Robert Karas | Working for a Family Owned 100-Year Old European Financial Institution

My guest today is Robert Karas. He is a partner and a chief investment officer at Bank Gutmann in Vienna Austria. He is a fellow Guy Spier’s ValueX attendee. He calls himself an investor on a lifelong journey. I’m a big fan of his newsletter, which you can find on LinkedIn, the link is in the notes. Robert has a way of presenting familiar ideas in a new fresh, and thoughtful way. I think that any seasoned and new investor would benefit from reading them. I highly recommend checking out his earlier posts, especially the ones written in midst of last crisis, the global COVID pandemic.

Today, we talk about Robert’s childhood, and upbringing, his investing journey. He shared with me his experience working at 100-year old institution, and how that influences the type of clients he works with, and the type of investment philosophy that his firm pursues. We discuss the benefits of writing, and how writing can make us better investors. Robert likes to call himself an outsider, and he explains why that helps in his work.

I especially like how he refers to the life of an investor as being monk like. He shares how an investment team resembles monks and nuns in a monastery. Stay tuned until the end to find out why Robert believes that it doesn’t pay to get completely out of the market at any point in time, no matter what’s happening.

I greatly enjoyed our conversation, I hope to continue to learn from Robert, and follow his writing.

After we stopped recording, I shared with Robert that Vienna was the first Western European city I saw as a kid. Poland, where I grew up, was just ending its failed experiment with a centrally planned Soviet-style economy. I have vivid memories of Vienna as being colorful, and alive compared to my early childhood Poland, which was gray, but about to dramatically change as the Cold War came to an end, and the Iron Curtain just fell.

Without further ado, please help me welcome Robert Karas from Bank Gutmann in Vienna, Austria.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertkaras/

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