I left Italy shortly after I got my first real job, say a couple of years. Up to that point, I had opened an online saving account and an online brokerage account: that was my only connection with the “banking” world. My only interaction with a physical bank was when, Read more…
Shortly after I moved to Zurich with my family, we went to visit my wife’s sister that also lives in Switzerland. While chilling on the couch on a rainy Saturday, I started to rant to my brother-in-law about the fact that I had to stash more than 11k in a Read more…
The good news: I finally managed to buy US-listed ETFs (in a 100% legit way. I have a cousin who pretended to live somewhere by photoshopping utility bills to bypass regulations/restrictions; amazingly, he never encountered any issue by willingly taking “risks” that his local Regulator deemed to be too big Read more…
Working with, and now also writing about, investing stuff necessarily exposed me to things that I do not understand. Not because they are complicated (there are but they are not the topic of this post) but because they are stupid. At least for me. As Matt Sperling would say, “I Read more…
A little bit more than a year ago, Andrea invited me to participate in his InCassaforte podcast after we had a brief exchange on Twitter on why it was reasonable or not to invest in bonds when rates are at zero or negative. This morning (which might not be your Read more…
In April 2022, I introduced on this blog The Italian Leather Sofa Model Portfolio. As a reminder, here is the portfolio composition: The idea behind the portfolio is stolen from here. The link offers the best explanation to what I think is the most common question related to it, i.e. Read more…
Some time ago I was reading a bit of a random post from BankersOnWheel‘s weekly link-fest: the author described which practical lessons you can take from famous finance movies like Wall Street or Boiler Room. A line hit me: when he got to Trading Places, he casually mentioned that he Read more…
Since Central Banks announced last year that they were going to increase interest rates, I (for once) acted responsibly and asked myself this question: should I reduce the leverage in my portfolio? The cost to borrow money represents a hurdle rate: the return I get from investing has to be Read more…
Global X just launched two “defined-outcome” ETFs that are UCITS compliant (i.e. can be bought by European Investors): I thought I already wrote about this strategy, but I realised I only did a generic piece on structured products here. Innovator ETFs launched the first defined-outcome strategy ETFs about three years Read more…
I have watched seven episodes of the series Fleishman is in trouble. With Atlanta, is one of the best I watched in the last year. While Atlanta was fun but I couldn’t relate to any of the characters (a bit of the racism parts since 3/4 of my family is Read more…