Experienced investment and financial markets professional
Specialized in Alternative Assets, Derivatives
Covered large institutional clients in Singapore, London, Paris in various sales and structuring roles
I've been involved in investing for over two decades. I am a DIY investor, a blogger, and a YouTuber; you may know me as Investorama. I've studied at HC Paris, a CAIA (Charter Alternative Investment Analyst) association charter holder, and I spent most of my corporate career in financial markets.
I was mainly in sales marketing, a term that means different things. Business development is one. I loved many parts of the job, particularly the technicality and being at the cutting edge of the financial market with innovative solutions.
I used to deal with institutional clients, mainly in the field of alternatives and derivatives, and investment products.
But not all commercial roles were client-facing. For example, I used to work in the structuring team of Deutsche Bank, and my role was to educate the sales force about our latest products and innovations.
I'm also glad these days are gone because I'd tell my friends and relatives to stay away from most of the products I was selling or helping to commercialize. Clearly, the incentives we had were to boost the margin, the p and l of the bank, not to care about, not to care about the financial well-being and welfare, not to care about our clients' wealth.
It's very difficult to work in financial markets and be focused on the client's long-term best interest. This is, however, my purpose here, and I'm able to do that because I'm fiercely independent.
Obviously, if I'm still here, it's not because it's obviously because I don't believe finance is evil. Like the Nobel Prize, Schiller said: finance is a technology that can be used for good or evil.
So as private investors, we may not have salespeople calling us with a pitch, but the investment opportunities we see are still subject to pitches and narratives. The information we see on the internet is not unbiased. It's still heavily influenced by what the industry is trying to push, and the narratives that dominate are not always beneficial. So we want to counteract that with a few principles that will guide this course.
No outside influence from product providers, although we might feature some of their expertise in a qualified way.
A beginner's mindset, this is something you might hear about from Zen Buddhism, but we're not going philosophical here. However, we want to look at asset classes by trying to abstract from everything we think we know.
Practical advice that can be applied in real life with tools that you can have access to, and if possible, free ones.
