About

Who is Behind Agnostic Investing?

In the real world, I am in my mid-twenties and currently work as Investment Analyst for a Single Family Office in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.¹I wrote the first version of this page in 2021. Mid-twenties is therefore not perfectly accurate but fortunately still not wrong… Before that, I worked for slightly more than 3.5 years as a Portfolio Manager in an insurance company.

My interest for investing began in 2015 after I read Warren Buffett: Sein Weg. Seine Methode. Seine Strategie by Robert Hagstrom more or less by coincidence.²As far as I know, this book is the German translation of the bestseller The Warren Buffett Way. Back then, my English wasn’t so good… Instead of becoming a lawyer, which was my first plan back then, this (fortunately) led me to a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in finance. Over the years, I also did some of the things you do to start a career in the investment industry. I interned in the research groups of two banks, worked as a finance teaching assistant, and obtained the CFA charter. Since 2022, I also teach Statistics and Company Valuation at a business school.

While value investing and Warren Buffett were my starting point, I gradually moved to a more systematic and data-driven investment philosophy over the course of my studies.³With value investing, I mean fundamental analysis of individual stocks, not the systematic value factor-strategies. Though, I wouldn’t say that Warren Buffett and his followers are not systematic and data-driven. I like modern quantitative methods, data, and rigor research. I also believe in (some of) the big ideas of academic finance, even though Buffett and Munger frequently make fun of them. Having said that, I still never gave up (and probably never will) the core elements of the Buffett-Philosophy.⁴I have no idea if there is a formal definition of the Buffett-Philosophy, but I mean his core ideas. Patience, regard a stock as partial ownership of a real business, honesty, common-sense, rationality, … So although I am nowadays more of a quant, I aim to be agnostic and use good ideas no matter where they come from.

When I am not working or maintaining this website, I enjoy spending time with family and friends, reading books, riding my Peloton bike, and traveling around the world.⁵The order has nothing to say, all of them are important…

Finally, why such a strange semi-secretive introduction? I thought long and hard about how anonymous or public I want to pursue this project. On the one hand, an explicit goal of AgnosticInvesting.com is to connect with like-minded people which obviously doesn’t work without a real name. On the other hand, I also like my privacy. Therefore, I decided for a compromise. If you explore the website, you will certainly find out who I am. At the same time, it is (hopefully) not perfectly obvious at first glance.

Thank you very much for visiting and making it to the end!⁶After finishing this page, I recognized that five footnotes in one’s description about himself is probably not normal. So I decided to create an even more abnormal sixth one to tell you that… And I can promise, the humor isn’t much better on the rest of the site…
June 29, 2024

An investor cannot obtain superior profits from stocks by simply committing to a specific investment category or style. He can earn them only by carefully evaluating facts and continuously exercising discipline.

— Warren Buffett (1988, URL)