My name is Tomasz Trela,
I am a professional investor, entrepreneur and stock market educator.
I have been managing various investment funds for more than ten years – currently within Luxembourg-based New Horizons Asset Management Sàrl. I am the co-creator of SCRAB, an analytical tool that, with the support of unique algorithms, helps to make better investment decisions. I run the author’s Investment University, which has already benefited almost a thousand participants. I have also written a book: “The Stock Market. The Beginning”, which quickly became a bestseller in Poland. I share my experience for free on my blog Trading For a Living and on my YouTube channel.
The site you are currently on is my personal corner where I write about what interests me, including in the world outside the stock market.
What do I do on a daily basis?
Within my private VC fund I primarily invest passively in over-the-counter growth companies from around the world, but I also use it for more active consulting and educational activities.
With the financial backing of the VC I run, for example, the London-owned consulting company Hudson Hill Associates Ltd. and the education arm of the Dubai-based consulting firm Gulf HUB Research & Economics FZE, where I live most of the year. Both companies provide services to so-called HNWIs (High Net Worth Individuals) and operate on a three-stage formula of ‘Teach, Execute and Oversight’. In the first stage I teach my clients the basics they need to take care of their wealth, in the second stage I help them build a specific investment portfolio, and in the third and longest stage I oversee the development of the portfolio by providing advice and support throughout the decision-making process.
Although the education business is perhaps the most media-savvy side of my professional life, the vast majority of it is devoted to managing funds in international capital markets. Until now, the services of the entities I run have been reserved exclusively for individuals and companies with multimillion-dollar capital, and the barrier to joining funds in Hong Kong or Dubai has been rather high.
We have therefore decided to launch a boutique hedge fund in Luxembourg from 2022, aimed at individual investors with slightly smaller portfolios (minimum investment is €50,000). This fund, unlike the US VC, invests exclusively in the public equity and options markets (mainly in the US and China) and is open to mostly European shareholders.
Do you have any questions or suggestions? Contact me!
As I am getting more and more e-mails which I am finding it increasingly difficult to answer, please first make sure that the answer to your question cannot be easily found using Google search. Only use the form below if the matter concerns me specifically or is of a business nature.
Your message will first go to my colleague, who will try to reply as soon as possible, or help you to contact me directly – if the situation requires it.
My history?
When I came to Warsaw to study twenty years ago, my wealth was 700 zloty. That was all my parents were able to send me every month. I ended up with this fortune in Prague’s Szmulki district, because where else could you survive on such an amount?
I studied journalism and it kind of took me out on a limb, opened up new perspectives. At the time, I thought I would travel the world and write about the world. The plan was good, except that after paying for lodging and food, I had one zloty twenty left in my pocket. Just enough for a ZTM ticket to get to the Bemowo loop and back.
And this is where I realised that.
However, money is important in people's lives
I finished my studies, joined the editorial staff of Rzeczpospolita for a short time, Przekrój for a little longer and, for quite a long time, Treasury companies, from which, in the following years, I tried to leave four times and four times I got such a raise that I stayed each time. Screw ambition.
Eventually, however, I felt the long-awaited sting of pride, after which two things occurred to me: that money can do anything and that I would go no higher in my job. So I started looking for a way to make money that was more scalable than working for someone forty hours, five days a week.
Also, I was fed up with superiors, fed up with being responsible for things I had no control over, fed up with projects I didn’t believe in and fed up with feeling like I was working for someone rather than myself.
So where did I direct my next steps? To the stock market, of course.
Well, let’s think for a moment – what other place is liberal and democratic enough to admit literally anyone? Even without experience, without connections, without a proper CV and…. no money?
Lack of money may indeed seem like a problem. However, I decided that I did not need it at all at this stage. My goal was not to make a fortune, but to understand the mechanisms of the stock market. I had the confidence that if I was good at what I did, the money would find me.
So I spent several years learning, reading, testing, checking, gaining knowledge and experience, making mistakes, correcting those mistakes, learning again, reading even more and understanding more and more what this whole stock market is all about.
Eventually, I gained confidence, quit my full-time job and set up my own consulting business, where I taught others what I had learnt myself in the meantime about the stock market, business and investing.
All the time, however, the problem was to accumulate any major wealth that I could manage. I wasn’t born rich, so I didn’t have any rich friends or circles.
At some point enlightenment came – after all, the world doesn’t end in Poland. So I set off with my business where I believed the real money was to be found.
That’s how my first consultancy company in Dubai was set up, where I helped carry out tax optimisation for European companies. Not a very sexy business, but it allowed me to reach out to people with money. After that, things moved at lightning speed.
I set up a second company in London. I created a closed-end fund in Hong Kong. I launched venture capital in the US and finally launched a hedge fund in Luxembourg.
And then came the crisis, such a personal one
Over the years, working on my own assets and helping others build those assets, I got to around the age of forty, where I began to realise that it all mattered less and less to me.
To be clear – I don’t mean to say that flying business class and sleeping in Shangri-La has suddenly lost its charm, and that I myself have decided to get rid of all my watches and live in an Indian ashram.
It’s not like that. I continue to enjoy the comfortable life, the sense of comfort and security that money provides. I continue to enjoy working with people and helping them build their own success stories. I continue to enjoy running businesses and finding the best investment opportunities. I continue to enjoy teaching, writing, recording and creating something from nothing.
It’s just that I’ve started to see less and less of a role for hard academic knowledge and rigid rules, and more and more of a role for relativism, psychology, human relationships, the ability to adapt to changing environments and using the power of one’s mind to make optimal decisions. Not only from a business point of view, but above all from the point of view of one’s own sense of happiness and well-being.
Because that’s probably the ultimate unique goal we’re all aiming for – we want to feel good and be happy, however cliché that may sound. Money is just one piece of the whole puzzle. The older I get, the more attention I start to pay to the other parts of it.
And it is this path, the path to the search for the other pieces of not only the business, but also the life puzzle, that I would like to share in future articles on my website and YouTube podcast.
