Meet Alex. Alex is an institutional sales person by trade and is also the Global Development Director for 100 Women in Finance.
-
The following is a transcript that has been created using AI technology. Please forgive any grammatical imperfections it may have.
Camilla Love
Welcome, everyone, back to another episode of Shares Not Shoes, an Insider's guide to careers in Finance. I'm your host, Camilla Love, founder of Future Females in Finance. Shares Not Shoes is a podcast whereby I interview someone of my favourite people, all with one thing in common. They work in finance. We lift a lid on who they are. How they came into a career in finance. And arm you with some knowledge about why a career in finance could be a good fit for you. I will promise that all my guests will share some amazing personal stories, will be open and honest. And will inspire you. So let's go. So today, I'm so super excited to introduce you to Alexandra McGuigan. Now, Alex has a fabulous career in finance and is now heading as one of the front people for 100 women in finance. And I have known Alex for at least, I'm thinking eight years. Right. I remember the first time we met, we've got introduced over the email. And I think the two of us have very good mindset about let's put things in the diary and let's get things done. And we're very efficient type people. And I think both of you and I just knew straight away we would be good mates. And I'm Super excited to tell all our listeners about your journey. So, Alex, welcome to Shares Not Shoes.
Alex McGuigan
Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. And I love the name of Shares Not Shoes. But I do actually think that a career in finance, you can have both Shares and Shoes.
Camilla Love
Shares and Shoes. It's true. It's true. Because as I always say, I do like a good pair of shoes, but I'm only buying those shoes of the profit I have in my shares. So I invest first and then take my shoes later. Although it's really hard to get back into those high heels after covet and being in, my dear.
Alex McGuigan
It is. Yeah. I carry my handbag, actually, mostly.
Camilla Love
Yeah. And I think all women in finance do that because they're all tower walking between meetings and then all of a sudden you whip out your shoes. Totally. Yeah. So your finance career will give you good shoes when they Alex.
Alex McGuigan
Absolutely.
Camilla Love
Indeed. So, Alex, thanks for saying yes, for coming along. And maybe you can give our listeners a bit of an introduction on who you are and a little bit of your background on what you do right now.
Alex McGuigan
Sure. So I am an institutional salesperson by trade, if you will. I have had about 15 years experience in the industry doing that. Raised around two and a half billion dollars in the Australian market, across asset classes and strategies, and have definitely. What do they say pounded the pavement?
Camilla Love
You warn those shoe leathers out. I broken that many heels.
Alex McGuigan
Broken that many heels. Absolutely. So dumb. Surround me with anybody and everybody who would take a meeting with me ended up raising lots of money. And then I moved to Singapore with my husband in 2018 and we had a small baby at the time and I set up my own company in Singapore and I've been consulting since then. So my company in Singapore is called Am Access Capital, and I currently am the global development director for 100 Women In Finance. And what I'm doing for them is institutionalising their capital raising process. So we can essentially fund the demographic change in the industry from the companies that work in the industry. So I work, I talk to investment banks, asset managers, fund managers, insurance companies, brokerage firms, you name it, I speak to them and I ask them for money. They do.
Camilla Love
And can I say, there is nothing wrong with asking people for money and a lot of people out there really find it quite uncomfortable, but I dare say, with a bit of practise, it actually becomes easier, right?
Alex McGuigan
Very easy. In fact, don't ask. You don't get as well ask.
Camilla Love
I live by that mantra totally on anything. Right.
Alex McGuigan
And then you still don't have what you wanted anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
Camilla Love
And what's wrong with no? And I always take a no as a maybe and never as a no by you.
Alex McGuigan
Absolutely. They can always change their mind.
Camilla Love
Yeah, indeed. 100 Women and F Three actually have very sort of similar outcomes and goals, but we're doing it for different ways. So talk to me a little bit about what 100 Women are doing globally.
