Curators: Green Musa Capital
Be honest. You probably spend a considerable amount of time contemplating your money. No, not just your own paychecks, but how much you should save or invest, when it’s time to buy a house, etc. How about why everyone became obsessed with stocks and cryptocurrency a few years ago or why the cost of nearly everything has jumped noticeably? The possibilities are endless and as a result, overwhelming. Fortunately, there are people from Green Musa Capital to help.
Tribe Called Trav (TCT): So, who are you? What’s your title/position?
Green Musa Capital (GreenM): My name is Anibal Hernandez, I am the CEO of Green Musa Capital, I’m a CFA charter holder.
TCT: What is a CFA?
GreenM: It’s a charter that you earn after taking a series of pretty grueling exams. Roughly 170k CFA’s globally, we’re very skilled financial analysts, essentially, that have been put through rigorous exams to distinguish the skill of financial analytics.
TCT: How did you get to this point?
GreenM: I studied finance and entrepreneurship at Florida State. I did an internship out there for about a semester, and it was an investment internship.I was doing analytics, analyzing stocks and seeing which ones would be good portfolio picks for someone that was doing that for a living already. You know? Someone in their 50’s that’s been in the game for some time. So i got to see that kind of environment pretty early. I just kept pulling that string after graduating. I would read books on it, on finance and through that reading, I learned about the CFA. So if I didn’t go out and look for it…
TCT: IT WAS THROUGH YOUR OWN PERSONAL INTEREST!
GreenM: Exactly, after doing some research, I learned that was a lot more (in terms of education) focused in what I wanted to do. Analyzing stocks, analyzing equities, analyzing pretty much any type of asset and understanding how to throw that in a portfolio and planning for clients and things of that nature, depending on who your client is.
TCT: How did you become a CFA?
GreenM: The CFA is three exams, but they’re only offered once a year. So it’s very much seen as a post grad education. Because it usually takes three to four years to do them. The passing rate last year for the first exam was 25% I want to say, like a historical low. That’s the first exam. The first one is akin to your entire financial undergrad in one exam. That’s what the exam is. Do you know your stuff? Do you care? You’re gonna have to put in extra effort to really understand these concepts. Each exam is six hours.
They say around 300 hours of study time. Before the exam date, I put nine hours before that to study. You need to give yourself enough time to study this amount of books. This is self study. I was reading everything by myself and putting myself through the practice exams. Only in the last half of the third exam did I enroll in one of those online teaching programs.
TCT: So, what do you offer to clients?
GreenM: That knowledge, they get to leverage that knowledge. Instead of trying to go through this grueling education to make investment decisions and build portfolios and do all that at the highest level, you can outsource that to our company and we will put together a financial plan for you. You get to leverage our infrastructure and our knowledge for your investment future.
TCT: How did you earn your first client?
GreenM: My first client was an ex-college roommate of mine, Mauricio. He just came to me. I’d be posting online on Instagram just like random trades I’m making. This was super early on, after I’d graduated for a couple of years. I told him “Hey, this is just something I’m doing myself, I don’t have any credentials.”
He’s like, “no that’s fine, take my money you know better than I do, I trust you.” We just kind of moved forward like that. A couple years later, he ends up purchasing a house with the advice and investment money I ended up making with him within about four to five years. He ended up purchasing a house before his thirties and he was also traveling for around two years of his professional life and was able to make these financial moves throughout that time. That made things real for a lot of people, it kind of kickstarted the interest in the company and the services that we’re providing.
TCT: There are probably a lack of discussions on money in our community. What would you say to someone about the importance of investing?
GreenM: How you think about money should be somewhat of a relationship. One, what is your relationship with money? How do you see money? A lot of that you have to do within yourself. That has to do with your background, where you come from.
