2019, Moscow City – the financial nerve center of the capital. You are in a meeting room at a large brokerage firm on the 47th floor. Floor-to-ceiling panoramic windows reveal a dizzying view of the city that never sleeps. A pleasant assistant – Tanya, Masha, or whatever her name is – places a cup of freshly brewed coffee on the table, smiles, and leaves without a sound. Your personal manager, wearing a suit that costs more than some cars, confidently launches a presentation. The projector comes alive. Slide one of eighteen appears. ...

Investing is never free. Yes, even “free” investing through a bank, brokerage firm, or asset manager. Usually, nobody sends you a separate invoice – the fees are simply embedded inside neatly packaged products with a personal manager, lifestyle services, privileges, and the overall feeling that your capital is being handled in a VIP format. This is convenient and, at times, genuinely justified. However, the investment value of such solutions is not always obvious, while total costs often exceed the price of working with an independent advisor. Over long periods, the difference may amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars – and for larger portfolios, millions. ...

Are you a successful entrepreneur? Good. That means you have already proven that you know how to generate money — build products, structure teams and processes, take risks, and deliver results. Investors often forget this. A significant share of large private fortunes, both in Russia and globally, has been built not in public markets or real estate, but in business. This is indirectly confirmed by global studies (BCG Global Wealth, UBS Global Wealth Report). Almost all names on the Russian Forbes list are owners of real businesses: commodities, finance, IT, development, logistics. Business provides leverage and direct control over outcomes: in strong years, it can deliver returns unavailable to most private investors. ...

Looking up reviews online is a natural instinct when choosing a financial or investment advisor. It makes sense. That’s how we choose restaurants, hotels, and products on marketplaces. At first glance, it may seem the same. But in investing, things work differently. Results here are a function of time, discipline, and the risks taken. Not a single good or bad decision. Over short periods, the same advisor can simultaneously have a satisfied client who benefited from a strong market and a dissatisfied one who entered right before a drawdown. ...

There is a recurring “trap” investors step on again and again: treating current yield as expected return. This is particularly evident today with bank deposits in Russia. In recent years, rates have been in double digits. And it creates the impression that this is the “normal” return of the instrument. But the deposit rate is not a characteristic of the asset — it is a derivative of the regulator’s monetary policy. It changes along with the phase of the economic cycle and cannot serve as a basis for long-term planning. Relying on current yields almost always leads to overstated (or understated) expectations, missed opportunities, and ultimately disappointment. ...

Supporters of real estate investing usually start with a simple argument: prices don’t change every day, therefore the risk must be lower than in public markets. There is some truth to this. Real estate is not marked to market every minute. But the conclusion that follows is often wrong. The absence of daily pricing does not mean the absence of volatility. It simply means that volatility manifests differently — less frequently, more abruptly, and often at the worst possible moment. ...

Some assets are bought for income, others for status. But there is a rare category of assets that people buy for the feeling of becoming part of history. In the high-performance and luxury car segment, the rules are different. The number of wealthy buyers globally is growing. And while the mass market stagnates, the top price tiers continue to expand at rates of 8–14% per year. Margins here are often measured not in single digits, but in tens of percent. ...

There are instruments in the market designed to generate passive income. There are instruments for preserving capital, and others for growing it. Each of them has its place — but they serve very different purposes. You can hammer nails with a saw, of course, but it’s probably better to use it for cutting. When capital is not structured, there is no system that connects different assets into a coherent whole. As a result, different objectives — preservation, growth, and income — start to compete with each other. I describe what such a system looks like in practice here. ...

The best stories in the market are rarely accompanied by bold headlines with tickers and daily coverage on TV. More often, they are “footnotes on the back pages.” Today, I’d like to talk about one such footnote. Last year, Vietnam’s economy grew by around 7%. The target is 8% and above. The population exceeds 100 million people, nearly 70% of whom are of working age. The country exports close to $400 billion worth of goods annually and has maintained a trade surplus for nine consecutive years. ...

It’s interesting to observe how the market underestimates and overestimates the future at the same time. Most of the attention today is focused on technologies with immediate economic impact. That’s understandable: in a world where global growth remains subdued and uncertainty hasn’t gone anywhere, investors gravitate toward what can be measured here and now. At the same time, another layer of change is unfolding in parallel. Less visible, but potentially more fundamental. ...