Where the perspective comes from
My career started in 2009 at State Street, one of the world's largest custodian banks, where I spent six years as a risk analyst. Custodians are not household names — and that is precisely what makes the vantage point unusual. A custodian is the institution that actually holds and settles the assets everybody else talks about. When a pension fund says it owns a billion euros of equities, a custodian is where that ownership physically lives.
From that seat you do not see the marketing. You see the settlement failures, the securities lending programmes, the fee schedules, the counterparty exposures. The machinery under the machine. Most retail investing advice is written by people who have only ever seen the outside of it.
Since 2015 I have advised banks on strategy — today as an Associate Partner at a management consultancy, where I lead the competence centre for securities and custody business. Which means I now spend my days looking at how these institutions decide what to do, and, often enough, how they get it wrong. I hold the Certified Financial Engineer (CFE) designation, issued by the Europäisches Institut für Financial Engineering und Derivateforschung — an affiliated institute of HfWU Nürtingen-Geislingen, a German state university, whose programme runs with the Capital Markets Academy of Deutsche Börse.
Worth naming the institute, because in the United States "CFE" usually means Certified Fraud Examiner — a different profession entirely.
Before any of it: economics at LMU Munich, bachelor's and master's. That is where the habit comes from of asking not what a number is, but what had to be assumed for it to come out that way — which is most of what this site does.
That is nearly two decades in the financial industry, and the dates are checkable — the full record is on LinkedIn. It seemed wrong to ask you to check every number on this site and not offer the same for the person writing them.
Why this exists
Most of what retail investors are told is not wrong. It is incomplete. "Diversify." "Keep costs low." "Think long term." All true — and all close to useless without the mechanics underneath. The mechanics are never explained, because explaining them does not sell anything.
"If your banker will not explain it without the jargon — that is exactly what gets explained here."
What I am not
I am not a researcher. I studied economics at LMU Munich, bachelor's and master's, and then went to work in the industry rather than on it — no doctorate, no research post, no university or institute behind me. Nothing published here has been peer-reviewed.
That is worth saying plainly, because the alternative is how borrowed authority works: leave it vague and let the reader assume upward. Every quantitative claim on this site names its primary source instead. That is the only authority this site has, and it is the kind you can check yourself.
The rules
- No hype. No get-rich-quick, no "what the banks don't want you to know", no manufactured urgency. If something is boring, I will say it is boring. Most of what works is boring.
- Sources are named. Every number traces to a primary source — the BIS, the ECB, FINMA, the SEC, the Bank of England, a filing, a prospectus. Never "studies show". Never "last year" — always the actual year.
- Nothing to sell. No course. No signals group. No affiliate broker links. No newsletter upsell. If that ever changes, it will say so here, in this paragraph, before it says so anywhere else.
- Errors get corrected, not deleted. I will get things wrong. When I do, the correction goes on the page itself, marked as a correction, where anyone reading that page will see it. A quietly deleted mistake is worse than the mistake.
- This is not advice. I am not your financial adviser and nothing here is personalised. I explain how things work. What you do with your money is your decision — and it should be made with someone licensed to advise you on it.
Who this is for
Someone who has a portfolio, is doing broadly sensible things with it, and has a nagging sense that there is a layer of this they were never shown. Someone who would rather build wealth than chase it. Someone who wants to sleep at night.
If you want to know which stock will triple this year, I am the wrong channel and I will waste your time.
Where to find me
A new video every Tuesday on YouTube. Each one gets a written companion here — with the tables, the numbers and the sources that will not fit into ten minutes of video. Every episode has one.