There are a lot of wrong ways to introduce yourselves. There is the salesy strategy of overshooting one’s achievements to impress the audience (very popular indeed on LinkedIn). One can present herself as the contrarian who is always right, but never listed (à la Cassandra). Or else, one could try to be funny at all costs to play the cool-kid card (which often results in looking quite lame instead). But the killer, especially for a 2025 newsletter, would be to be boring. 

Allow us to clarify: there is nothing wrong with boring per se as we would actually further elaborate in this newsletter. The main issue is trying to be accurate and informative for as many people as possible in the Tik Tok era where readers want pure and distilled information in fifteen seconds. It looks like an impossible task to achieve when you want to talk about personal finance and in-depth analysis of companies, but if there is a way to achieve that is by relying on someone with enough experience to be able to digest and synthesize information. This is why we believe Yet Another Investing Newsletter is a very much needed project, especially outside of the United States in countries like Italy or Japan: we are both coming from top roles in the investment management world and we now want to share what we have learned in the last decades. 

Antonio

At my wedding my best man delivered a very nice speech saying basically that despite it may be hard to define (and confine) what I do, for him I will always be a theatre director. Deep inside I know he’s right. 

Without annoying most of you (nor spoilering the content of a future autobiography) in my early twenties I was committed to become an academic, spanning my research interests across econometrics, behavioral economics, and macro economics. I have been a teaching and research assistant at Bocconi University, but at the same time, Lorenzo was right, I was actually leading a theatre group named Hypocrites, performing across Italy shows like V for Vendetta or Sleuth. Eventually I had to choose between the two careers and fearing a life of struggles I opted for the former, deciding to pursue a PhD in Economics at the University of Zurich. 

One of my problems with social media is that they foster a culture of narcissistic expectations, based on people showcasing only their success. As a former economist I profoundly understand survivor bias and so I deeply believe instead that one should be as proud of their failure as of their achievements and so with no shame I confess that I failed out my first year of PhD. People close to me know that to be fair, that was not entirely my fault, but facts don’t change: I had to look for a job in the real world, and after growing up as sort of a wonder kid (I started teaching in Bocconi at 21) that was a big hit as I was feeling a failure. 

For some reasons, I was always skeptical about finance, maybe just because my peers doing finance were often the people I would have not hung out with. Hence, considering my skills, it was natural for me to start looking for a job in tech. In fact, as a kid, I have always been passionate about technology, being the son of a computer scientist and being exposed to MS Dos at the age of 5. Quick anecdote: my father set up a timer to automatically disconnect my computer from the internet at 10pm sharp when I was 15 or so. However all my friends were still chatting on MSN Messenger at the time and being the first one to disconnect was causing me embarrassment: so I had to find a way to hack it.

After consulting with my mentor, we agreed that I would find more interesting working in the startup space rather than in big corporations and that I should focus more on promising startups than having prejudice for one industry or the other. Therefore, I applied and became fascinated with Amagis Capital, a group funded by exceptional leaders (Simone Russo, Guido Miani, and Andrea Angelone) who were looking for a quantitative guy to oversee risk management & compliance department as well as coordinating the Maltese operations. Okay, it was in finance, the exact place I swore I would have never worked in, but I fell in love with the team and the project. 

Amagis was relatively small when I started, with less than $20 million of assets under management (compared to the trillions of the big ones, such as Blackrock to name one). However, thanks to the amazing push given by Simone as CEO in just a few years Amagis became a leader in Malta for structuring, risk management, and compliance services, overseeing now over $2.5 billion of assets, across different asset classes. It was intense having to learn and build everything from scratch, but flashforward 2025 I’m now a partner of the Amagis Capital group and I lead a subsidiary specialised in democratising cybersecurity. And that, kids, is how I met Attilio…

Attilio

I had just completed my studies in computer science when, one day, on my way home from my first job at a small consulting firm, I ran into a university classmate on the tram. He mentioned a notice on the faculty bulletin board from JP Morgan seeking a recent graduate. Little did I know that my life was about to change dramatically. A few days later, I found myself sitting in their interview room, where I was confronted with the most daunting question: “Do you know what we do?” With complete honesty, I replied: “No, I Don't Know What You Do” And that’s how the most unlikely banker was born. I knew nothing about finance, but I was young, enthusiastic, fearless, eager to explore the world, and, above all, I had nothing to lose. 

Fast forward a few months, JP Morgan relocated me to London where I joined the Credit Hybrids trading team, pioneering structured credit and exotic credit derivatives trading. It was an intriguing new world: who would have thought that people were interested in buying and selling default probabilities of companies or their likelihood of defaulting together?  Business was booming, growing exponentially, and I was growing alongside it. 

