#Money grabber plus#

You conduct a due diligence investigation, as they call it within the real estate world: you gather as much information as possible. But there are many steps preceding such decision at an organization like APG. “Being a private person, you click on a button and you purchase a share. Good question, how does that investment process go? They ask me, for example, what I am currently doing and how the entire investment process at such large asset manager goes.” Every time my friends and I come together in the evening, we always talk about my work at least once. So, everyone in my inner circle is very interested in what I do. “Well, they believe it's very interesting! I notice that many people started investing privately in the past years. How do people react when you tell them what kind of work you do? And then to come up with smart, quantitative solutions gives me great satisfaction.” What drives me specifically in my work is unravelling that extremely complicated process involved in making an investment decision. I became a vegetarian a couple of years ago for environmental reasons. Sustainability is important to me as well. APG is a leading company within the financial industry in terms of sustainability, for example. When I chose to write my thesis at APG, that wasn't my main motivation but I started to identify more and more with the missions of APG throughout the years.

That is quite different at many other asset managers where you try to earn money for a small number of millionaires. “The fact that we invest for the pension of millions of people. It's still nice not to be called a money-grabber.” I enjoy contributing to that goal, although that wasn't the initial reason for me to choose the pension industry. We do this to make sure the people will be receiving sufficient pension payments. Yes, we are busy making money and we want to realize that by means of investments, but there also is an idea behind the reason.

#Money grabber plus#

And it's a pleasing plus that we serve a public interest. That makes the process better to explain and also more transparent. I also very much enjoy concretely contributing to the process itself, in together making sure that it gets increasingly easier to compare why we invest in hotel A and not in hotel B. I consider the investment process a challenging, interesting puzzle. “Absolutely not, I have definitely made the right choice.” So, I did a two years’ traineeship and have been working in this new job since October.”Īnd, no regrets yet about the choice you made? I enjoyed it here so much that I decided to stay. APG is the largest asset manager in the Netherlands that scale and complexity cannot be found anywhere else. “I never really thought about the pension industry to be honest, but accidently ended up at APG to write my graduation thesis.

Yet, ‘the financial world’ sounds a bit flashier than ‘the pension industry’. I studied mathematics at the university and gradually found out my interest for the financial world.” “If you studied mathematics or econometrics, the label ‘quant’ is easily applied. It also makes it easier to compare those decisions with one and other.” By systemizing the process that way, you make sure everyone has to go through the same steps when making decisions. We are working on a type of decision tree which has the question whether or not to invest at the top and that works its way down to more detailed information on why we should or shouldn't. The answer is always based on substantiated arguments and convictions. “What we do within the real estate team, simply put, is answering the question: Do we want to invest in this? with either Yes or No. The field I am involved in specifically, is systemizing the investment process within the real estate team.” In addition, we try to make sensible statements on what the future will hold. We try to explain the things happening on the stock exchange by means of mathematical relations, and cause and effect. It is a rather broad and vague concept in the investment world but in general, a quant is someone who looks at potential investments in a model-based and mathematical way. I work within the real estate team and participate in managing a real estate portfolio of APG.” “A portfolio manager manages an investment portfolio. What does the work of a quant portfolio manager entail? “People wrongly assume that a quant is a numb machine who is programming all day sitting behind a monitor.” Julian Steenman (26) is quant portfolio manager at APG. Who are those people choosing to work in the pension industry? What is it they do all day for your pension? And do they truly enjoy their work? We take you with us to have a look behind the scenes.