RG 161 – USA vs China: The Shift in Global Trade, Economics & Power with Andrew Stotz
Nuts and Bolts
Andrew is the president of the CFA society in Thailand and an award winning equity analyst. He is the founder and CEO of A Stotz Investment Research (ASIR) which is a financial service company based in Hong Kong. Prior to this he spent 20 years in global investment banks in the Asia regions, he has also be a university lecturer in finance. He is the co-founder of Coffee Works, a specialist roaster in Thailand since 1995. Andrew made his first dollar when he was 14 years old stacking hay in Ohio where he grew up.
Andrew grew up in a small town called Hudson near Cleveland, everyone in the town looked like him so when he went to work with his uncle in Oakland California he had a cultural shock and absolutely loved it. There was a large Cambodian population in Long Beach and he became fascinated by the culture. He took a gap year after college and went to Thailand where he fell in love with the country, he wondered if he would be able to make a life there so took a teaching job in finance at the university in 1992. In 1993 he took a job in the stock market and has been there for 27 years.
As he left Ohio the industrial zone was in decline and he moved to a country where they were just experiencing the beginning of their industrial boom. When the country was developing people moved from farms to factories and the output increases, this transition takes 10-20 years and then the movement stops. When people start to move there isn’t any infrastructure so when there’s investment at this time it makes a huge impact. The US is trying to push these countries to get their consumers to buy things and increase consumer debt, but Andrew disagrees with this method. He believes you should add value to the contents of the factory, bring in robots and automate to add value. There’s a growth of the middle classes in China and the way they use money and technology has totally changed; there are over 1 billion users on WeChat and when Andrew visits he no longer needs to use physical money because everything is digital.
Top tips
- Most important habit – Have a written plan
- Most influential person – Dr W Edwards Demming – teacher when he was 24
- Most important tool – Andrew designed it to communicate financial updates. It’s a 1 page tool that assess the financial performance of any company relative to it’s global peers – 1 to 10 score card.
- Advice – life is suffering, not a case of chasing high after high, true success comes with understanding that life is suffering
- Contact – andrewstotz.com
- www. myworstinvestmentever.com