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An investment junkie at 13 Daniel Smith meets our regular Investment Commentary contributor David van Shaardenburg. What's his take on current market-impacting events?
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eenagers aren’t usually known for their passion for financial markets: but David van Schaardenburg was an exception. At 13 years of age, he found himself drawn into the world of finance, inspired by “the excitement of markets”. “I’ve always been a numbers’ orientated kind of person,” he explains. “So I think investment naturally appealed to me.” But it was the factors of markets outside of numbers that really got van Schaardenburg’s blood pumping. “You look at the marketplace. It’s not predictable, you’ve got to use your wits. I just found all of that incredibly intellectually interesting.” With such an early interest in markets, 22 | ASSET NOVEMBER 2020
BY DANIEL SMITH
it would seem that a career in investment management was a given. Van Schaardenburg laughs at the suggestion. “I don’t think I was quite as good at having any kind of long-term plan. I finished my accounting degree and worked out within three weeks that accounting was not sufficiently interesting enough for me. Which is funny because I work at an accounting firm now, doing investment management.” That company is Findex Wealth Management in which van Schaardenburg is a senior partner. Findex is one of Australasia’s leading providers of integrated financial advisory and accounting services.
The company’s vision, summed up by van Schaardenburg, is that, “a lot of people know how to earn money, but they struggle with how to turn that into wealth. Findex bridges that gap.” The journey that van Schaardenburg took to reach this position saw him take up varying positions in multiple countries, but each role had a focus on the excitement of markets that had first drawn him into the financial world at 13. A role that set the scene for van Schaardenburg was his time at FundSource Research (formerly IPAC). The role saw him providing fund research to investment clients and advisers. “What attracted me to that group at the time was there were several really smart guys at the company.