Alex McGuigan
Okay, so 100 Women In Finance is the largest organisation for the empowerment of women in financial services in the world. We have 28 locations around the world, something like 20,000 registered members, 500 volunteers who really execute. And it's kind of different what we offer our members. So we offer our membership base. What we offer them is probably something similar to maybe like Women in super, where we do bigger events and have keynote speakers, etc. E. And then we have sort of smaller events broken down by the experience level. And then our third pillar is impact. And so with the impact pillar, what we are trying to do is change the demographics of the industry. So for that, we have in our locations that are more senior, if you will, have probably 500 plus members. We host galas and there's a committee that puts on the gala and they put together. It's a fundraising event, really, for the industry. And so all of that money that we raise and we've raised $55 million in the last 20 years. All of that money goes towards investing in the next generation. And what does that mean? We have a grant giving programme.
Alex McGuigan
Because of our global reach, we don't think that we can do everything ourselves and we want to support smaller organisations or organisations that might be geographically specific, like S Three, for example, in the Australian market. And we give funding to those organisations. So they can go out and continue on achieving our vision, which is to have 30% representation of women in senior investment roles and executive leadership positions by 2040. So recipients of that grant, those grants would be currently matched for girls in the UK. And there's one in New York called Girls Who Invest. And then we can also do our own initiatives. And our initiative is because we almost have a bird's eye view of the industry globally. Our initiatives would always be industry facing and bridge the gap between organisations that are looking for students and helping those female students to understand what a career in finance might look like. The different job types, the different companies they might be able to work for, the different countries they might be able to work in, and then helping those students to actually meet those companies and people who work in those companies. So it becomes a real option for them to consider a career in finance.
Camilla Love
Indeed, there's a couple of pretty lofty goals in there. Are there areas globally where finances are doing really well on the gender gap and then areas where they aren't?
Alex McGuigan
Yes. So the most underrepresented area are women in investment roles and the very senior executive leadership, we call it executive committee, because sometimes the numbers at that very top level can be swayed by women who are working in traditionally female roles and companies can say, oh, well, we've got two women at the top, but they might be the person, the head of HR, global head of HR, or global head of marketing. Right. Because what we want is representation of women across the board. And so we have specifically focused on trying to solve for the most challenging piece of the puzzle, which is getting that investment role, which is currently Bloomberg says it's about 10% of women, our portfolio managers globally, and that number hasn't changed in 20 years. So the reason that we're focusing on this is that historically, actually our fundraising has gone to different philanthropic partners. But in 2019, the board recognised that the demographics hadn't changed. And if they were going to change at all, then there needed to be a concerted effort and we would have to actually invest in making that change. So that's the goal. And it is a lofty goal, but we gave ourselves the time horizon of 20 years because we can work on different initiatives, like grassroots initiatives, getting girls who are still at school, considering careers in finance, helping those who might be, say, studying science or something at University, considering a career in finance.
Alex McGuigan
So actually transferable skills. We're going to work on initiatives to retain women in that mid career section. So make sure that we're working with companies and make sure that they have a plan to help their women during that child rearing period where it is more difficult. Some countries have high representation in that period, obviously, because there is childcare available. So we see high in Asia where I live now, I'm looking for participation rate of women in financial services firms during that period. It doesn't really drop off that much. It does drop off at the more senior level, though. And so we find that there is a multiplier effect, and this sort of comes into unconscious bias as well, or even conscious bias, really. But if you have women or diversity at the top, you end up having a multiplier effect throughout the organisation. And so that woman will then hire women. Will then hire women. Right. So if we can get more women at the top, more women in the middle, and more women coming through the ranks, then maybe we have a chance.
Camilla Love
Yeah. And both you and I have been in the industry for a long time, and F Three is doing a lot in the grassroots, really on the student side, as you know. And I'm just trying to drive the pipeline. And when I looked at it, I just went, okay, how can I facilitate change inside an organisation? I don't think personally I could. So hence why I decided to start F Three for the pipeline. But I'm glad that 100 women are looking at retaining the senior women and promoting senior women as part of that as well. But you did media at Uni, right? So how did you jump from doing media at Uni into finance? What was the trigger point for you?
