QOTD: Hugh Hendry on Being a Global Macro Worrier

I absolutely loved reading Hugh Hendry’s note at Zero Hedge this weekend, we’ve not heard from the contrarian fund manager since 2010, largely because “nothing has changed” in his view.

This bit about playing the global macro game with the big boys was particularly cool (emphasis Daddy’s):

The question now is just how we can make money in the tough business of global macro investing this year. As I am sure you by now know, I am nothing but a worrier. I have, I think, a soul mate in the prolific but often misunderstood Italian soccer player Pippo Inzaghi, the second highest scorer in all European club competitions. He has 70 goals behind him but he recently noted that, “the tension is always the same…I hoped to become less agitated with time, but this is also my strength”. I suspect he would have made a fine macro manager.

I meet a lot of inquisitive and extremely intelligent people in this business and I have come to think that maybe this is something of a problem. Perhaps they are just too smart. Perhaps they just try too hard. Rightly or wrongly, the highest return on intellectual capital of any endeavour in the world today comes from the management of other people’s money. So it is entirely rational (especially if you have never met a hedge fund manager) to assume the industry attracts the brightest, smartest minds. The beautiful mind, if you will. But I am not aiming to outsmart George, Stan, Julian, Bruce or the others. I do not think it is logical to try and outsmart the smartest people. Instead, my weapons are irony and paradox. The joy of life is partly in the strange and unexpected. It is in the constant exclamation “Who would have thought it?”

Why did ten year treasuries yield 14% under the vice like grip of iron-man Volker but yield just 1.8% under the bookish and most definitely Weimar-like Bernanke? Why does France in 2012 flirt with the notion of electing a socialist president intent on reducing the retirement age, imposing a top rate of tax of 75% and increasing the size of the public sector? Why do we hang on the every word of elected politicians when Luxembourg’s prime minister Jean Claude Junker openly admits, “When it becomes serious, you have to lie”?

You cannot make stuff like this up. It is simply too absurd.

Read the whole note at ZH here:

Hugh Hendry Is Back – Full Eclectica Letter (Zero Hedge)