DECEM / OBSERVATORY
Why I built the Observatory

I kept asking questions.

After more than 30 years advising families, I became less interested in adding more information and more interested in finding out what actually matters.

Pencil drawing / animated_me.mp4
The starting point

I don't think people need more investment noise. They need a better way to make sense of it.

I have always been curious. I like pulling ideas apart, looking for patterns, working backwards from the outcome and asking what might stop us getting there.

Over time that made me increasingly uncomfortable with parts of the investment industry that are simply accepted because they have always been done that way.

Fund managers can choose the benchmark that presents them best. Traditional risk profiling can reduce a person to a number. More data often creates more noise, rather than more understanding.

None of that sat comfortably with me. So I kept asking questions.

What matters to me

A few things I have come to believe.

01

Understand the person first.

The same investment can be right for one person and completely wrong for another. The investor comes before the investment.

02

Evidence beats opinion.

Markets will always produce stories. I would rather observe what actually happened than become attached to an explanation.

03

Simplicity is a strength.

I have never believed a portfolio becomes better merely because it becomes more complicated. If the simple answer is the right one, use it.

04

Preparation matters.

For me, success is not a clever call after markets fall. It is a client who does not panic because the work was done before the difficult moment arrived.

Questions I've never stopped asking

Some questions just never went away.

Question 01

Why do two people react differently to the same market?

Because risk is not just a volatility number. Context, experience, behaviour and what the money is for all matter.

Question 02

Why is investment risk so often described too simply?

I wanted risk to reflect how investments actually behave through time, not merely how a questionnaire or a static label describes them.

Question 03

Why can a good investment quietly stop being good?

Because deterioration can happen gradually. Breadth, persistence and intensity can change before the headline numbers make the problem obvious.

Question 04

Why do we accept the benchmark we're given?

I became uncomfortable with investments being judged against a reference point chosen by the very people being judged. Peer behaviour can tell a different story.

Question 05

Why does more information so often mean less clarity?

Because information without structure is noise. I wanted to reduce a huge investment universe into evidence that can actually support a decision.

Question 06

What should good advice feel like when markets are difficult?

Calm. Not because nothing has happened, but because the client understands what they own, why they own it and what would genuinely cause us to act.

A different choice

I didn't want to manage more money.

For more than 30 years I have looked after families and helped them make some of the most important financial decisions of their lives.

Before founding Decem, I personally managed around CHF 300 million on behalf of approximately 30 families, as part of a team responsible for around CHF 750 million.

I chose to leave.

There is nothing wrong with scale. It simply wasn't what I wanted. I wasn't interested in building the largest business I could. I was interested in building the best one I could for a small number of families.

I wanted to spend more time with fewer people.

I wanted to take the rigour, research and discipline of an international wealth manager and bring it into an independent setting, where the relationship with the client did not have to become more distant as the business became more successful.

Decem was built around that choice: a deliberately small number of families, more time, more thought, and the freedom to challenge accepted thinking when I believe there is a better way.

The Observatory grew from exactly the same idea.

At a glance

Experience is useful only if it changes how you think.

30+

Years advising and looking after families.

CHF 300m

Personally managed for approximately 30 families before founding Decem.

CHF 750m

Assets managed by the wider team I was part of before leaving to build something smaller.

Where it led

Eventually I stopped looking for a better report. I started building a better way to observe.

The Observatory grew from a simple idea: take the evidence investments leave behind, strip away as much noise as possible, and observe behaviour consistently across the whole universe.

It is not there to tell me what to think. It is there to make the evidence harder to ignore, and to help me explain the judgement that follows.

And I'm still asking

The Observatory isn't the answer. It's how I look for one.

It is still evolving. I hope it always will. Curiosity does not have an end point.

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