The next 15 years flew by: JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch and Mediobanca, London and Tokyo, endless working hours, incredible people, questionable people, exhilarating times and the great financial crisis. At Merrill Lynch, I became Managing Director, running the credit correlation business in Europe and later, at Mediobanca, I led credit trading and helped set up their London operations, focusing on structured credit and illiquid assets. With growing seniority came a new challenge: office politics, something I was neither interested in nor prepared for. The fun was fading, I now had a family and a life outside of work and I wanted something different.

Did I mention Tokyo earlier? Towards the end of my second year at Deutsche Bank, I was asked to move to Japan to help develop the correlation trading business in Asia. At first, I hesitated as it was a big decision, but in the end, I couldn’t resist the allure of new and exotic places. Growing up watching Japanese cartoons, I was thrilled to finally set foot in Japan. After a challenging start, I fell in love with Tokyo: the people, the food, the culture, the smells, the sounds, the trains… everything. When I left, I knew it was simply a temporary goodbye. Back in London, I met my wife who, no coincidence, is Japanese.

Years later I returned to Japan, this time not as a banker but as an investor and entrepreneur. I co-founded KP Holdings, an investment company, diving deep into return on invested capital, cost of capital, and compounding (themes we’ll revisit in future chronicles). Over eight years, we invested in receivables, bonds, equity, real estate, and distressed credit opportunities. Eventually, we sold the company to a Japanese firm.

How about Malta? My children reached the school age and I wanted them to learn English and experience Europe. The outcome of Brexit was still unclear, I had some friends in Malta, checked the schools, checked the weather and the beaches and jumped again. 

What’s Next?

Now we both live in Milan and we decided to launch YAIN as an educational project for all our friends and family who constantly ask us about securities and investments: now having a link to share will make our life much easier! For the first year, at the beginning of each month we will start telling the story of amazing investors, because as Warren Buffett put it, it may be pure chance, but it seems that the superinvestors sharing our principles tend to be more likely to outperform the market in the long-term. During the month, we will publish at least one article a week on Thursdays, which will also be completely free for our subscribers. These articles may be about personal finance, investing, news, or anything we deem worth writing about: it is important to have a plan, but it is even more important to stay relevant and listen what you are finding more valuable, so we will not be rigid and we’ll try to integrate your feedback as we go on.

We also have two premium options, but we need to emphasise once more that these are our only financial incentives. In fact, luckily, we have other income streams unrelated to what we write in the newsletter and we are asking for a small contribution to whoever would like to help us cover our IT costs (domain, SaaS, data subscriptions etc…) and the time dedicated to this project. We will only write about companies in which we have put our money in with which we do not have any affiliation or other financial incentives rather than being happy shareholders ourselves; and as much as we would like to, we are still negligible shareholders so our ownership does not affect the overall valuations of the companies we like.

What do you get as our premium subscriber? To start, our gratitude for the not obvious support. We will publish at least monthly an in-depth company analysis, which after the first chapter will only be available for our premium subscribers. These analyses will describe why we deem a specific company worth investing in, focusing both on fundamental (i.e. from its financial statement) aspects and on qualitative aspects (e.g.  its management, our understanding of its future outlook and prospects etc…). Furthermore, at the end of each month, we will update the list of the companies and bonds we consider worth investing in (the so-called investable universe). Please note that the investable universe is just the list of securities compatible with our investment philosophy, without taking into account neither valuations considerations nor whether we own them at that specific point: we may very well like a company and still believe it is too expensive to purchase at that stage. We will also publish the list of securities purchased in the last month, tracking our performance for you to hold ourselves accountable. We do it at the end of the month for a simple reason: when we say we don’t give financial advice we mean it so we don’t want our readers to blindly copy our transactions or to believe it is the right moment to buy/sell something. However, we want to live by this very principle and we believe that everyone writing, talking, or working with investments should do the same: 

Finally, we would like to create a community of Yainers (more to follow on that) where we can discuss together and where our readers will have the opportunity to speak with us directly as true partners.

Therefore, to recap, you will have three options:

We completely understand that this may be an important amount for a lot of people and as our ultimate goal is to spread knowledge as much as possible, as long as you bring us other subscribers, we will unlock the premium features for you free of charge! As soon as 12 people will subscribe using your referral link you will automatically get the Supporter Plan for 12 months, whilst when you hit 25 referrals you will obtain the Partner Plan for an entire year!