Two, why do you want to acquire money? What is the end goal? At the end of the day, money is a proxy for food. At our most purest form, that’s what it comes down to. When you think of money as the first form of currency introduced to a society. It was definitely not a paper money, it was barley. Psychologically, we see money as a proxy for food and being able to provide. When you move on from that, what is the next step with your money? You should be investing it after you’ve built an emergency fund, the house is taken care of for at least three to six months. It depends on who you are, your own risk level, where you’re at as a family. Then, on top of that, you should start investing every dollar, because having it sitting around is not gonna make you any returns. You’re literally just lending your money out to the bank. Your money is being eaten away by inflation.
TCT: Can you explain inflation? It has been an ongoing topic in the news for a while.
GreenM: Every year your money is being chipped away by inflation on average it’s about 2%. Inflation is kind of like an invisible tax, because you don’t see it. If you had a hundred dollars this year, the same hundred dollars is only gonna be able to buy you 98$ worth of goods the next year. It keeps going down from there. You’re seeing a hundred dollars, it says a hundred dollars. But what you can buy with that $100 the year you put it there then three, four, and five years later is not the same. That is your money being eroded away by inflation. Unless you’re doing something against that, you’re really just becoming (poorer) as time goes on, because you’re not able to buy what you think you can buy.
A lot of the Inflation we’re seeing is in energy and food. The messed up thing is these energy companies are recording record profits.
TCT: How do you change someone’s mind who’s hesitant to invest or views it like gambling?
GreenM: People do see stocks like gambling because they don’t really know what’s going on behind it. PFFFFT that’s like betting on red or black. A lot of people will try to pass off as investing when they’re speculating really. They’re betting on something that’s speculative, they’re not really researching or investing or seeing the valuation on something and having a strong thesis behind their investments.
TCT: What can you say about the cryptocurrency craze of the last few years?
GreenM: We don’t invest in crypto, we don’t really touch it. We look at everything from a fundamental value perspective. We want to put a price on everything that we’re investing in, we want to buy something that’s cheaper than that, that way we make money, right? When it comes to crypto, and in general when you’re valuing an asset. There’s gonna be some kind of cash that’s being exchanged, some kind of cash flow. If I’m buying a house as an investment, there’s rent that’s attached to it. If I have a company, that company has customers, it owns XYZ percent of the market, I’m gonna have some cash flow coming in from that company. Then there are other investments such as watches, art, and wines, and things like that that comes in more of a scarcity thing.
For example, Richard Millie just released the world’s thinnest watch. They’re only making 150 of them and each of them is like $1.8 million. But you buy one of them, the demand is more than the supply, then you see an appreciation in these types of goods. When it comes to crypto, what is the value there? There isn’t a cash flow behind it, there’s like a code. To me it’s more of a technology, it’s like saying “I’m gonna sell you a piece of the internet” it really doesn’t make sense from an investment perspective.
Owning it and then being able to transfer money and easily move it around, that has value. So, I’m not taking anything away from the technology. As it is, It’s great. I do see finance moving in that direction, there’s already been some institutional investment in that direction. There’s not gonna be a million coins, the US is gonna regulate cryptocurrency, and there’s only gonna be a few that survive that regulatory storm that’s coming. Look how many crypto companies have layoffs and are getting sued. And ponzi schemes that are coming about. it’s an extreme bubble so as an investor it doesn’t make sense. If you see a lot of scams surrounding an investment it usually means it’s gotten way too easy to get people’s money. Something is going on there.
TCT: Is there some basic advice you could give to someone seeking financial advice for the first time?
GreenM: I think It is important to protect yourself from the advice that you’re getting. Anyone can get in front of a camera now and say whatever. If you’re gonna listen to someone make sure they have some kind of designation, some kind of degree. I would say a financial designation, some kind of license. (Proving) that they’re qualified to say certain things or statements. I think it’s gotten really popular because of crypto, NFT’S, and things like that to say that you know about finance but you really don’t. You dipped your toe in the water, but it’s a lot deeper than that. There’s a reason that certain banks and institutions have a lot of money. There’s a whole industry of people that know how to analyze stocks everyday. There’s a lot of nice buzzwords. That’s the generation we live in.
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