Alex McGuigan
Actually, I wanted to be an actress and I did a lot of acting training. I used to do a lot of performances with another girl who was a year ahead of me at school, and she got into Nida and we used to win all of these performances, et cetera. So when she got into Nida, I just assumed that I would get into Nida. Unfortunately, I didn't get into Nida. Well, maybe it was, fortunately, I don't know.
Camilla Love
Very fortunately. Otherwise we wouldn't know each other, right?
Alex McGuigan
Yeah. Unless I was an amazing famous celebrity.
Camilla Love
Which is a chance it could be on the rich list and beyond every Marvel episode that's out there unlikely.
Alex McGuigan
Because the chances of that are very slim. I quickly realised that I didn't want to be poor, actually, I had other skills and so I actually did media communications because I was just buying my time until I got into Nida. And then I realised that I had other skills and I should just probably focus on my studies for a little while. And I ended up working. I did an exchange overseas, I came back and I ended up working in the wine industry because my family makes wine, which was super fun. I used to go to all these parties and sponsor fancy parties.
Camilla Love
Yeah, I should have been wine.
Alex McGuigan
It was really fun, but it was also a little meaningless. And so after my travel and studying at Cornell, I was like, I really kind of had the travel bug, and I wanted to go overseas again, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do in my career. And I also kind of didn't want to waste that time just sort of sapping about. So I made a plan, and I decided five things that I wanted to achieve in the next five years. And I wanted to complete a postgraduate degree. I wanted to live in another country. I wanted to learn another language. I wanted to buy a property, and I wanted to have a share portfolio. And I went down. I told my dad, and he laughed at me. And I was like, Whatever. I could figure out a way to do this.
Camilla Love
The whole purpose is you proving up your point to your dad.
Alex McGuigan
Is it always the goal? That's always the goal of everything. So I decided to do an MBA. And I figured out that if I did an MBA at a University that didn't exchange to another country, then I could tick off two of those boxes. And if that other country didn't speak English, then I could take off three of those boxes. So I did that. And then I wanted to buy a property before I left. And so I figured I was going to need money. And where do people make money in finance? So I changed up my CV to suit whatever job. The only job that I was qualified to do in financial services, and that was to be an executive assistant. So I got lucky. And I interviewed with an amazing man who became my mentor and took me under his wing. And he was the managing director of Being by Mellon Asset Management. And he said to me he was an American guy. And he saw that I studied at Cornell, which is an American, I believe, University. And he said, look, you're overqualified for this job. But if you do it and you do it really well, for two years, I'll teach you how to run a business.
Alex McGuigan
And I was like, that's a pretty good deal.
Camilla Love
I'll take you on that.
Alex McGuigan
Yeah. And so I ended up getting to shadows this managing director. And literally I learned everything. I learned how to write emails, I learned how to present myself, I learned how to put a roadshow together, I learned how to manage my time. And all of those skills that I learned in that role I still do use every day for sure.
Camilla Love
And do you still keep in touch with him?
Alex McGuigan
I do.
Camilla Love
Great.
Alex McGuigan
And he's based in the States now, not as much as we did in the past, but there's only been a few people that have been as impactful on my life as him. And so after that, he was just flying around the world, winning mandates for $150,000,000. I was just like, this is cool.
Camilla Love
I want to be like you.
Alex McGuigan
Exactly. And then after that, that's just what I set my mind on. And I was like, I want to do that. And so I ended up studying. I did go to France and I did the exchange, but I actually had to major in international business, but I studied all finance subjects and really was coming from very far behind, but I worked my butt off and here I am.
Camilla Love
Do you find purpose in the financial services industry? Like, it sounded like you've definitely found that here.
Alex McGuigan
Absolutely. Well, I think that is finance is really interesting, but the subject matter is challenging. Right. So the people are generally quite intelligent and intelligent people have interests other than just finance. So I find the conversations that I have with people in financial services to be interesting. The subject matter is always changing, and I'm a lifelong learner, an advocate of that. So I like the fact that it's always changing, but really, in order to make change in the world, change goes where money flows. Right? And so if you actually want to make a difference in climate change or anything like that.
