I don't believe I have it backwards. Without trying to appeal to authority, I work in the industry and except in very specific cases where it is clear how much AUM a particular fund runs, people will quote percentage returns because it tells you immediately what is the severity.

I'm sorry but nobody can keep all the different AUMs in their head. There are thousands (tens of thousands?) of funds in the world, I really can't be bothered to memorize all their assets. The headline was clearly written to elicit an emotional response, at the expense of information content.

> Losing $3.7bn trading stocks in a tech bull-market the likes of which we've never seen is...not good, regardless of the fund size.

It's not good, but again the dollar figure is completely meaningless: if the fund has an AUM of $100bln, this is a largely inconsequential -4%, which may compare unfavorably to their peer group and may elicit management changes down the line. For a $10 bln fund this is pretty much game over and they would be gearing for a fire sale of office equipment.

> Without trying to appeal to authority, I work in the industry

Fun fact, this is called "apophasis". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis

I'm not attacking the OP (or is this another apophasis?), especially since they expand on what they mean later in their reply; I just like the word.

In a lot of cases, reporters do not have access to AUM or want to extrapolate from potentially misleading sources in order to construct a percentage return that does not exist publicly. You don't see reporters attempt to extrapolate dollar returns from percentage ones when percentage ones are all that are available; even if dollar returns might make a better headline like you claim. A headline with an extrapolated percentage return would have to be phrased in an awkward manner like "could be down as much as" and an editor is not going to greenlight that. This isn't even broaching the subject of gross vs net percentage returns which isn't possible to succinctly address in a mere headline.

>The headline was clearly written to elicit an emotional response, at the expense of information content.

These days, I'm ok with any headline that isn't a complete fabrication or at best, completely misleading.

>You might have this backwards. Actual informed people have a good idea of the scale that these funds are operating at, and can understand without context whether $3.7bn is a lot.

Even "actual informed people" won't necessarily know how much much any given fund has in AUM.

>Losing $3.7bn trading stocks in a tech bull-market the likes of which we've never seen is...not good, regardless of the fund size.

Actually, fund size is very relevant. Losing $3.7b as a $10b fund will put you in at least 37% drawdown which can put you past a board-controlled threshold at which trading might pause or a re-evaluation of the trading strategies might be triggered. Losing $3.7b on a $100b account is 3.7% which is business as usual really.

If you have a machine learning background this analogy might be useful: if you're building an algo trading strategy then training your model on absolute dollar returns data will be nonsense. What makes more sense is calculating the relative returns or even log-returns because then we're encoding an actual relative change.

You have a good point. But anyone following the SoftBank story within the context of Elliot’s activism is thinking about SoftBank Corp. from an earnings perspective and Vision Fund from a returns perspective. (The latter being easy to translate given its Fund 1 $100bn base.)

The fund size itself means positions will spread out to risky assets and the more money you try to put to work, the more risk you're gonna take.

They lost 4% of their unmanageable capital, big deal.