Capital Markets

Value and valuation. Starting as an equity analyst at Gabelli Asset Management, morning meetings with Mario taught me lessons that have served my whole career: know your numbers (never cuff it), do the work. But the finance models I had learned in the classroom did not translate to how markets worked, so after my MBA I joined Barclays Capital in London in the midst of a period of extraordinary growth in global capital markets. Markets proved to be the most demanding and merciless of teachers, if not also the most rewarding: an agnostic scoreboard, as we followed the flow of money for clues to how the global economy worked. It was impossible not to fall in love.

Those heady days at the beginning of the new millennium were the peak of the global dollar system. Greenspan accommodated the leveraged party of balance-sheet expansion with low policy rates, European capital markets deepened under the common currency, and China joined the WTO. In that Cambrian explosion I learned the plumbing of the international monetary financial system: starting on the repo desk with the financing of trades, then learning to price risk by bootstrapping my own curves and building derivative pricing engines, then working with the expansion of hedge funds, relative value and macro alike, including one of the largest players in the US Treasury basis trade. I traveled to Latin America to expand Barclays' leading ETF business. And I began working with sovereign balance sheets, the central bank reserve managers and sovereign wealth funds that in the years before the crisis were expanding both their assets (inflation-linked products) and their mandates (derivatives and leverage).

When the music stopped, and the most liquid reference points in financial markets froze, the primacy of liquidity became clear. Market making went back to basics: finding matched interests and creating liquidity off screen. History and market structure were being rewritten, and so was the policy response: I priced some of the Lehman collateral packages, and played a key role in the European Central Bank's rescue of European credit markets via the National Bank of Slovakia.

After the Lehman acquisition I moved to Singapore with Barclays to help build out our newly enlarged global footprint: globalizing local product and localizing global product across Asia-Pacific. Working with my new colleagues on the index research and quantitative portfolio strategy teams, associated with the newly rechristened Barclays Aggregate Index, taught me still more about the power of knowing the rules of the game and why market structure matters. We worked with large Asian sovereigns on tail-risk trades through the European crisis, and with sophisticated investors as they moved to a risk-premium approach to allocation. This was the machine that moves the lifeblood of the global economy, seen from the inside.

From working with the expansion of leverage and balance sheets at the systemic level, in 2015 I began a professional move to the buy side. With a proprietary balance sheet the challenge changed from accessing liquidity to deploying it. I was founding and managing partner of a Singapore-based private equity firm, responsible for fundraising, fund structuring and deal origination; our first targets were in the consumer, agricultural, and food and drink industries. Later, for family reasons, we moved to Spain, where I carried on building a European origination pipeline for a Madrid-based permanent-capital investment group. The focus also shifted to deeper value: controlling interests in lower-middle-market consumer, industrial and logistics companies, with a thesis of consolidating fragmented industries into platforms for growth.

Finance reaching what the traditional system does not: new rails for payment and credit, and credit for those the system has not served.