Camilla Love
That'S a great example.
Alex McGuigan
In financial services, you actually have the ability to make change. And I mean, it's all good, don't get me wrong. Marching and joining in protests and all of that kind of stuff. That's all good stuff. But if you really want to make change, you got to get money to go to the problem.
Camilla Love
Yes. And divert capital away to actually really make the change that it needs to see. I absolutely agree.
Alex McGuigan
Absolutely.
Camilla Love
So then talk to me a little bit how you were like, did you love sales? Did you love your roles? What was your favourite asset class that you sold? Can you give me a bit of an insight then?
Alex McGuigan
Yeah, sure. So what I really like to do is start with a problem so I can talk about Gan when I first started at Shed Enterprises. So Gan is a huge global asset manager and we were representing them. They had performance in a fixed income strategy of 10% per annum. They had a tracking record of like ten years. They were coming out to Australia for six years and they just couldn't raise money. So I was like, all right, I need to do a bit of an analysis on what is going on here. So I went out to the market. I spoke to different people. I found that the fee was just too high for the Australian market and they were raising capital all around the world. So they were like, pulling up and negotiate on fees. But that's a mistake, because if you're trying to enter a different market, you need to understand what the constraints and the requirements are of that market to be able to sell the farm. So that was the first thing then. The second thing was you're going to laugh. This is how old I am. But at the time, interest rates were like.
Camilla Love
More than zero.
Alex McGuigan
Yeah, exactly. They were getting 10%, people go, all right, well, you're getting annualised 10%, so you say. But things can change, right? So that's an okay 10%. Then you're going to charge me 1% fee. So I get to 9%, I can get a guaranteed 7.5%. So I think that I'm going to go with that option.
Camilla Love
Yeah. Because the risk is a no brainer on the risk decision too.
Alex McGuigan
Absolutely. It was an absolute return bond strategy. Basically. I put that analysis together and I expressed that to the manager and they were like, oh, thank you. No one had ever told us this before. So figuring out what the problem is first and then working out a plan on how to execute and how to sell. So that strategy then. Okay, so then where does it fit? What bucket does it fit into? Is it an alternative because it's a hedge strategy or is it a fixed income strategy? Probably not fixed income because it's too expensive. So then you work out your target market and from the target market, then you go, all right, who are the asset consultants for each of these people? So it's like a puzzle, really. And so it's kind of cool to be able to figure out the bits and pieces and then you just have to go and drink tonnes of coffee.
Camilla Love
And from a person who doesn't drink coffee at all, me, right. I find that very difficult.
Alex McGuigan
Yeah, it's a lot of coffee. So you have to build relationships, people have to trust you. I always like to think about it. First it's they buy me, then they buy the business and then they buy the product. If they don't want to deal with me, then there's no chance that they're going to buy the product.
Camilla Love
That's really critical because we talk about a bit in shares, not shoes, that it really is a relationship industry. So talk about how you go about building relationships that are based on trust and authenticity.
Alex McGuigan
I think you just have to go and have coffee with people and just talk about things that aren't related to the product, like don't try and sell all the time. It will come to the end of the conversation. And they'll say, all right, well, show me what you got. I'll see if I'm interested. And I love the institutional space because, look, there's a professional approach to it and I can have a personal relationship with someone and go and try and talk to them about a specific product. But if they're not interested, they can be like, Look, I really like you, Alex, but this is just not going to fly with us.
Camilla Love
Not for now.
Alex McGuigan
Not for now. Coming soon when you've got something different. So you can have those. It's less opaque, I think, and you can have those open and honest conversations, you can get feedback and you really just have to pound the pavement. Now, it's a little bit different with Zoom, but it's also more efficient. Sometimes you can never forgo or underestimate the impact of being in person. However, having an hour coffee and then tracing to the other end of the city to have an hour coffee takes a long time. Wears out a lot of shoes as we go.
Camilla Love
The high possibility of breaking a heel. I've done that a few times.
