Where the perspective comes from
My career started inside a global custodian bank. It is not a household name — custodians never are — 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 then I have worked as a strategy consultant to banks — 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.
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."
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 in public. I will get things wrong. When I do, the correction goes on the page, marked as a correction. 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. I am working through the back catalogue one episode at a time, so not every video has one yet.