About us
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I started in finance in 2021 as a financial advisor at Partners Financial Services (now Partners Bank). Here I got first-hand experience with clients, investments and portfolio management. Day to day, we mainly did mutual funds that were actively managed and therefore had high fees: 2% per year and an entry fee of approximately 4% of the whole amount (monthly payment × number of years of investment × 12 × % of the fee). This amount was paid to the "structure", and some part of it to the advisor as well. For example, 100 a month for 20 years is 24,000 planned, so the entry fee is about 960, paid at the start. And the yearly fee keeps working against you: a fund earning 7% a year before a 2% fee leaves you with 5%. After 20 years that is about 40,700 instead of 51,000, more than 10,000 less, before even counting the entry fee. You can play with numbers like these in the Calculators. After two years I concluded that my career would be somewhere else. Firstly, I don't like to distribute investments I would not personally own (too expensive, and they mostly just make money by making investment decisions similar to the benchmark, but respect to those who at least do it in a scientific way). Secondly, I was not able to get business, as is common in the first years of being a financial advisor. After financial advisory I started to work at financial sector institutions like KBC and Deutsche Börse. Here I got more practical knowledge about how things really work in finance than from just the sales contracts I did before, but it was not about trading and asset management. That came from my deep, nerdy interest in financial markets, portfolio management, algorithmic trading and machine learning. At KBC I also co-created a financial literacy project called "Finzone", where we brought financial topics to a broad audience, so people would know where to start and would not over-complicate stuff. I made this website so you can literally "fuck around and find out" how to make portfolios, how to start with trading and how to continue. I don't want to be another finance bro or guru, of which there are a shit ton on the internet. But honestly, one day I would like to do sessions about it, as I think people learn the most when they see a person in the real world and can speak to them, not only from watching some online session, even though that can sometimes be a solution as well. I also have knowledge of Python for data analysis, and of IBKR and QuantConnect for trading. I use AWS for infrastructure as well, so I have some technical background too. But honestly, today I do a lot of programming via Claude Code, which is my favorite AI for all stuff. Where to start:
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