Alex McGuigan
Me too. But on Zoo at the moment now I deal a lot with the US. So I'm based in Singapore, so I deal with the US. The twelve hour time difference. So every day I pretty much only have work from 08:00 P.m. To 10:00 P.m. At night with the US. And I probably have four pitches a night for half an hour.
Camilla Love
Yeah, right.
Alex McGuigan
Which is a lot of energy, but I can get through a lot. I must have had 220 meetings with global institutions in the last seven months or something. That's a lot of meetings.
Camilla Love
That is a lot of meetings.
Alex McGuigan
Gosh.
Camilla Love
The efficiency is definitely there. You can see that already.
Alex McGuigan
Yeah. And so depending on what the product is and how complex it is, I'm selling sponsorships to a nonprofit, which is pretty easy to get your head around. Whereas if you're selling a derivative strategy or a quantitative strategy, it's going to take a lot of meetings. Right. And institutional sales process, I always tell people, is minimum twelve months from the first meeting, two years, and then two years, probably by the time the money comes in, it's probably six months from the time they tell you that you're going to get the money.
Camilla Love
Actually, by the time you do all the legals definitely in the negotiation part on fees. Oh, my gosh, it can take a while.
Alex McGuigan
It can take a while. But when you get $150,000,000 mandate or my biggest one ever was $350,000,000, that's pretty exciting.
Camilla Love
On that day, totally go out and buy a pair of new shoes just on a pattern.
Alex McGuigan
Yeah, absolutely.
Camilla Love
So you mentioned your quest and your sort of mantra of lifelong learning. And I know you've done extra stuff and your postgrad stuff. Tell me a little bit about that and why you did it.
Alex McGuigan
So, Kai, I did because most Shared enterprises was it's a third party marketing firm. And what that means is that we represented international fund managers in the Australian market and Shared Enterprises is a specialist in alternative investments. And alternative investments are typically basically they have more bells and whistles and levers and bits and pieces more complex, much more complex. I did that and then I moved on to Tribeca and I was head of investor relations at Tribeca. And again, they had a macro strategy. They had a long short equity strategy and a regular small cap strategy, but they were complex strategies. And I really felt that to have the credibility to go and speak to a CIO about the macro strategy or the long short equity strategy, which was what we call quantum, which is part quantitative. Sorry. And part fundamental. I really needed to have the vocabulary and the skills and the understanding to be credible. And so I did the hire and it was the most useful study immediately, useful study I've ever done to exactly what I was doing. And no study is wasted, don't get me wrong. But for what I was doing, the comprehension rate just increased substantially.
Camilla Love
And that is a focus on alternatives. Correct?
Alex McGuigan
Correct. So it's like the CFA, but it's for alternatives.
Camilla Love
Yeah. Okay. Obviously that applied directly to the people you're talking to and the products that you're with. And I bring this up because there are alternatives out there that might not necessarily be apparent when people are just looking for extra learning in this space.
Alex McGuigan
Absolutely. And so the other thing that I'm doing now is I've just signed up to Wharton online. So Wharton is the top finance University in the world. The top finance University in the world. Obviously, I don't have the capacity to go and do a course there in person at the moment, but I've signed up for a certificate in asset allocation and portfolio construction, which I'm continuing to do. So there are lots of different ways that you can upskill yourself. And if you want to transition or you need to move from media communications into finance, lots of different ways you could do it.
Camilla Love
Yeah.
Alex McGuigan
Good.
Camilla Love
So tell me, I always like to have real life stories as part of this and tell me, like, I'm really interesting or highlight of your career so far.
Alex McGuigan
Really interesting highlight of my career. Well, I guess that was the first mandate I won. Right. So I did this analysis and I don't actually think anyone ever thought that I was going to raise money, so that was pretty cool.
Camilla Love
Why not? Well, I don't know.
