How Stock Picking, Fund Selection, and Entrepreneurship Reinforce One Another

At first, I fell in love with stock picking, or more precisely, with studying companies, their history, and business models. Shortly after discovering the role officially as a student, I had the opportunity to manage private mandates within the firm I was working for. At that time, I viewed it as an observatory of good practices for becoming a great investor. I continued this path in my next role, managing more capital but with a different approach. Yet I always wanted to continue doing equity research. First, because I love it, but also because I saw so many synergies between the two roles that I never wanted to choose.

More recently, I was hired by a family office (while keeping my role at Influidence) to oversee investment strategy and fund selection. Like I have always done throughout my professional life, I seized the opportunity because I believed it would help me grow and become a better investor. Indeed, there are so many ways to be an investor.

Today, I wanted to share with you what I find valuable in combining different roles, including being an entrepreneur.

The Value Investor (Stock Picker): Zoom on Companies & Information Network

• Your focus is investing in companies. Rarely do you make decisions based on macroeconomic factors, but you account for anything that could affect company performance or business dynamics.
• You live in a world that is highly analytical, sometimes factual and sometimes emotional. Every piece of information matters.
• You allocate more capital to high conviction stocks. Your portfolio is concentrated and highly volatile. It represents a pool of business stories.
• You build, bit by bit, a mosaic of information that shapes your opinion about a stock and leads to an investment decision. But making that decision means ignoring some information, and most of the time, information asymmetry remains substantial
• As a stock picker, you create detailed information bubbles for each company you study and sometimes use that knowledge to evaluate other companies. You connect the dots.
• The difficulty is managing the endless amount of information available about companies, especially nonpublic information.

The Allocator (Fund Selector): Probabilities & Matryoshka Structure

• Your focus is compounding capital at a constant or target rate.
• Your toolbox is large but exhaustive. Each asset class must be linked to a macroeconomic or diversification rationale. You need to think, live, and breathe probabilities.
• Within each asset class, you choose from a large number of competitors: funds or products, including various sub asset classes.
• Your decision making has two dimensions: asset class allocation and selection of underlyings within each asset class.
• You are both a bottom up analyst and a top down strategist.
• The difficulty lies in building a vision of asset class performance across short, medium, and long term horizons while selecting the right underlyings.
• Fund selection requires thorough analysis but is less complex than stock picking, since a fund’s information universe is more defined. Commercial presentations, DDQs, ODDs, team dynamics, and business model structure are standardized.
• This role demands a creative mindset to identify emerging ideas, funds, and investment themes.
• You are a generalist and specialist simultaneously, needing a strong vision to build an integrated investment strategy across asset classes.

The Entrepreneur: Building Everything from Scratch

• You constantly navigate uncertainty and, at times, loneliness.
• Entrepreneurship teaches you your limits and helps you make decisions under pressure.
• You must learn quickly to do things you didn’t know how to do. Thankfully, AI is a great help.
• You wear multiple hats simultaneously: operator, accountant, strategist, salesman, and analyst. Time becomes your scarcest resource, forcing brutal prioritization.
• You have the highest level of skin in the game of all three roles.
• Your success depends not only on the quality of your idea but on your ability to attract business. Execution and relationships matter as much as vision.
• Each setback provides information that shapes the next iteration, making experience a form of asymmetric edge.

The Convergences

All three activities have rather long feedback loops and require making decisions under uncertainty. But, each of them brought something specific to the other. I tried to list some of them even if the reality it is much more complex and intertwined than this.

Entrepreneurship has taught me enormously about stock picking, especially that what companies communicate is only a small fraction of what actually happens inside them. It taught me that fund sellers are rarely specialists. They are paid to sell, so information from them must be thoroughly scrutinized. Because entrepreneurship is so emotionally demanding, it helped me know myself better (inspired by Peter Gustafson’s VIC 2024 talk, “How to Outperform the Stock Market for the Long Run: Understanding Yourself is the Most Important Factor”).

Stock picking taught me a great deal about entrepreneurship, and to this day, the failures and successes I studied while analyzing stocks fuel my entrepreneurial decisions. Being a stock picker gives you room to challenge equity fund managers since you do the work yourself. It also showed me that most equity funds today deliver poor performance and that very few managers do it out of passion. Stock picking gave me a clearer vision of the equity market as a whole, which is invaluable when selecting fund managers and constructing equity allocations, particularly for regional exposures and sector pockets. (I wish I could say the same for fixed income.)

Asset allocation taught me that macroeconomic, systemic, and geopolitical factors cannot be ignored in decision making as an entrepreneur or stock picker. It showed me that successful investing requires more than good performance. You need a compelling story and must build a network if you didn’t inherit one. It revealed that being an equity fund manager is itself entrepreneurship.

All three activities draw on overlapping mental models, yet each helps me navigate the difficulties of the others. Being an allocator and stock picker early in my career helped me grasp industry dynamics, grow faster, and build a diverse, strong network.

Why I Chose to Integrate a Family Office

As I’ve said, since childhood, I’ve tried to make decisions designed to maximize desired outcomes. In this case, that means becoming a better investor, entrepreneur, and allocator, which translates to serving my clients better and building competitive advantage over my peers. I believe improvement stems from continuous learning, which has been my goal since university (“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest,” Benjamin Franklin).

When I was offered the role of CIO in a family office, I saw it as an opportunity to deploy my existing skills in a new context and develop additional ones. While I had primarily served institutional investors, working with families and entrepreneurs brings a fresh perspective on capital allocation and investment.

First, since the end client is typically an entrepreneur, I have the privilege of being exposed to exceptional individuals who built their wealth from scratch. It inspires me greatly in my ventures.

Also, the approach is truly 360 degrees: fiscal, legal, concierge, deal flow, etc. We invest for the perpetuity of family wealth and the benefit of the enterprise and future generations. This gives profound meaning to our work.

What I love most is using the tools I’ve learned in new ways while developing others.

Working with a strong team rather than as a solo entrepreneur accelerates my growth tremendously. Since my role is central to the family office’s development, I have access to the leadership’s strategic thinking. In a short period, I’ve learned a great deal, especially about the commercial dimensions of finance and wealth management.

I firmly believe this role will develop Influidence in meaningful ways: bringing new skills and services to the platform, building a stronger network in the family office space, while preserving my stock picker, fund selector, and analyst capabilities.

And as you might know, I am always terrified of getting bored!