Investing in Costa Rica – Wall Street Offshore

Although WeLoveCostaRica.com is my baby and I L-O-V-E Costa Rica with a passion – as a free site, it doesn’t pay too many bills so for many years I had a real ‘job’ as a Wall Street trained, international wealth management professional.

My career on Wall Street started long before we all realized how much money Wall Street was stealing from Main Street…

In 1987 while working in New York as a genuine ‘yuppy’ stockbroker at Drexel Burnham my Branch Manager, Stephen Schwartz once told me:

“Doc!” (He didn’t have a good memory for names)

“You know that nice guys finish last, right?”

You see I was always one of the top stockbrokers but was never ‘the’ top stockbroker for commissions because I could never do what they did to generate the really outrageous monthly commissions. After all, big commissions meant that the firm and the broker were making money but, it had nothing to do with the fact that our clients were making money… They rarely did!

If you had sat in my seat in downtown Manhattan, one day you would have heard a stockbroker trying to pitch his latest stock idea to someone lying in a hospital bed recovering after major heart surgery… I kid you not!

You would have heard a ‘Senior Vice President’ (a title that normally refers to someone who generates a million dollars per year in commissions for him and his firm) hard selling yet another high-risk, options trading idea to his client who had already lost so much money he couldn’t meet payroll, but the SVP was pleading; “We still have some buying power on margin and this baby could move, literally any day now.”

So the manager thought that with my inquisitive mind, my talent and the fact that when we started I was making a minimum of 500 telephone calls per day, that I should have been grossing more in commissions…

But I could only have done that by trading more than was necessary, asking for bigger and completely inappropriate orders or, as was possible in those days, selling the OTC (Over The Counter) stock ideas that had big spreads. However, I was not going to sacrifice my integrity then, now or never.

I would rather be honest and poor!

From that day, I tried hard to prove to him and to myself that he was wrong and, here’s why the majority of my high-net worth investment clients have been delighted they hired me and, why you won’t find any anti-depressants or a single sleeping pill in my home.

Never being satisfied with just ‘pitching’ an idea, I had to study it in depth so that after a short while I wrote the best ‘pitches’ because I knew the investment idea inside out. More often than not, I knew the story better than the analyst who supposedly covered the company.

Everyone would ask me what I was working and beg for my ‘pitch’ but since I knew the idea better than anyone and believed in it passionately, I was naturally more confident and persuasive and sold hundreds of millions of dollar’s worth of investments to individual investors over the past 20 years!

But no more…

After leaving New York City and moving “offshore” to Grand Cayman in 1996 I specialized in showing my non-US clients how to invest offshore safely, privately and profitably in some of the world’s best offshore mutual funds and top ranking hedge funds.

Many of these proven strategies were later outlined in my first book ‘Costa Rica Guide To Making Money Offshore In Bull And Bear Markets.’

Now I was not right all the time, but thankfully we were right a lot more than we were wrong and when you combine that with sensible and highly disciplined risk management strategies, my client’s portfolios have done well…

As of 2012 I must confess to being totally disgusted with Wall Street’s shenanigans and obscene bonuses and after more than 20 years I cancelled my subscription to the Wall Street Journal, dozens of other financial news services and no longer work as an investment advisor in any capacity.

But my work today is similar except now I will focus all my time on finding high probability, low risk Costa Rica real estate investment opportunities for you – our VIP Members – and you’ll only ever find recommend Realtors on this site who are qualified, experienced, trustworthy, reference-checked and personally recommended.

For me it is end of an era, the beginning of a new one and it feels good.

Written by Scott Oliver, author of 1. Costa Rica Real Estate Scams & How To Avoid Them, 2. How To Buy Costa Rica Real Estate Without Losing Your Camisa, 3. Costa Rica’s Guide To Making Money Offshore and the Director/Producer of the Costa Rica Living & Retirement – Secrets To Happiness DVDs.

Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.