Ben Ford
10 min readOct 8, 2019

Investing Lessons From Sydney’s Coolest Robo-Advisor

Back in the day, before ‘Fintech’ was a buzzword, Chris Brycki pulled up stumps at his investment banking job and decided that there had to be a better & fairer way for average folks to access sensible but clever financial advice and investment options.

And so he created Stockspot, which could reasonably lay claim to being Australia’s first robo-advisor — a financial advice firm that profiles you as a customer and then automatically allocates an appropriate investment portfolio. In doing this and by investing largely in low-cost ETFs (electronically traded funds), less of your investment goes towards management fees and more going into your investment (don’t worry, Chris does a much more eloquent job of explaining it further on in the article).

It’s a disarmingly simple approach and one that echoes the investment strategies of luminaries such as Warren Buffett, Tony Robbins (via his book ‘Money — Master The Game’) and, to a certain extent, our dear old Barefoot Investor here in Australia.

And yet because the beauty lies in the simplicity of the portfolios, it’s an approach that flies in the face of ‘active’ investment management (translation: paid for), the very industry in which Brycki used to ply his trade.

If this wasn’t enough, Stockspot also produces an annual Fat Cat Report that reviews the performance of…

Ben Ford

Fintech — Fitness — Football — Finance — Fine Dining — Fatherhood… not necessarily in that order.