What is Plain English Finance?
Plain English Finance and the accompanying book “Own The World” give you the information you need to optimise your personal finances. The knowledge needed to make a huge difference to your money is not that complicated but is very poorly distributed throughout the population. We believe it should be taught at every secondary school in the country.
Our mission is to provide you with the basic tools you need to learn about money and some of the fundamental truths of finance in Plain English. We show you why you can and should run your own financial affairs. With a little knowledge there are inherent reasons why you will invest better than many professionals. Doing so maximises your chance of making high returns and saving thousands of pounds in fees. This fact alone will give you the very best chance of long term investment success.
There are plenty of people working in finance who promise the earth and fail to deliver, why should we be any different? The most fundamental difference between this site and much of the rest of the finance industry is that our goal is for you to learn how to look after your own money, not for us to look after it for you. The only cost of our advice is the purchase price of a book, rather than any fees or taking a cut of your money. Even this is optional as much of the information you need is to be found in the blog…
So… Who does Andrew Craig think he is?
Andrew graduated in Economics and International Politics in 1997. His first job took him to Washington DC where he worked for a US Congressman on Capitol Hill. Andrew’s time in DC was hugely helpful in his gaining an understanding of how important politics and politicians are when thinking about finance and investment.
Since then Andrew has spent over a decade working in financial markets for various finance firms in London and latterly New York. These included UBS, Credit Agricole (France’s biggest bank) and two smaller boutique firms.
Importantly, Andrew worked in an area called “pan european small and mid caps”. This simply meant that he dealt with companies from all over Europe and the UK that were less than about £2-3 billion in size. He was able to meet and travel with the very top management teams (CEO, CFO, Chairman etc.) of several hundred companies from every sector imaginable and was involved with the stock market flotation (IPO) of dozens of companies including the likes of Burberry, Campari, easyJet, HMV, lastminute.com, Carluccio’s and the Carbon Trust.
Working in the more volatile area of “smaller” companies meant that Andrew witnessed some companies appreciate in value by dozens, even hundreds of percent and, equally, saw others lose a huge percentage of their value, sometimes overnight. He saw first hand just how much money the very best investors were able to make.
His reaction was to read extremely widely about investment and to start investing his own money. Thanks in great part to the returns afforded by those investments he has been able to spend around five of the last fifteen years outside of conventional employment (not having to earn any money). This has given him the time to read very widely on finance, trading, economics, history and economic history.
It is this, more than anything, which he feels qualifies him to bring you the information you will find in this site. More than his degree or over ten years of working in banking, it is the time he has had to read the very best books and other information sources about investment and economic history for the last many years that has enabled him to bring you this information…
At the most basic level his view is simply:
- That you really owe it to yourself to learn enough about money to run your own financial affairs. The rewards of doing so are life changing as you have significant advantages over professional investors… (click here to see why in more detail).
- That learning about money is nowhere near as difficult as you may previously have thought. You can learn how to do a perfectly good job with your money more quickly than it took you to learn how to drive, for example. Andrew would argue that learning about finance is a more useful life skill than driving in the long run and it is crazy that nearly everyone learns how to drive but hardly anyone learns anything about money. Real financial literacy should be taught at school.
We fervently hope that Plain English Finance will give you everything you need to make a truly life changing difference to your financial affairs in the shortest time possible…
Feel free to contact Andrew directly via the contact page or: andrew.craig [at] plainenglishfinance.com with any questions or issues.