COMING SOON
This is Going John Galt, a newsletter offering a sneak peek into the world of investing, financial independence and personal growth.
If you have run into me at a party / pub / anywhere really - and if you’ve lived in the gray-t city of London these past five years you might definitely have - there’s a good chance I’ve bored you with the somewhat gray topics of investing, financial independence and personal growth.
Welcome to the 2022 version of that - leveraging the grand advantages of not-so-novel Web 2.0 technology!
This newsletter is born with very small pretensions.
My past life as an institutional private equity investment professional incorporated a substantial amount of writing / documenting and after several months out of the institutional game I’ve simply come to miss it.
In my current life I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking and reading about the topics of investing, financial independence and personal growth and intend to document these thoughts with the hope that somebody (including my future self) finds them useful.
“Are you employed, Mr. Lebowski?”
My friends call me a “retired millennial”, but nothing is further from the truth. (Sidenote: if you have friends like mine, you’ll know they also call me many other / worse things, so I’ll gladly take “retired millennial”, thank you very much!) In fact, it was mainly a combination of the “State of the Markets” and personal reasons that triggered a seemingly abrupt resignation last year.
The pandemic certainly played a role, yet I’m not sure that my case is just another product of Pilita Clark’s Great Resignation, as I’ve always found myself lingering “outside of the box”.
I’m confident there are many cases similar to mine, so I’ll try to unpack my decision-making in coming posts.
Managing money is hard. So is managing risk.
After almost ten years successfully managing institutional capital alongside my personal account I’m confident to have the tools to compound capital and manage risk independently.
I intend to share these, discuss my investment approach and specific investment opportunities / themes / trends in these lines.
I hope this exercise is informative and brings order and clarity to both of us.
Just to be clear: this will be, first and foremost, a blog about investing, yet (therefore?) you will not find discussions of “get rich overnight” schemes. (I can already imagine some of you thinking “OK, boomer”!)
“I wouldn’t consider myself a journalist… and nobody else would consider myself a journalist”.
Borrowing the above quote from Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, I want to be very upfront about the fact that I don’t pretend to be a journalist / writer. (Neither do I think, generally, borrowing from a seasoned PE investor like Rubenstein is great investment proposition!)
Throughout the life of this blog, I will probably make all the mistakes in the book, plus the occasional chart crime. I have not started and already struggle with length, format, audience, voice / tone, content, privacy, degree of detail and… consistency.
In fact, I’ve committed myself to writing two posts in the coming month and then step back and reassess. If you stick around long enough you’ll find me playing around with all the levers above… and feedback is always welcome.
I will try my best to deliver useful, accessible and entertaining content... and never investment advice.
I will also try to keep things informal.
In case it’s not obvious yet, I’ll channel my inner Duderino and state that often I’m “not into the whole brevity thing”.
Instead of apologizing in advance for that, let me just stop right there and avoid getting ahead of myself, as I still have two more posts to write in the coming month. Stay tuned for more.
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Thanks for reading,
John Galt
PD: Going back to those encounters, if you are thinking of sending me a thank you note for talking you into buying “this obscure digital asset called Bitcoin” in the mid-2010s, think twice… 100% sure this was not me. Apparently and as my fellow millennials frequently like to remind me, I’m a “nocoiner who has fun staying poor”!