Get to Know Tim
In the corporate world the standard icebreaker is to go around the room and have everybody offer one fun fact about themselves. This is a long way from the corporate world, but the idea underneath the exercise is a sound one: it helps to know your advisor, at least a little, before you decide to trust one with something that matters to you.
My family came to New York from Ireland and Italy. My father sang opera for a living, professionally, for most of his working life. My mother was an occupational therapist in an early childhood intervention program in Brooklyn. A generation before that, my grandmother left school at sixteen to raise her brothers and sisters after her own mother died, with a father who spoke only Italian.
An opera career comes with no salary, no institution behind it and no particular security, and it is negotiated one engagement at a time, very often in another country and in another currency. So I was well traveled early, and I learned to travel well, and without anyone sitting me down to teach it I picked up an early education in contracts, in currencies, in how business actually gets conducted, and above all in how much the relationships matter when the terms are being set. It was also an early education in what it feels like when a family’s income is not a settled thing, which is a different sort of lesson, and not one I have forgotten.
Music has stayed with me, and I believe firmly that having a constant source of creative output has made me a better advisor. Not in some direct way that I could draw a line under, and not because there is anything about music that teaches you markets. What it does is keep a part of my mind working in a different register, and that has allowed me to make connections I might not otherwise have made, and to give advice I might not otherwise have given, which has more than once turned into a good outcome for a client.
The other practice that has shaped the way I work is mindfulness, mostly by way of yoga. Anyone who practices will tell you the same thing, which is that people do not come to yoga because they have some inherent Zen quality about them, or because the practice has made them supernaturally calm and centered and even keeled. Most of us are there precisely because we are none of those things, and the practice is an essential and periodic reprieve from the craziness of the world. What it has given me is the ability to observe my own thoughts at a slight distance, and to be more objective about my own life. That objectivity did not just stay in my personal life. It came to work with me.
One of the most important traits in this business is the ability to keep a cool and calm head about markets when everyone else is losing theirs. I treat that as a core competency of my practice rather than as a feature of my personality, because it is something you build and something you can lose. Where I have had the chance to mentor other people on it, I have. And it is something I keep coming back to, that being able to do it at all depends on being honest about the ways in which you are imperfect. We are all a work in progress, and I have yet to meet the individual or investor for whom that stopped being true.
The markets deserve the same kind of attention. The present will sometimes rhyme with the past, and there are episodes in history that can be fairly boiled down to greed or fear overtaking a large swath of investors. Sometimes those corollaries are genuinely useful. But, as markets and economies move forward, things are essentially new. They are happening for the first time, in a way they have not happened before, against a macroeconomic backdrop that is shifting faster than ever. The anecdotes give you a framework for the situation you find yourself in rather than an answer to it. So, as in yoga and as in life, I try to come to markets with a fresh perspective, through the eyes of a newborn. That is what allows for curiosity, and curiosity is where the most interesting (and concerning) things get uncovered, in markets and in ourselves.
It helps to remember what a market actually is. It is an aggregation of human beings making investment decisions, making markets imperfectly human things. I have found that being well tuned to the human side of investing, at the level of the individual investor and at the level of the market, is what has enabled me to give better guidance than I otherwise could. My intuition about people and markets is not a substitute for the discipline or for the data. It sits alongside them.
Am I clairvoyant? Absolutely not. Have I gotten things wrong? Absolutely, and anyone who tells you they have not is lying to you. But the search for truth in markets and in investing, and the curiosity underneath that search, has a real connection to the rest of life. The more curious I have been about my own life, the more in tune I have been with it, and the more in tune I have been with markets. Those two things have never moved independently of one another for me.
Above all, I am a family man at heart. I met my wife the summer before my sophomore year of college and twenty-five years later we are still inseparable. She and our two girls are my world. Helping to take care of other people through my profession is what has allowed me to take care of and grow my family.
The instinct to look after people was instilled in me long ago. My grandmother gave up school to raise her brothers and sisters. My mother spent a career with small children who needed help early. What was handed down in my family was the work of looking after people. That inheritance became my profession. It is also why the firm’s name, Opima, takes the feminine form in Latin rather than the masculine, in honor of the work done and abundance created by my mother, grandmother, and other women in my life.
I built this firm to do that work for a small number of individuals, families and institutions, and to do it the way I would want it done for my own family. It has been, and it will always be, my life’s work. If that is the kind of relationship you are looking for, I would like to hear from you.
