10 phrases to jettison from everymarketing pitch

Spring is typically filled with tailored events for investors and managers to engage, learn about industry happenings and market views, and find investment opportunities with each other. One of the newer trends at such events includes the speed-date, in which pre-arranged, one-on-one sit down meetings allow investors with an interest in particular strategies to interact for 10-20 minutes with the fund manager or representative and get an initial feel for the fund's uniqueness.

On its face, this sounds like a great idea—the elevator pitch withbothparties captive to the conversation. In reality though, this face time can be mangled by mishandling: precious time lost to vagueness, datadetails, and portfolio phrasing pabulum—bland, insipid intellectual lingo.

Alternatives lingo groupspeak

After attending numerous networking functions and witnessing many of these manager/investor exchanges, I thought it useful to offer up ten of the popular blunders managers make with prospective investors. While these statements may be truthful in general, they offer no color, specificity, or distinction from which managers can separate their approach from other rival managers in the business.

Worse, many of these phrases can be found in hundreds, if not thousands of the pitch book presentations these managers rely upon to articulate their unique offering. To paraphrase George Patton's "If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking," if everyone is saying the same thing, then no one is saying anything.

Investment acumen reduced to pabulum

Following are ten of the more egregious errors in alternatives marketing pitches.

The first five are general to any strategy. The last five are offered for those managers who have approaches that focus on equity-related strategies, as these are most popular and offer many generalized blunders.......................

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This article was published in Opalesque's New Managers a top-down monthly analysis, news and research publication on the global emerging manager space.