https://www.linkedin.com/in/fiole (Dr. Eelco Fiole) is co-founder and sole managing partner of https://alpha-gp.com/ (Alpha Governance Partners (AGP)), a risk-governance-focused fiduciary services firm with alternative assets under the governance of US$15 billion across 12 jurisdictions globally. He is also CFO of the Tezos Foundation, a blockchain endeavor that has enjoyed one of the largest fundraising levels globally. Eelco is an adjunct professor in finance ethics at https://www.unil.ch/hec/en/home.html (HEC Lausanne) (the faculty of business and economics of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, 2018 winner of the global CFA Research Challenge) and chairs the Annual Conference Advisory Group for the https://www.cfainstitute.org/en (CFA Institute). He has gained almost a decade of fiduciary COO and CFO experience in alternative investments, emerging markets, wealth management and blockchain at Credit Suisse Asset Management, with operational responsibility for US$17 billion in alternative strategies, (in Zurich, London, and New York).

He was a consultant for five years at PwC in Zurich, and his work there included a focus on frontier markets. He started his career as an institutional banker with ABN AMRO in Amsterdam, after spending early working years as an engineer in the oil-and-chemical industry. Currently a master of studies in social innovation candidate at the http://www.ice.cam.ac.uk/course/mst-social-innovation (University of Cambridge), Eelco has completed advanced degrees in economics (PhD, Basel), ethics (MAS, Zurich), positive leadership (MPLS, Madrid) laws (LLM, https://london.ac.uk/ (London)), and business (MS, https://www.rsm.nl/ (Rotterdam School of Management), Erasmus University). His holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from https://www.rotterdamuas.com/ (Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences)). A chartered financial analyst (CFA) and a chartered director (CDir), Eelco holds various other leading finance and management designations. His global travel for business and education has included private and professional exposure to China for 20 years. He is based in Zurich and Singapore and is fluent in English, German and his native Dutch, has conversational French, and basic Spanish and Mandarin.

Worst investment ever

Background

After finishing a business degree and working with major organizations, Eelco felt he had a pretty good understanding of what was going on in the financial investment arena, but he was yet to receive his CFA designation.

Reliance on flawed research

A friend of Eelco’s sent him an equity research report by a CFA charterholder who was working at a well-established, reputable investment house. The report projected that a large telecom firm’s stock would go up from 17 to 20 euro. Eelco thought that based on: the credibility of the research house; the compelling nature of their argument; that it was not a speculative stock; it was a large telecom firm; and the level of his own expertise to read such a treatise, he decided to buy the stock. However, soon after, instead of going up from 17 to 20 euro, it went down to 6 euro, in tandem with the inherent deception surrounding the tech bubble. What he hadn’t realized what that part of the valuation performed on the stock (outside of the usual equity research carried out on any stock) was based on the psychology of the market at the time around the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble (tech bubble), and Eelco paid the price. He has remained involved in the investing space ever since, going through the ranks of various organizations, but submits that this was one of the key experiences of his career, even though he became a CFA charterholder later. Suffice to say, the report he had relied on and the result of the reality going the other way, was a memorable shock.

“The frameworks that we get offered through the CFA or some other academic material are not enough to reflect reality in the end...