Finance to the moon and back - introducing me and what is coming!

Hello everyone! My name is Ole and I am a finance geek from Norway! Finally, I am here thanks to my ambitious and brilliant friend @Fredrikaa who introduced me to this community! I am thrilled to get started with sharing my knowledge as well as learn a little myself in here!

The most important thing to know about me is that my brain is designed around finance! More specifically that means stocks, derivatives (options, futures, rolling contracts), blockchain, crypto (currency), FIRE (Financial Independence - Retire Early), minimalism, real estate, passive income, and the like. For the last decade I have touched these topics daily and now I want to provide you with my knowledge and expertise – especially within the FIRE world! One should have thought that I must be insane since I am super stoked about every keyword mentioned above! There is, however, one common denominator to all the ‘shmancy’ keywords: finance – the management of money!

With this in the back of the cerebral cortex it is not hard to understand why I picked my education in 2010. Five straight years of finance kicked right into the temple! What could have been better? I mean, every company need a guy that can count money!? But the most important one, knowledge to know how to build wealth in a smart- and sustainable way. Who said they do not teach people to get rich in business school? Robert Kiyosaki? As far as I know the school of business gave me the most important guidance – how to manage money!

Well, after 5 years of education and trading besides studies (Note: trading besides studies is not recommended) I eventually ended up as a stockbroker. It was fun, some months you made big bucks and other months you did not earn a dime. It was challenging and instructive, but the sound of getting rich in a couple of years sounded alluring to me… That did not happen... Working from 5 am in the morning to 10 pm at night will eventually tare you apart, if you do not love it. Which was my case! I needed to do something different, I was tired of finance… I fled early in 2018.

I fled over to the TECH world, more specifically Tech Data Inc – one of the biggest companies in the world focusing on distributing technology. I did get an executive position, serving the support team with all inquires that Tech Data stood against, quit challenging but in a slower phase than the finance world - enormously relaxing times! However, after some months in the Tech universe, I was haunted… It was like a ghost was following me, whispering behind my back with a weak voice; “finance”, “finance”, …

BOOM! I found myself in a position where I was talking about finance to almost every colleague I met, I could not help it. It was like two years of imprisoned goodness were finally set to be free! In every room, corridor and office finance was put to the table, and as my finance spirit grew stronger everyday – so did the environment around me.

Suddenly I was eating lunch with a colleague, who apparently had absorbed that I was stoked about finance. As we are eating and talking it turns out that he has been crazy about the derivatives market. He was one of those nerds earning millions before 2008 just to see everything evaporate when the global financial crises started. He was acknowledged “the king of stocks” by a Norwegian economic news paper for earning and losing millions in a blink of an eye. He was fun, I liked him!

It did not stop there, “the king of stocks” introduced me for another colleague that was obsessed with Bitcoin (BTC). He told me that if you do not own Bitcoin you own “Shitcoin”. According to “Mr. Bitcoin” the only coin that matters was, as he put it; “the B to the C” [Bitcoin]. I mean, those lunches were no longer leisure. The topics of discussion was isolated to cryptocurrency, gold, and silver. We are talking about a man totally obsessed about the Keynesian economic theory (which I will write about in another post). So, there we sat, discussing crypto, gold and silver day in and day out.

Note: The time being 2018 where people started to wonder where they should put their hard-earned money to beat inflation (it's even harder now in 2021). What did we do? We bought contracts on silver and gold, and filled our wallets with crypto, especially “B to the C” - which turned out to be a lucrative investment a couple of years later. Thanks to Mr. Bitcoin.

As you might already have realized - I quit my job in Tech Data Inc in early 2019. The time there led me to understand that I cannot only talk about finance, I need to become finance. Three months later I started to work for Infront ASA (competitor of Bloomberg). Infront provides a platform that combines real time data, news, analytics, and electronic trading – putting financial markets at my fingertips. I am back, acquiring more knowledge about the financial markets than ever before.

This was my “histroduction”, hoping I made my interests clear. If you want to know more about me and my private life, please drop a question below and I will try to elaborate. I am looking forward to write about finance – the management of money! And hey, guess what – I am also a father of a coming stockbroker!

 Olebulls