Alex McGuigan
Because with the third party marketer, you're kind of a gun for hire, almost. Sure. So it's not the same as what you do being invented organisation and understanding what's happening. You're always one step removed. Right. So you're just the sales and marketing, really. And she's had been successful, definitely. But I think that people were expecting that other people would have to come in at the top level and support the sales process through the end. So I worked out this strategy and I was like, all right, so this is how they outperformed. And so I reached out to one of the CIOs and I said, Will you have a meeting with me? And he said, yes, I have a coffee with you. And so he had like a 30 minutes coffee with me. And he said something about the product why he wasn't interested in looking at it. And I said, well, actually, I have to cheque because I'm only new, but I think that that's wrong. I think that actually these are the returns of the product. And so he was like, all right, well, send me stuff, and I'll have a look at it. And so I sent it to him, and he was like, you're right.
Alex McGuigan
Actually, my understanding of this strategy was not correct, and it has outperformed all of its peers. So then I started building a relationship with this CIO and brought the portfolio manager out a number of times. And then he said to me, okay. So I've decided I want to do this, and I'm going to go and tell Jana that I want to do this. And they have to come back to me with a reason why I can't do what I want to do. And I was like, that is the golden ticket. If you can get an institutional investor to instruct an asset consultant to work on your product, then you basically can open the floodgates. And that's kind of what happened. He had the access consultant work on it. They approved the strategy. And I remember I was walking on George Street when he called me, and he said, I just want to let you know I'm going to give you $150,000,000. And I did a happy dance on the street.
Camilla Love
And people are like, who's this crazy lady? What is she doing?
Alex McGuigan
Why is she doing? And then literally. So it took 18 months to get that first call to say they were going to give us that money and another 18 months to raise $1.5 billion.
Camilla Love
Yeah. Wow. And it's funny how it's just the first and then once the first how long it takes to get to the first. And once the first comes in, the flood comes not always.
Alex McGuigan
But if it's a good product and it really helps. And so one of the key points I would like, I think that's a good story to highlight the need for persistence. And a lot of people won't have that persistence, and that tenacity to keep following up. And they can't be annoying. You really have to try not to be annoying, because that shuts off the basis. The way that I did it with him was he said, okay, this is the next thing I'm going to do. Call me in two months. And so I put it in my diary, and I called him in two months. And I said, hey, you told me to reach out in two months. Is now a good time? And he would say, no, I still haven't got to it. Give me another month. And so I cancel it in my diary. And whatever he told me to do, I really try not to test for him. So having that systematic approach to the follow up is significant in the sales process, for sure.
Camilla Love
To me, there's two sort of learnings from that story. And I relate to something that I had a conversation ages ago, maybe 15 years ago, I had with my boss, who said, really? There's only 10% of people like you and I, Alex, where we just get stuff done. The rest of the people will go along on the ride or things happen in its luck or whatever. But it's 10% of people who have that persistency. And the second moral of the story never underestimate to me, Alex McGuigan.
Alex McGuigan
They're underestimate Alex McGuigan. That's exactly right. So I used to be the chair of the emerging leaders and the CEO was leaving. And I remember I had a conversation with them and I said, Please give me some pearls of wisdom before you leave. And this person said to me, Never underestimate the mediocrity of others.
Camilla Love
And that's true.
Alex McGuigan
I've never ever forgotten it. And you know what? You don't have to be the best. You just have to be a little bit better than everybody else and you will still win.
Camilla Love
Indeed, pearls of wisdom, everyone pearls of wisdom. Hey, where are you going to be in five years time?
Alex McGuigan
Where am I going to be? Well, I'm actually working on something pretty exciting. I can't say this yet, but I'm working on a project. What I can say is that female portfolio managers tend to outperform. And there's a lot of empirical evidence that has been done by investment banks and management consulting firms that prove this. And it's for a number of reasons. One is self selection bias. So they are just those type of people, those 10% of people who get it done. They are also comfortable being the only person in the room. So these portfolio managers tend to sit with contrarian positions longer, which is very valuable in a portfolio. So even though we have this information that tells us that women outperform, they still manage less than 1% of the global assets, and that is also for various reasons. One is unconscious bias, but I think that we're coming to a place where they are being actively addressed in organisations. But the second and probably most challenging piece is the structural element. Right? So institutional investors, they have risk management requirements and investment committees who say you can't be more than 10% of a fund, which makes it impossible for them to invest in women.
