Fighting Financials is a regulated investment research platform focused on public investment opportunities in the financial services (financials or “FIG”) sector. Our objective is to provide high-conviction, independent investment ideas across the capital structure, with a core focus on financial services and real estate issuers. I founded the firm in 2023, following almost a decade working on both the buy-side and sell-side across public equities, high yield, private credit and distressed.

After a career working in large investment banks and asset managers, I was dissatisfied with the quality of investment research in general, and financials investment research in particular:

Whilst traditional sell-side research offered detailed insights into banks, insurers and diversified financials, such research was often non-actionable (cf. the pervasive "Hold" rating), whilst analysts themselves were often siloed, both in terms of asset class (e.g. equity or credit only) and coverage universe (the same analyst might cover the same 10 stocks for their entire career).
On the trading floor, meanwhile, desk analysts were often more incentivised to "make markets", prioritising returns to the bank's balance sheet rather than generating great ideas for clients.
Finally, across both published research and trading floor analysts, investment recommendations typically lacked genuine independence from the sell-side institutions' corporate finance and brokerage operations.
For these reasons, I decided to launch Fighting Financials.

Fighting Financials exists to address a gap in the market for financials research, a market that is - all too often - biased, low-conviction, and siloed.

Based on ten years of investing in financials credit and equity, across distressed and performing, public and private, Fighting Financials seeks to bring differentiated, actionable investment ideas to the professional financial services investor.

With a permanent, live book of 20 actionable publicly traded investment recommendations at any given time, the platform seeks to better equip investors to generate alpha in a sector characterised by complex fundamentals and evolving macroeconomic and regulatory contexts.

Ultimately, our mission is to be the partner of choice for the professional financial services and real estate investor.

As we continue to grow, we look forward to you joining us on this exciting journey.