Hi
Thanks for looking into my blog. My name is Alex Williams, I live in Bern, Switzerland and I’m 30 years old. I studied environmental engineering at the technical university of Zurich (ETH). Besides my studies I was working in the board of a small consulting firm for specific (mostly IT) projects. Through this I found my todays job in a leading health insurance as a corporate development manager, mainly managing the strategic project portfolio and helping our board in strategic questions. I love what I do, but since I finished my masters there has always been missing one thing: Numbers!
As you can imagine, studying engineering is hyper numbers focused and decisions are mainly numbers-driven. My focus area was hydraulics & hydrology, an area where especially statistics is important. Something I enjoyed in particular. So, since I don’t really need math in my current job anymore, I wanted to find another way to put it to use. So investing was an obvious choice since it was something I was hyped for a long time already. Now, as a student I didn’t had barely any money to invest, so over the university-years it wasn’t something that I was able to tackle in an appropriate fashion. Meanwhile, I do have a proper job, I do make a fair income, so this situation changed. Hence, since my graduation in 2018, I started to focus on my investing and tried to learn as much as I could. This means, I made pretty much every mistake one can do: Trying to time the market, use leveraged products, invest in things I didn’t understand, etc. But fortunately, I understood that trying things out is good, as long as you don’t put all your money in it. So after all, I never blew up my account.
One of the very important learnings for me was: Understand what you do and understand the things you invest in (pretty small finding for such a long time, but I guess that’s just me. I’m a slow learner, but I never forget). This is why my first real strategy was the classic “value investing”. Really understand the businesses you invest in. Understand the management, the strategy, the industry, the product, the customer needs, the competitors, etc. But after a couple of month, I had to admit to myself that it just might not be the right thing for me. I know that it can work beautifully and it has been prover over and over in the last decades. My problem was that I don’t really like reading as much as I would have to. To be able to invest in single stocks with good risk/reward ratio over a lifetime would mean that I’ll have to read for hours a day, 7 days a week. One just needs to become an expert for specific industries. I would have pulled the plug at some point, because value investing is not about numbers but about understanding. The second issue came with the Covid-crash in 2020. As I wasn’t the expert I would have needed to be, I almost sold all my positions in the worst possible moment.
Therefore, I had my second important finding: I’m not good at sustaining large drawdowns. Hence, I had to look elsewhere for other strategies which might be more suited for my personality. I searched what felt like ages. But finally, I found the “tactical investing” style mastered by Brent Osachoff. Well, if you haven’t heard of him, at some point in the future you will – I’m sure of it. I basically learnt everything I needed from him. He offers a service to follow his investments and has thousands of articles & videos, and they have been an absolute eye-opener. So I strongly recommend to have a look at his content on YouTube (VTS / Brent Osachoff) or on his webpage: www.volatilitytradingstrategies.com
Nevertheless, the focus of tactical investing for people with small accounts (in the mean of the financial industry everything below 50 Mio. or so) is, that one is able to enter and exit a position in a matter of seconds. So the goal is to avoid drawdown periods as often as possible while participating strong upwards market trends as much as possible. The basic idea is, that one can (comfortably) beat a buy-and-hold strategy on any index by focusing on drawdown reduction. Because if one starts to feel uncomfortable with a drawdown, this person might just pull the plug in the wrong moment. And maybe never going to invest ever again …
So that is what I’ll talk about whenever I find time, showing what I do and why I think it’s the right thing to do. Because sleeping well because of drawdown reduction while growing ones account significantly whenever the time is right is what it’s all about.
Best, Alex