#6: Do you speak investments?
Why translating investment language matters for client-facing content
Spend enough time around investment teams, and the day-to-day financial market vocabulary can quickly become familiar. Often without realising it, ordinary language gives way to shorthand investment terminology. But while investment jargon has its place, client-facing investment content is rarely it.
Investment jargon only makes sense in context: think of positioning, drawdown, and conviction. And that is only the start, because once you dig deeper, the language can become even more specialised: alpha versus beta, relative versus absolute, and nominal versus real may be familiar enough, but terms such as convexity, duration, and spreads can quickly take things to another level. We could go on, but you get the point.
Within the right setting, there is nothing wrong with this shorthand: after all, it can help investment professionals discuss complex issues quickly and accurately. The problem comes when internal investment decisions, opinions, and nuances are carried too directly into external communication. What might sound perfectly clear in an investment meeting can feel far less so when it lands in front of a client: hard to navigate at best, and abstract and inaccessible at worst.
Investment content is not written for the investment team’s benefit, but for an audience. Whether that audience is institutional, intermediary, or retail, none were ‘in the room’ with the investment team when the decision was made. That leaves the audience at a disadvantage, which good investment content should help to overcome.
This is where translation matters, and where the role of the investment content specialist comes in. Investment content is not there to dumb things down, but to identify what matters most and express it in a way that is clear and relevant. Instead of repackaging investment jargon, great investment content translates investment thinking into something the audience can understand.
Yes, there are subtle differences depending on the audience. Professional investors, consultants, and advisers do not need complexity removed for the sake of it, but they do need content that is well structured, purposeful, and clear in its argument. For a retail audience, the same logic applies, but the message may need to be expressed in clearer language, with less jargon and greater emphasis on practical meaning.
In both cases, the principle is the same: to be understood. And in investment communication, the ability to translate and ‘speak investments’ is not a nice-to-have, but a crucial part of the job.
