Blog 1: Has the world become crazy? And a short introduction…

To begin with the latter. To make it easy for most of you, I am the big brother of @exyle (although in physical terms I am his small brother as you can see in the picture). I was born in 1980 and raised in the suburbs of the ‘harbor capital’ of the world, Rotterdam. I still live there with my wife (formally girlfriend, but she really hates that) and two beautiful daughters (see pic).

I studied Business Administration at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and started working as an investment banker at ING Bank in Amsterdam. After doing that for 10 years, I changed jobs in the mid of 2015 and started at an investment boutique near Utrecht. I am responsible as a fund manager for the management of a fund of over € 500 million, which invests in large equity stakes in Dutch small and medium sized companies.

Shortly on my screen name, look4balance. It is the way I try to live my life. Balance is important in the relationship between work and free time, but also in so many other aspects of live. Lastly, I love playing poker and that game is all about balance. If you’re not balanced the better players will run all over you. So you should always look for balance and only leave it when you’re absolutely sure that is the best thing to do.

Has the world become crazy? Off course the world has been crazy for a long time from the perspective of what people are doing to each other, but I mean specifically on the subject of blockchain / cryptocurrency. The amount of money that is pouring into crypto and that my brother and some of my best friends are making is just mind-blowing for me. I work for over 12 years in the top of the financial industry and have never seen anything like it. My brother calls me (and my father btw too) a dinosaur that is sitting by the station while the train is taking off… Perhaps he is right, perhaps not. But for the moment he is at right end of the scale.

In general, I am pretty busy with a job that costs me at least 50 hours a week (don’t be sorry, I really like my job and the office location (see picture) is stunning) and a young family. But no more excuses, I need to get my head around this. Understand what is going on and figuring out if the value attributed to crypto is justified. What is the value? This question is the main question in my job, which I ask myself over and over again for almost every decision I make. The problem with value is that it is dynamic, e.g. the value of a can of coke for me right now behind my computer is completely different from the value of the same can of coke for me if I walked for a day in the dessert without any water.

I spent a day with my brother, who educated me on the basics (thanks Bro!) and invested a few thousand Euros to be on board and feel committed. I will try to write at least a blog every week in which I talk about investing (i.e. answering the question: What is the value?) in the traditional economy and my journey of answering this question for the crypto world.
Hopefully this provides for some interesting reads and stimulates to also invest in some other categories besides crypto. Who knows what will happen.

I hope that 2018 will give me some more insights into the astounding world of crypto and I wish everyone reading this a very happy and healthy 2018!

All the best, look4balance