My story - from tennis to Wall Street, from USSR to the West

To the Steemit Community,

I’ve been thinking about the idea of writing and sharing my thoughts with a community (or anyone who’s willing to listen, frankly) for quite a while. Despite that and, my college financial research website aside, I haven’t yet done so in a committed way. Steemit as a platform and as a community finally got me over the line!

My life and, in many ways, personality can be quite easily split into two realms. One is athletics and the other is financial markets, physical and intellectual. To make things a bit more interesting my journey, athletic and professional, took me from Ukraine (technically Soviet Union at the time) where I was originally born to the US where I studied and worked, to Australia where I currently reside. There were some other stops along the way and while fun, they are slightly less relevant.

Playing sports has always been my escape. I started at the age of 5 with swimming, trying out tennis a year later and, as a true European, playing football at any opportunity. Eventually settling on tennis, I gradually got pretty decent winning some tournaments in Europe in my mid-teens and reaching #3 rank in Europe (under 16) before heading to the US on an athletic scholarship. During my career I played with guys like David Goffin, Aljaz Bedene, Peter Gojowczyk, Vasek Pospisil, Jerzy Janowicz, Bernard Tomic, Martin Klizan and a couple of others in the Top 200 on the ATP World Tour. I even beat some of those guys! I also trained with Thomas Berdych and Jiri Novak a couple of times. At the end of the day my tennis career was officially a bust and I had to refocus on other sports to satisfy my desire to push the physical boundaries. Currently, I pursue endurance activities that cause the most pain and are quite solitary in nature. I find that when body is pushed to the limit, it’s the mind that becomes free.

My other passion can be broadly described as financial markets or investments. But it’s much bigger than that. I’m interested in studying how financial markets can help us navigate and take advantage of the system that was designed for the few at the expense of the masses. I’m interested in the behavioural side of finance and how our brain wiring is affecting our decision making. I’m interested in elevating the levels of financial literacy in children and the underprivileged parts of the population. I got into this stuff in the middle of 2008, got burned a bit during the financial crisis but continued to pursue this field as my career. Since then income and wealth inequality around the world have reached record levels, we’ve seen and continue to see a significant rise in populist politics around the world, social fabric of societies has deteriorated and the people no longer display any trust in the established institutions, be it the government or the corporates. Not to mention cryptocurrencies and decentralised applications changing the world! Exciting stuff!

This is the type of stuff I’ll be talking about from Down Under so expect some financial nuggets and an occasional quip about sports (Chris Froome is doping??!! We all knew that of course :)