About Mike

• I’m not a professional money manager – the whole point of this blog is to look at financial challenges, products and ideas from the perspective of the lonely individual investor who is mainly trying to avoid stepping on a landmine. I have worked a lot in investment banks, but not in trading.

• I’m not an academic. I won’t be attempting to prove theory from first principles. Instead I want to provide a framework to allow the average reader of this blog to manage their own money, and to do so at least as well as a professional manager would.

• I have been investing my own cash for more than 30 years, right back to Big Bang, Black Monday and before. I’m currently managing a decent-sized portfolio (see the blog for an idea of what size this might be) without a financial adviser. I think this is a good thing, you may not agree.

• I am good with numbers – I have a science degree and an MBA. That said, you only need arithmetic to follow most investment discussions. Occasionally there will be some statistics, and your life will be easier if you can operate a spreadsheet. If your maths is poor, feel free to skip some of the logic and head straight to the conclusions.

• I’m only interested in investing ideas that can be implemented by private investors in the UK, and in the economic theories and policies that affect these investors. If products don’t currently exist to allow us to make use of a particular promising avenue, we’ll make a note to come back and explore them later.

• I’m not putting myself forward as a great original thinker – I didn’t come up with any of these ideas myself. This is stuff I’ve picked up over the years. I’ll be summarising and synthesising and adding my own experience. Sources are usually prominently referenced, unless I’ve forgotten where I got something from. If you can spot where an uncredited idea came from, let me know and I’ll fix it.

• The point of the blog is to save you time and effort. I hope that in due course my readers will introduce me to things that I’ve missed, and help me fix those things that I’ve got wrong. Together we can make this job a bit easier for us all.

• I’m not selling anything ((I do offer low-cost financial coaching, and you can buy books from Amazon who will bung me a few pence. I might figure out a way to make this site self-funding in the future, but I will make it painfully transparent if and when I do.)) One of the big problems of investing is that everybody wants a slice of your cash.

• I’m not doing this (the blog) to get rich. I am of course investing to avoid not being rich in the future. It does takes time and money to create and host the blog, so if you want to buy my a beer, go ahead.

• And finally, Mike is not my real name.