For many of us, the New Year is about setting lofty goals in January and working hard for a couple weeks before falling back into old habits. For investors with allocation and return targets to meet, and investment managers with fundraising goals, this is not how you want to start the New Year. But this year, as the idealism fades and the corresponding disappointment grows, let’s resolve to make February about re-focusing and getting back to basics. Because too often when we set lofty goals, disappointment inevitably sets in. Let’s view this not as failure but as a challenge. By putting focus on the more mundane day-to-day work, we lift our chance of meeting those lofty goals. Or put another way, if we conquer the minutes we can win the day.

It’s in this spirit of re-focusing on the little things that it is worth reviewing some of the basics of institutional investing, and more specifically — who are institutional investors and how do they think?

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