Some of the most fascinating topics covered this week are: Mental illness (Is there really a global epidemic?), Investment (Poker-playing hedge fund managers have an edge), Lifestyle (Making a rich man angry is easy), Sports (Mo Salah helped Liverpool residents more tolerant of Islam), Digital Payment (Indians are switching to digital payments), Environment (Going vegan will help you but not the whole country), Athletics (She's 45, an amputee, and she runs ultramarathons!)
But what causes the mental illness? Psychiatrists speak of a combination of risk factors that might add up to trouble. Start with the genes. “What you inherit is a certain vulnerability or predisposition, and if things happen on top of that then people would then be more likely to suffer from a mental problem,” says Ricardo Araya, director of the Centre for Global Mental Health at King’s College. For example, last year scientists pinpointed 44 gene variants that raise the risk of depression. Then there are life experiences that compound the risk factor, such as abuse, trauma, stress, domestic violence, adverse childhood experience, bullying, conflict, social isolation or substance abuse.
Some of the most common illnesses are clinical depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders (yes, anorexia), and dementia. In the span of 30 years, the subject has moved from being invisible to being taboo to being openly discussed. But mental illnesses are still not universally accepted. People with mental illnesses still complain of discrimination; 300,000 people with long-term mental health problems lose their jobs every year – and that’s just in the UK.
2) Poker-playing hedge fund managers have an edge [Source: Bloomberg]
What’s common between hedge fund managers and poker players? Both activities demand aggressiveness, accurate calculations under pressure, keen behavioral insight and shrewd risk-taking. So, do poker-playing hedge fund managers fare better than the other managers? Academics Yan Lu, Sandra Mortal and Sugata Ray try to answer the question in a new paper titled “Hedge Fund Hold’em.” This is part of an emerging academic interest in correlating recreational activity to business and investing success.
The headline result of the latest paper is that hedge fund managers who have won poker tournaments have more alpha, representing an additional 4.2 percentage points in returns per year versus 2.8 percentage points for other managers, through a combination of higher average returns and lower average risk. If personal characteristics of top decision makers such as their personalities, attitudes toward risk or game skills have measurable effects, however small, on their performance, then this is an important field of study.
Poker skill only seems to help in fundamental strategies in which the manager is making partly subjective judgments about unique situations, as George Soros does in real life or Bobby Axelrod does on the fictional Showtime television series “Billions.” The important takeaway is we need more systematic research on behavioral characteristics and skills of top decision makers. Maybe then we can train and select a better class of leaders, not just in fields like poker and trading where performance can be measured objectively, but in business and politics as well.
3) How to make a rich man really mad [Source: Financial Times]
In this intriguing piece, journalist Holly Peterson reveals some weird and bizarre characteristics of some rich people that would surprise a normal guy. She says that rich guys can lose a few millions on a trade in a single afternoon and keep their cool, but if a chief executive can’t find his car after a black-tie gala, his fury boils over with the force of a pent-up volcano.