Marc Mayor

The founder of Inside ALPHA is Marc Mayor, a Swiss citizen who speaks (and writes) fluently in English, French and German.

Marc's first investment decision came during an investment game in 1987, prior to the October crash. Figuring that there would be only two possible outcomes, either winning the simulation or not winning it, he decided to invest in one of the riskiest penny stocks in September of '87, hoping of course to see its price go up. Fortunately this was only paper trading, as the tiny company soon went bankrupt.

Since then, Marc has been a student of risk. Aside from stock investments, Marc has tried mutual funds, options, futures, computer-based system trading, day trading, forex trading etc. His main conclusions are:

1. A solid, self-disciplined money management approach will have a larger impact on your results than the investment strategy chosen
2. The markets are inefficient, perhaps more so today than twenty years ago
3. There are much safer, smarter bets to make than hoping for a particular stock to go up; you get paid better, and with less risk, if you bet that the average insiders know their companies better than most individual investors, or if you bet that time will pass (yes, you can get paid really well just betting that time will pass!)
4. Life is too short to remain stuck for hours looking at the markets. Some strategies allow you to double your money every two to three years without ever having to watch the markets. We all have a limited time left to live, so why waste any of it watching some erratic index?

For more than eight years, Marc has written his weekly column "The Insider's Corner" (Le Coin des Insiders) in l'Agefi, the daily Swiss financial and economic newspaper (to access the archives, choose "Les archives du site" from the home page, choose Marc Mayor from the "...écrit par" box on the archives page and click "Recherchez").

In addition, he has been featured in professional finance and banking publications like Banque & Finance (Banking & Finance - the magazine of the Swiss financial industry).

Finally, Marc has also been the Chairman of high-profile investment conferences like the base metals investment conferences in Geneva and Zürich, an energy investing event in Geneva and Zürich as well as a gold investment conference in Geneva and Zürich.