Dave’s Fave Advice : Get into a good story, hold it until it breaks trend lines then take your profit and protect your capital.

Growing up as the son of one of the UK’s biggest industrialists, Dave spent a fair amount of his childhood immersed in business environments – listening to his Dad talk about business, watching him do business and learning how to understand the fundamentals that make a good business. As so many kids do, he went off in a totally different direction as a young adult: heading to university to study archaeology, moving to Spain, finding love and following a girl halfway across the world to end up living in Australia’s harbour city. Here in Sydney, he went into finance, enjoyed spending time with his lovely wife and growing family, dabbling in property and eventually meeting the man who would change his trading life forever.

It was from this man that Dave discovered the power behind trending and momentum, taking this knowledge, building on it and developing what would eventually become the core of the Equity Story system.

After spending several years watching the behind-the-scenes happenings in the finance sector, Dave realised that he had a big problem. The industry he was working in didn’t align with his basic principles of wanting to do the best he could for people rather than driving profits up for brokerage businesses.

He struck out on his own: further refining his trading model and basing it on his experience of learning backgammon from a Master in Spain. Like backgammon, investing is all about probabilities and strategy. If you want to win, you need to put all of the odds in your favour before you put any capital on the line and you need to take action based on your head and not your emotions.

Today, Dave still puts his archaeology skills to the test – studying the history of markets and organisations, digging up the best positive growth trends and uncovering the fundamentals that tell the story of how a stock should perform, regardless of what the sentiment in the market says.

“We’re proud to be 100% independent. We care about people and their results, not about management fees. Equity Story is a story of passion and empowerment.”

Pete’s Top Tip : Use the service to its full potential – and give yourself a chance. Your first investment starts with yourself.

Born in Poland, Peter came to Australia when he was 10 years old and spent his first years Down Under in Adelaide. When he was about 20 he got a taste for investing after he got into a couple of IPOs which did really well, and this gave him a great introduction to the market and its potential, driving his passion for finding out more about how it all worked.

Eventually finding his way to Perth and scoring a job with Asgard, he worked his way up from customer service to pensions to the share department, which re-ignited his interest in investing and introduced him to the concept of analysis, where he found his calling.

It was then that Pete decided to become an analyst. Jumping in the deep end and joining a brokerage firm as a Junior Analyst, he learnt the ropes on the run, moved to another firm and spent 7 years working his way up the ranks and finding his niche writing reports.

Classically trained in music until the age of 18, Peter takes a slightly different view of charts. For him, watching them is like looking at a piece of music: you watch the story play out, follow the highs and the lows and feel the momentum of it. The story will tell you when to get in and when to get out, you just have to listen to it.

But after a time, he started to question who the reports were in the best interest for. He started to notice how dog-eat-dog the industry was, with brokerages getting kick backs for promoting certain companies, and found himself being required to put a good spin on reports that he didn’t fully believe in.

So like Dave, Pete found himself in a position where he had to make a decision. Keep his secure job, doing analysis and writing reports for the firm while battling what was fast becoming a huge conflict of interest for him? Or stay true to his ethics and morals, take the plunge and strike out on his own.

Lucky for Pete, he met someone who wanted him to be true to himself. They moved to Queensland, and Nathalie backed him 100% to invest full time – launching a new phase in Pete’s life and leading to some of the most sleepless nights he’d ever had.

And this is where stories collide: not too long later, Pete came across the newly-launched Equity Story and saw that Dave was looking into the very same stocks that he was investing in and decided to give Equity Story a go. Being the very early days of the launch, Dave was wearing all the hats in the business and called Pete himself to welcome him on board. They got on like a house on fire and Pete was soon back to writing reports – but this time for a company he wholeheartedly believed in from an ethical perspective. Not too long after this, they decided to join forces, combining their truly unique approaches to fundamental and technical analysis and creating the alchemy which turns information into investing gold every day of the week.

(Fun fact: Pete still plays the cello and double bass and composes his own pieces, though we’re yet to hear any of them.)

“My main goal is helping people to trust themselves with investing. We need to empower people, give them good stories and teach them the skills they need to invest for themselves.”