Tuesday, April 1, 2003

file: self-appraisal excerpt

From the arrival of a new Director of Marketing to the opening of our Canadian mutual fund business, I’ve been kept quite busy this year, and most of my new ideas have revolved around streamlining my current activities and working more efficiently. I’ve continually sharpened the monthly commentary writing process, for instance, and as a result, commentary drafting is relatively painless – despite its time-sensitivity and its required input from people in Mutual Funds, Portfolio Managment, and Compliance.

Another example relates to the quarterly commentary. As we laid out our plan of attack for the third quarter’s installment, I noted that the “Market Results” section didn’t quite mesh with our bottom-up philosophy – and that the quality of the QC might not suffer if the section were omitted. I suggested that we drop Market Results and lead off with the “Portfolio Notes”sections instead; this new idea was well-received and implemented in that quarter’s commentary.

I’ve also demonstrated initiative in my work for other departments. In the first half of the year, for example, I conducted a detailed review of the calculation method we previously used to obtain D/E values for our benchmark indexes, presented my findings to ***, and gained his approval for a change to a different, more straightforward method. This new method simplified the gathering of monthly fundamentals and, in my opinion, strengthened the accuracy of the D/E numbers we report for our benchmarks.