About Us

We feel that in the UK there is a misconception that investing in the stock market is ‘high risk’. We have heard this time and time again from friends, family and colleagues. We think that consciously deciding how much to invest in the first place is the simplest way to manage risk!

Our Mission

Our mission is to share our passion for investing in the stock market. We like to keep things clear, simple, and straightforward, and think that investing should be accessible to everybody.

Investing doesn’t have to be complicated, and it doesn’t have to be high risk.

A little bit about us

My name is Julian. I am in my mid thirties and have taken an active interest in investing since 2011, when my brother Theo and I started investing in a fund through Fidelity.

First thing to say is that neither of us are ex-investments bankers who previously earned a big salary + even bigger bonuses and are now trying to sound down to earth. I don’t have anything against people from this background (part of me secretly would have loved to have worked in banking), but I think there is a big gap between people in ordinary jobs and whether they can relate to somebody who worked in banking. 

I started my working life as a graduate civil engineer in 2008 and promptly got made redundant in early 2009. I managed to find a similar role after a few months and my career continued. I was on a graduate salary (£23k) and lived with my parents while my girlfriend (now wife) and I saved hard for our first house. When we bought in 2011 my salary had barely changed. The mortgage was affordable, and I didn’t spend much money on luxury purchases (the UK was still in a recession and I was still pretty nervous about losing my job again). I couldn’t understand how the two of us in relatively ok jobs were ever going to do any better than our current situation. I was saving some money, but due to low interest rates it was never going to amount to much. It was quite demoralising. 

In 2011 an engineer friend of mine mentioned that one of his friends had started investing in funds through a company called Fidelity. I had never heard of Fidelity and didn’t really know what funds were. I started investigating, primarily by looking at past performance. There were a couple of funds that had increased in value by 40% in the previous year. I couldn’t believe such a thing existed, all while I was getting about 0.5% interest on my small amount of savings. 

In late 2011 I made my first foray into investing by starting to put a little bit of money into a fund aligned to UK smaller companies. Why UK companies? I had literally no reason. Why smaller companies? Probably because they had a good year the year before, but definitely nothing more educated or informed than that. I had nobody to ask for their opinion and if I mentioned it to my friends they looked at me as if I was from a different planet. My family thought that what I was doing was risky, but didn’t really seem interested in my reasoning behind why the risk to me was actually low (more on risk management here)

One day around then I was clicking about on the internet and found a list of books to read recommended by some entrepreneur. On the list was Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It blew my mind. Above all else it gave me a desire to learn and I focussed on learning about the stock market and how to be a better investor than randomly picking funds and hoping for the best based on no real understanding. 

Since then I have read as many books as I could get my hands on about different investing approaches and spoken to as many people who could help or would listen. Most of all we have learnt by doing. Theo and I have used much of this learning to experiment with developing our own investing approaches. 

We have also set up and started actively managing our own portfolio, as well as helping our friends and families do the same.

Career wise, I have continued my journey as a civil engineer but have become increasingly specialised in the asset management of the UK’s transport infrastructure. Asset Management, either of infrastructure or financial assets, is about most effectively using your resources to reach your goals and doing this through making trade-offs between cost, risk and performance depending on what you place most value on.  That’s exactly what we are consciously doing to manage our investment portfolio.

Over the last decade stock markets have been on a non stop journey upwards, and anybody who has kept all their savings in the bank will have missed out tremendously. This doesn’t seem right, and through this website we hope to help a few more people make an informed decision about whether investing is right for them and to provide the tools they need.

Our Personal Investment Aims

Our aims are pretty straight forward. We are investing now so that in the future we will be able to afford to retire and live off what we have built up. We are in no rush to retire, mind (we like our jobs), but when we each do we would like a comfortable level of retirement.

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