For this issue we have the pleasure of interviewing Tristan Waine from Hurdle Rate Unit Trust.
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Hi Tristan, thanks so much for taking the time out to do this interview.
Can you please tell readers about your background, and how you got involved in investing?
I purchased my first stock in 2011 at the age of 14 shortly after starting my first job as a cook at McDonalds. I did not have any material needs for the money at the time so my dad would help me out by using my excess earnings in the stock market on blue chip stocks.
In 2015 I started a commerce degree at a local university here in Australia the year after graduating from high school.
My first choice was Civil Engineering, but I did not have good enough grades in my high school physics course to get in and ended up being accepted into commerce due to my strong mathematics grades.
1 year into this degree I chose to specialise in Accounting and Financial Planning as my brother was studying accounting and I saw that many firms were also so called ‘limited’ authorised representatives meaning they could provide financial advice to self-managed superannuation funds.
In the 3rd year of this degree (2017) I took control of the stocks I had mentioned before and started investing after reading a few books on finance and podcasts on financial independence, borne from my increasing involvement in finance throughout the degree.
On a family trip to Hawaii in 2016 I purchased and read “Buffett: Beyond Value” on the plane flight home before reading both the “Intelligent Investor” and “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” in the following months. At the same time, I had been listening to the “Aussie Firebug” podcast on financial independence.
From 2017 to 2019 my investment was in small amounts of capital, and I had made many amateur mistakes before starting full-time employment in an accounting firm in early 2019 and beginning the ‘Aussie Contrarian’ blog in June 2019 where I had started to write pitches on stocks.
This eventually evolved into ‘Professional Value’ before eventually settling on ‘Hurdle Rate’. Over the past 5 years I have written 188 blog posts.
Why did you create the Hurdle Rate Unit Trust? And whom do you manage funds on behalf of?
Over the course of my accounting career, I had increasingly come to dislike the nature of trading time for money and as evidenced by the sheer number of blogs posts I had been writing I was certain investing is where my passion lies.
During my career I had worked my way up the ranks from undergraduate accountant, to Junior, to Intermediate, to Senior, and eventually assistant manager before deciding to call it quits on working for others. You may have heard of ‘climbing the corporate ladder’.
This is very real and in accounting, the goal is to work as a ‘partner’ in small and medium accounting firms, a role which involves as much managing those below you as it does technical know-how.
I have a naturally introverted and conservative personality and found it extremely draining to work in the management position and saw that the only direction from where I ended was further entrenchment into the management of others, rather than solely technical expertise.
Having built up a reasonably large portfolio at that stage I discovered a realistic pathway I decided to branch out into funds management, supplementing this by also working as a sole proprietor preparing and lodging tax compliance for individuals and small business owners.
The Hurdle Rate Unit Trust was conceived as a small private unit trust and currently has 18 different investors excluding myself. These investors are mostly the rapport I have built up over the past 5 years of blogging and being active on social media.
Importantly, taxation is very punitive for foreigners, so the trust is exclusively taking in Australian tax residents. It is still very small but pleasantly is growing rapidly.
What type of businesses do you like to invest in?
I take the ‘circle of competence’ dogma literally and exclude basically all businesses except for those in the areas of professional and financial services.
I am an open book on everything else and believe value can be found in countless different ways, rather than restricting myself to ‘value’ or ‘growth’.