For 16-year-old Swiss high school student Richard Schaeli, nearly everything revolves around stocks. But meeting smart people is just as important to him as earning money.
16-year-old Richard Schaeli probably wouldn't call himself a child prodigy. But if you've made it onto the prestigious «Forbes» 30-under-30 list in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, as he has, you have achieved something extraordinary.
Schaerli has been managing the assets of others since he was eleven years old. First from retail investors via exchange-listed certificates, and now only for ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWI) via mandates. He attends high school in Zug, although he is taking a semester off to live alone in Singapore to learn Mandarin. He wants to broaden his horizons there and meet a new range of people, from architects to ministers of economics.
No False Modesty
In an interview with «Private Banking Magazin» (in German), the youngster reveals how he negotiates the rather cocky financial world with sure-footedness and confidence.
One way Schaeli built up his network was by writing to authors of the financial books he was reading. He not only received entire boxes full of free books but also tips from all over the world.
Jorge Lemann as Mentor
He also had the fortitude to address very successful individuals in the financial world directly. As an eleven-year-old, he met Jorge Lemann, a major shareholder of the world's largest beer brewer, InBev, over lunch in a traditional Swiss pub in the Alps. Schaeli recognized the Brazilian-Swiss from a school project on the 30 most successful people in the world he had done a few weeks earlier.
As he explains in the interview, the encounter developed into a close friendship in which Lemann mentored him to become a kind of «Swiss Warren Buffet» and introduced him to a network of interesting people.
Avoiding Over-Diversification
For Schaeli, a game of Monopoly or a day of skiing together are more convivial and create a more valuable exchange than a formal meeting. When it comes to something as personal as investing, talks in conference rooms only create an unnecessary distance from the client.
Schaeli manages a small portion of the total assets of high-net-worth private clients, mostly entrepreneurs, in a specialized equity mandate that is usually in the six-to-seven-figure range, according to reports.
In doing so, he focuses on diversification, which he believes many asset managers take to extremes, guaranteed to result in mediocre returns. Over-diversification quickly leads to a loss of overview, which is why Schaeli limits his mandates to a maximum of five stocks. It is essential to understand every position and every company in the portfolio, from top to bottom.
A Normal Teenager
Schaeli is careful not to get lost in the administrative side of things and wants to wait before founding a company. For now, he wants to learn and not just earn money.
He also wants to lead a completely «normal» teenage life alongside his hobby. In order to reconcile both, Schaeli consciously makes selective decisions in his everyday life about where he wants to spend time. This evaluation of priorities is a valuable skill, he says, an insight that testifies to the teenager's maturity.
