I am 21 and starting out in finance and wealth management. I like to get ahead of things: I know what I want and I work for it.
I am in the final year of a BSc in Business Management at the University of Barcelona and I am spending this academic year at the Université de Genève. In September I sat the European Financial Advisor exam, the EFPA certification European regulation requires of anyone who advises clients on their money. Preparing for it is what led me to build my own MiFID II suitability assessment: twenty-one questions where the client's answers, not the adviser, decide the profile, and from that profile an asset allocation and a shortlist of instruments.
I analyse listed companies on my own, with every figure traced back to the document it came from, and I have built a method whose only purpose is to argue against my own conclusions. It has made me change my mind about companies I had already decided I liked.
I believe advice starts with listening, not proposing. Almost everything I know about that I learned somewhere with nothing to do with finance: five years refereeing federated football, a summer signing up donors for an NGO in the street, a year and a half handling disruptions for passengers at an airport. All three taught me the same thing. People rarely object to the answer; they object to not having been heard first.
I believe what matters most in a person is whether they do what they said they would. The rest can be taught.
I am looking for somewhere to start. The rest I will bring myself.