Tariq Dennison – Know the Value of Your Time, Know Your ‘Edge’

Tariq Dennison is a Hong Kong-based manager of US and offshore retirement plans at his own firm, GFM Asset Management. Prior to GFM, he worked in the wealth management divisions of Société Générale in Hong Kong, CIBC in Toronto and London, Bear Stearns and JP Morgan in New York, after a few years in Silicon Valley. Tariq holds a master of financial engineering degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and the history of philosophy from Marquette University, and is a visiting professor of fixed income and alternative investments at ESSEC Business School Asia-Pacific in Singapore. Tariq is an IFPHK Certified Financial Planner and the author of Invest Outside the Box. He is a frequent speaker on RTHK Radio 3’s Money Talk program, HKIBN Cable News’ All About Money program. He has also presented on ETFs, investor education and retirement plans at multiple public conferences. “The number one difference between whether or not someone has a million-dollar retirement account is whether they put money in the account early on, not whether they invested in stocks, or bonds, or international, or value, or growth. It was whether they simply had the discipline to save regularly and not do stupid things. And the second thing is just making sure that we have the proper tax structuring and we take care of accounts in the right way. There are enormous differences between having something in a taxable account and a tax-free account, being able to touch it and not being able to touch it.”  Tariq Dennison    Worst investment ever Tariq offers listeners a tale in three parts, spanning the 20-odd years of his entire investment career. But like many investors Andrew speaks with in his podcast, Tariq says the challenging experiences made him the investor he is today. Part 1: Pre-bubble Silicon Valley beckons He started working, investing and made his first real money in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. He was invested heavily in tech stocks of companies he truly thought he knew well as he either worked for them himself, or had friends working with them. He was buying the companies’ stock as he and his friends watched them prepare to go public, they were progressing, he thought he understood their business models and saw the path to success before them. And, like many others in the aftermath of the burst tech bubble, he lost money in those stocks. He points out here though that these would fail to make them his worst investments ever. It was early, the amounts were small and in total he lost less than US$10,000. Part II: Not about what he lost but the gains he walked away from His Silicon Valley forays happened before he learned proper...