About Tom Konrad

Tom Konrad Bio

Tom Konrad’s interest in Economics and markets was first sparked by an inspiring professor, Gary Evans, when he was studying for an undergraduate degree in Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College.  “Snave,” as he was called by the students, has the talent of making even the “dismal science” interesting to engineers and occasional physicist or mathematician who filled his classes.

Dismal science or not, Tom caught the bug, and started watching the financial markets in earnest, mostly by following Richard Russell’s Dow Theory Letters, and reading The Economist magazine cover-to-cover, habits he continued throughout his time in earning a Ph.D. in Mathematics at Purdue University.

After defending his short-and-sweet thesis, he decided that being a math researcher was not for him, and by 1999 was managing his own money (soon joined by that of some close friends and family members.)

Tom’s decade of extensive reading in the field had reinforced his natural skepticism of accepted wisdom, especially when it comes to the financial markets.  When most investors were going wild over dot.com stocks, he was looking for value and high dividends in REITs, taking positions in foreign currency (because of the US’s already gigantic current account deficit), and dabbling in renewable energy companies (this last not because of any great market insight, but because he has always been an environmentalist).

Past performance is no guarantee of future returns, but in 2005 a friend who had heard his negative comments on stocks in 1999 came to him for advice on planning for retirement.  That experience convinced him to start helping people with their money professionally.

In November 2005, he attended the World Oil Forum, seeing it as an opportunity to educate himself about an industry to which he had not paid much attention in the past, interested as he was in the technologies which would one day replace oil, rather than oil itself.   He was treated to two days of extremely well-reasoned arguments that the day when the amount of oil we are able to pump out of the ground will begin to decline is much nearer at hand than most people think.

The economic consequences of this conclusion are that while the price of oil may not keep rising from here, any drops will be temporary and short lived, and the need to increase energy efficiency and transition to renewable energy sources is much more urgent than he had previously thought.

With this new conviction, Tom decided to focus the money management practice on people renewable energy, and unite his passion for environmentalism with his passion for deciphering the financial markets.