Investment managers’ quarterly investment letters should be meaningful to clients, specific to the manager, and short. These are the key conclusions I drew from my quarterly investment letter survey that I conducted some years ago. I believe these conclusions still apply.

Meaningful content

“Clarity,” “insight,” and “candor” were the most popular answers to the question, “What’s the ONE WORD that best describes what investment managers should strive for in their quarterly letters to clients?” I think these popular answers can be summed up by the term “meaningful content.”

The image below gives a visual overview of the responses. Type size is proportional to the number of respondents choosing a word as their answer.

Here are examples of how respondents explained their word choices.

“Clarity” suggests that you have done the reading, research, analysis and due diligence on what you’ve taken in. You have synthesized it. Rather than repeating a