by Tim Staermose
Sovereign Man
One of my favorite things about being a full-time frontier markets investor who actually lives on the ground here in Africa is that it’s like stepping back in time.
I started my investment career more than 25 years ago as an analyst based in South Korea. I speak Korean, so one of my jobs was to monitor the Korean-language news; if there was anything important that could move markets, I would report it immediately to our trading desks in Hong Kong, London, and New York.
This was really before the Internet was in widespread use, and information used to travel a LOT more slowly than it does today.
So something as simple as having access to the basic news on the ground in South Korea gave my firm a distinct advantage.