Our Story
Fedwinteg stands for Financial Education with Integrity.
I am Zaharah Sheriff, a Chartered Accountant who has taught other Chartered Accountants how to invest.
I have worked in the financial services industry for 2 decades, and I got exposed to the world of investing even earlier, at the age of 16 while I was still in college. It was when the BSE Sensex went up 4x and then lost 50% all in a matter of 2 years! Talk of iconic first encounters!
I have set up this website to empower individuals to become savvy investors.
The idea for this business emanated from 3 things.
First was my interactions with friends and acquaintances who, unlike me, are not from the world of investing. Extremely well-accomplished professionals in their own fields who were completely clueless about investing before meeting me. I love what I do and keep talking about investments so now they are better off J.
In fact, even today, I repeatedly come across smart fun people who excel at their profession or craft and I am amazed to discover that most of them don’t really know how to invest! That of course is because nobody actually teaches you how to invest. You are somehow supposed to figure it out just because you have become an adult!
Second was what I discovered when I saw who my friends are getting investment recommendations from. In some cases it was from their equally clueless friends. Most of the time it was their bank’s relationship manager or wealth manager, the family’s insurance agent, their stock broker and so on. The interesting thing is that the primary activity of each of these professionals is sales, not investment advice, and their incentive structures reflect that. The onus therefore is on you, the investor, to figure out whether what you are hearing from these professionals, is genuine investment advice or just a nicely packaged sales pitch. Without some investment education, how on earth are you supposed to figure that out!
Third was my own investment management experience as a research analyst and fund manager with large institutions investing in the stock market. It seemed like a lot of individual investors were repeatedly making the same, extremely costly mistakes of either investing at the wrong time or in the wrong instruments or just trying to make a quick buck based on misguided information. Mistakes that could potentially be avoided by asking some simple questions and understanding a few fundamental investment principles.
It breaks my heart every time I hear about an individual or a family that did all the “right” things…got an education, worked hard, saved and invested regularly and yet when there is some emergency or a big-ticket occasion like a wedding or children’s higher education there just isn’t enough because of some surprise along the way either in their investments or in their career. Atleast some of this can be avoided if you invest well. And you are more likely to do that if you know how to invest. Fedwinteg hopes to help you do just that.
It’s time to Learn to Invest.