Took this from @KylePorterNS Normal Sport blog: “Pro golf is the most susceptible to YouTube disruption because the difference between how good the pros are compared to how good YouTube personalities are is the toughest to discern in golf compared to other sports. It is easy to see how much better Dak Prescott is than a YouTube creator. It is harder to see how much better Xander Schauffele is than Brad Dalke. Schauffele is standard deviations better but you cannot tell as easily on camera.” This is an interesting take. Golf is one of the few sports where the gap between elite and very good is almost invisible. The difference is the intangible stuff: judgement in shot selection, discipline in avoiding the wild miss, getting up and down when they should, never missing the short putt and keeping the bad shot in play. I have a friend who is a scratch golfer. We play a few times a year. It never looks spectacular, but at the end of the round he is always +2, +1 or even under par. You do not notice anything brilliant in real time. You only notice that rarely does anything go badly wrong. And that is the key point people miss. You have to look at how someone shoots under par. A player can go low because they holed out a 7 iron and rolled in a 40 footer. True skill shows up in the rounds where nothing dramatic happens. Just quiet, repeatable decisions that remove mistakes. It is the same in investing. Two PMs can post similar returns. The attribution tells the story. One made money because they got lucky with a few big swings. The other because they avoided disasters, sized well and made steady, disciplined calls under pressure. Because it takes effort and nuance to see those differences, people default to whatever looks or sounds good. The edge is rarely visible in the highlight reel. It shows up in the small, quiet decisions that compound over time. Everyone wants shortcuts. In golf people look for the next tip and think a few great shots mean they are close to the pros. Retail investors do the same. They think they can replicate what professionals do because the surface level looks similar. A club golfer can hit a 300 yard drive. A retail investor can pick a stock that doubles. But consistent judgement and discernment only show up over time, and they are almost impossible to spot without watching the whole distribution of decisions.

Some PMs are poor at hiring analysts and building a team. Sometimes it is adverse selection, but more often they prioritize the wrong attributes. What is interesting is the overlap. The PMs who misjudge people internally are often the same ones who misjudge management teams externally. Assessing character, incentives, and judgment is a transferable skill or a transferable blind spot. Basically "bad taste", the opposite of what Jim Simons put his success down to.

A lot of CIOs treat LP meetings as a nuisance. But if you actually listen, you can learn a lot from the questions LPs ask. They rarely give direct feedback, but their line of questioning tells you exactly what they are thinking. They speak to a lot of funds too so they are triangulating info all the time. Sometimes it is deliberate, sometimes not, but sophisticated allocators have far better portfolio and risk analytics than most single-manager funds. Their questions often reveal what their systems already know.