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Jan 26, 2024
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Joachim Klement's avatar

Really interesting study. Thanks a lot for sharing :-)

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Gunnar Miller's avatar

The thing that makes me most grumpy about the "ifo Institut" is that "IFO" ("Information und FOrschung") isn't capitalized, but "Institut" still is https://www.ifo.de/en/survey-results ... I have a theory that German corporates attempt to overcompensate with odd all-lower-case name forumlations because the German language capitalizes all nouns, proper or otherwise https://translationpost.com/2014/06/22/dealing-with-lower-case-german-brand-names/ ;-)

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Joachim Klement's avatar

Well, if that were the only problem the ifo Institut had, it would be a good thing :-)

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Gunnar Miller's avatar

I'm recently retired, but when I joined what is now Allianz Global Investors in 2003, the Frankfurt entity was the Deutscher Investment Trust. Shortly beore I arrived, they had re-branded from "DIT", all-caps with a cool eagle logo https://www.fundresearch.de/fundresearch-wAssets/sites/default/files/Nachrichten/Top-Themen/2016/Concentra_Flyer_100_DM.pdf , to "dit" all-lower-case https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dit_(Unternehmen) . In a marketing meeting, people were complaining about how they felt crushed by local arch-competitor DWS (all-caps), and I suggested that the lower-case looked weak and diminutive, especially if pronounced "diht" rather than "deh-ee-teh"; unfortunately, the person I was directly addressing was the guy who'd cooked up the re-branding, who'd (amazingly) never thought of it that way. Needless to say he hated my guts from that moment foreward!

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Pip McIntyre's avatar

What triggers me is that this seems to imply that German managers are not grumpy Tuesday to Friday.

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Gunnar Miller's avatar

From personal experience, at the firm from which I recently retired, fund manager happiness *definitely* peaked on Thursday because that was the day the cafeteria offered schnitzel and fries for lunch, and even the "sportiest" of employees usually had a "cheat day" diet-wise and joined the long line to obtain a generous portion for themselves. I think this tradition also evolved because, as is the case in London, people liked to go out for drinks with co-workers on Thursday evening, and I think wanted to eat something a bit more substantial beforehand.

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