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 the city where I want to build my future. In September I sat the European Financial Advisor exam, a qualification recognised in Europe to advise 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.
Above all, 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.
Outside my studies, I analyse listed companies, 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.
Doing what I say I will do matters more to me than anything else. Skills can be taught; that cannot.
I am looking for somewhere to start. The rest I will bring myself.