Annual Letter Season Onramp Deep Dives

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Having spent the bulk of my professional career in the realm of traditional investment management, I have a particular affinity for this time of the calendar year - it is "annual letter" season. This period, spanning from mid-January to early March, is an opportunity for professional investors, specifically portfolio managers, to opine on the happenings of the recently completed year, dissect their fund's performance, provide LPs with an updated lens into their philosophical stance, and prognosticate on the future.

For my own purposes, while allocating capital on behalf of private banking clients at my prior firm, this exercise of reviewing annual letters from across the investment management space was immensely valuable - it allowed me to assess the perspectives of the broader industry and better contextualize the positioning of investments within our own portfolio. I would compare and contrast the views of fund managers on our platform with the myriad of other investors who would release their annual letters publicly. A consistently reliable repository to track the release of such reports was the Subreddit called Security Analysis - here is the aggregation of this season's musings: Q4 2023 Letters & Reports.

Despite departing the world of traditional investment management to focus my analytical energy on bitcoin, I still find value in sifting through these letters. If nothing else, the exercise is helpful in triangulating where the notion of bitcoin currently sits in the TradFi zeitgeist. During 2017 and again in 2021, several managers' letters mentioned bitcoin's bull market theatrics, albeit in a dismissive manner, referring to tulip bubbles or the asset's lack of cash flows. Unsurprisingly, the past few years of letters included hardly any mention of the best performing asset of the last decade, as its bear market decline afforded traditional investors the opportunity to once again ignore its existence. While I suspect this dynamic may shift in the coming quarters, bitcoin-related commentary this season was fairly sparse, with a few notable highlights.

You can download the full report here