The new face of wealth management

Attendees listened intently and cheered her to the rafters. She got a cool million for a one-hour appearance, which is more than Boris or Blair could ever hope for. And it wasn’t even her speciality – she’s an ecdysiast – but Kim Kardashian was the star speaker at the recent Miami Hedge Fund Week. That tells me all I want to know about hedge fund managers, and I had a good teacher long ago, one John Bryan of toe-sucking fame.

Luckily, my father was still alive back then, and after my less than profitable experience with Bryan, old dad put his foot down. ‘I have a drawer full of mouldering proposals from financial advisers on how to become richer,’ he told me. ‘Stop looking for short cuts and try being a ship owner.’ After my father’s death on 14 July 1989, I actually went looking for a financial adviser. I was warned by friends that advisers are beholden to no one, hence I had to be careful. On a whim I chose a childhood friend who was a brewer and whose family, like half of mine, had come to Greece from Germany with King Otto, the first Greek King after the war of independence of 1821. His name was Karolos Fix, and the Fix brewery enjoyed a monopoly for generations.

Fix had run the brewery to the ground and had left Greece under a cloud. We met up in Gstaad and he invited me to invest in his new fund. However crazy it may sound, and despite my wife’s loud protests, I did. The result was a 22 per cent annual return for the next 15 years. Some envious types went as far as to call me lucky, as I was the first to invest with Fix and to advertise his returns.