What’s it like to work in investment management? In the first of a series of features profiling different disciplines and roles in financial services, we speak with Donough Kilmurray, Chief Investment Officer with Davy and a Certified Bank Director, about his career journey, typical work day and his advice to those interested in developing a career in this field.
I originally went to the US to pursue an academic career, but at the end of the 90s bull market, my head was turned by finance. I joined an investment bank in New York, to work in investment research and strategy, and once I found my feet, I loved it. After a few years I was transferred to London to help build out an investment team in their European wealth business. It was a case of right time right place as the wealth industry evolved after the tech crash, and again after the global financial crisis, into a more institutionalised business, with asset allocation and portfolio construction overtaking the old stock-slinging approach. After 20 years in the American banking world, I was ready for something else, but wasn’t sure what it was. Fortunately for me, a great opportunity appeared at Davy and I was delighted to move home.
From a young age, I always wanted to understand how things worked, what made them tick. My academic subjects were maths and physics, but I also had an interest in history. In American universities you can sign up for courses outside your field, so I dabbled in economics as a way to understand history. At first, I thought it was another subject that would “mathematise”, but then I realised there was so much more to it than that, and I was intrigued. It’s not like physics where the speed of light is fixed and there are well-defined laws of motion. As George Soros would put it, the economy and markets are highly reflexive systems, with endless human feedback loops, and just when you think you’ve figured it out, the game changes. Being an investment manager means you get constant feedback as you’re figuring things out. It also means putting somebody’s money at risk, which sharpens the focus too.
Every day is different, but in a typical week, my days are filled with four different types of activity. These are (1) figuring out an investment idea with our team, which is my favourite part of the job, (2) working on a particular client situation, (3) working with the Davy management team on some aspect of our business strategy, and (4) ongoing people management. Unfortunately, I don’t get to spend as much time looking at markets or portfolios as I used to, but fortunately we have experienced teams who are all over them both.
The scary and humbling thing about financial markets is that nobody knows what’s going to happen next – even if many people talk or behave as if they do. Experience can develop useful intuition, and ideally, we’d learn from our mistakes along the way. But the markets will test you over and over again, and you have to get used to being wrong and having to rethink your assumptions. You’ll win some and you’ll lose some, but if you manage your risk well, you (and your clients) can stay in the game long enough to see the law of large numbers in action, meaning that managing the short- term swings carefully allows success to emerge over the long term - which is very satisfying for a maths nerd like me, and also for our clients.
First, I’d say talk to as many people in the industry as you can, to get a sense for the different roles in the banking and investment worlds. I’m still surprised sometimes by the ideas that people looking in from the outside have formed about how it all works and who does what. Then don’t be afraid to take on roles and places that might not be what you first think you want. Finance careers are journeys and where people start and end up can be very different. You can try different things, learn along the way, and figure out what you’re good at and enjoy – hopefully they’re the same thing.
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