Episode 22. Demystifying The Path To Success In Investing & Finance

<p>“I wanted to work for an investment company … one of the regulators had a list of investment companies listed A to Z, so I had a very simple strategy. I started off with the ones starting with an A and wrote them all a letter … none of the initial As replied and I was just about to start on the Bs but I got a letter from a company beginning Ar and they said "we’re interested, come and have a chat with us" and that was purely good luck”. My good friend, Chris Bailey shared with me how he managed to get his big break into the investment industry, which set him on the path to a successful career without the aid of connections or contacts, simply hard work and writing lots of letters!</p> <p>Chris is the founder of Financial Orbit, a research and investment consulting firm. He has 25 years of investment industry experience at long-only and long-short institutions as a global multi-asset fund manager, strategist/macro thinker and, in the earlier part of his career, as a securities and fund analyst. He strongly believes in the importance of the fusion of top-down and bottom-up analysis taking a view that an understanding of both aspects is the only way to get a full view of global opportunities. Prior to Financial Orbit Limited, Chris worked for a London based fund management group and headed the team for a range of globally directly invested mutual funds, personally running the Growth, Balanced and Conservative funds (collectively around US$2bn of assets) all of which were either first or second quartile against their respective peer groups from inception in 2010 to the end of 2012. In the four years prior to this, for the same fund management company, he managed global thematic equity and European equity funds that also outperformed their benchmarks. He is in the process of writing a book on his journey in the investing world which will be published in 2022.</p> <p>We had a great conversation and talked about the following:</p> <p>How he became interested in investing through breakfast TV,</p> <p>The need f