Crow Knows is a website about personal investment. Its main purpose is to improve the investment performance of the author by setting out his investment rules and observations in public in the hope that he is obliged to stick to the former and can benefit from the logical implications of the latter. If this website has a philosophy it is that everyone should take responsibility for their own money. If you spend 50 hours a week getting out and earning the stuff, treat it with respect when you get home.
About Crow
Crow worked in the City from 1983 under the alias “Jonathan Crozier”. As referring to yourself in the third person is an early sign of madness, I will summarise my career as follows. My sideways glance took in many interesting events. I watched “big bang” from the floor of the London stock exchange where I began life as a jobber or market maker.
Skipping on, I was one of the people who made it into the office on the day of the “hurricane”, 16th October 1987. It was the worst storm to hit England for 284 years so the handful of us in the office ignored the weak markets and talked all day of falling trees. As it turned out, that day was the last chance to sell before Black Monday when Wall St fell by 22%. Then we pointed out amazing falling share prices in just the same way that we had with the trees. People lost BMWs as a result of both.
Just over two years later, I was in Berlin the day that the Wall started to come down. I was quite oblivious but enjoyed reading about in the papers the next day. Forward to 16 September 1992 and I was sitting in a dealing room with bond dealers who had an open line to the Bank of England dealer who was buying sterling against the mark on what turned out to be Black Wednesday. Believe it or not, at 4.30 pm, the Bank dealer packed up and went home for his tea. And that is when the pound crashed.
Opportunistically, I switched to researching technology stocks in order, as it turned out, to have a good seat from which to watch the tech boom and bust (remember Y2K?). Finally, although I can claim no personal role in the financial crisis of 2007and counting, I worked very near a branch of Northern Rock and saw a bank run in action – something that I did not expect to see in my lifetime.
Email crow@crowknows.co.uk. I look forward to hearing from you.