About us

Background

We are a small group of former analysts, tech entrepreneurs, investigative journalists and academics. We have actually lived in the countries we cover and have followed their development closely for over a decade. In our former roles we have covered the equities market in particular, with a focus on tech and media companies as well as the finance industry in general. Our academic background is decidedly not in finance or financial engineering, but in sociology, history and political science. While we are by no means strangers to mathematical finance or financial engineering, we gladly defer to others in this regard. We stick to what we like and do best (see What we do).

Curiosity commands us

We believe that there are enough fresh graduates in cheap suits and expensive downtown real estate and enough redundant expertise, relying on the same black box numbers, draped in jargon masquerading as insight. We also believe that there are enough seasoned experts on government bonds or central bank policies who cover interest rate changes in all minutiae on the inside track. We don’t have ministers on short dial, but we also don’t take shortcuts. Some of us worked as investigative journalists before, so we know how to trace key sources and convince them to talk to us, and we have a valuable network of existing sources to work with. But most importantly we take whatever time is necessary to make sense of things, if the choice is to lose money or gain insight, we gladly lose the money. It’s our curiosity that pays the bill after all. We are not in the business of statistical pattern searching or chasing p-numbers we want to understand cause and effect instead. 

Nothing to declare

Finally, we have many interests but no conflict of interest, we are an independent research provider and don’t trade, invest or lobby.