Alex McGuigan
So there's this whole group of exceptional investors who get immediately eliminated from the selection process just because of their size. So I'm working on a project with two single preemptive institutions on analysing whether or not this is actually true for the Asia Pacific managers outperform. And if the research proves the case, then I'm going to be working on a solution to get more money to women.
Camilla Love
What's this thing?
Alex McGuigan
I know it's very exciting.
Camilla Love
That's so exciting.
Alex McGuigan
It is.
Camilla Love
So we're going to come to the end of our podcast soon, but before we do, have you listened to any of my other podcasts? What we do at the end, we do this quick fire round where I ask you like five or six different questions and you got to say the first thing, like the first thing that comes into your line you're up for something like that?
Alex McGuigan
Sure. Okay.
Camilla Love
Well, who knows what your answer is going to be?
Alex McGuigan
That's why I say I hope not. Rude.
Camilla Love
Okay. You ready to go? Yep.
Alex McGuigan
Let's go.
Camilla Love
Okay. If you could be any animal, what would it be? And why?
Alex McGuigan
Tiger. Strong and beautiful.
Camilla Love
Fierce.
Alex McGuigan
Fierce.
Camilla Love
Endangered.
Alex McGuigan
Endangered. I think strong, powerful. But I don't want to say calculated. Yeah, but planned and considered. I think if they make an attack, they don't just do it. They think about it and they stalk. They stalk.
Camilla Love
My favourite superhero is Sheira Princess of Power.
Alex McGuigan
So good.
Camilla Love
Oh, my God, that reminds me of the 80s. That's so good. I love that. If you could invite anyone alive or dead to dinner, who would it be and why?
Alex McGuigan
Oh, Elizabeth Taylor.
Camilla Love
So amazing.
Alex McGuigan
Taylor? Yeah.
Camilla Love
And just because of the Grace. The diamonds, the dress?
Alex McGuigan
Diamonds, the diamonds, the dress. I just want to know the stories as well.
Camilla Love
How many husbands?
Alex McGuigan
Nine or something. She married one of them and divorced one of them twice.
Camilla Love
Twice exactly. A lady who can't make up her mind. Nothing wrong with that. My favourite book is.
Alex McGuigan
By David Benioff and it's called City of Fees. It's about the siege of Leninbrad and two boys. They get thrown in a prison cell together and they've basically both been accused of doing something wrong. And in order to save their lives, the general or the commander sends them off on this incredibly dangerous adventure to find a dozen eggs in the Siege of Leonograde when there was, like, everyone was starting to death. So it's a fabulous look. You won't be able to put it down.
Camilla Love
Okay, great. I'll have to put that on my reading list.
Alex McGuigan
It's very good.
Camilla Love
My first investment was a property.
Alex McGuigan
An apartment on William Street. Darling house.
Camilla Love
Do you still have it?
Alex McGuigan
I do.
Camilla Love
Great.
Alex McGuigan
Someone is living in it right now. Hopefully. Happy.
Camilla Love
Good.
Alex McGuigan
My biggest investment mistake was not linking my offset account for my money. For the property.
Camilla Love
No.
Alex McGuigan
Anyway, I figured it out.
Camilla Love
Extra interest, paid less and learned.
Alex McGuigan
Lesson learned. That was a Biggie.
Camilla Love
What weird or unusual thing do you have in your handbag right now that you want to tell us about shoes? I'm thinking of something else, but. Yeah, cool. No, every handbag has a good pair of shoes.
Alex McGuigan
Well, and you know what? I'm just really organised and I constantly change my handbag, so there's nothing weird in there. I usually put it away.
Camilla Love
Gosh. I don't have enough handbags to do that.
Alex McGuigan
Maybe that's a better question. What do you draw?
Camilla Love
What is in your drawer? Then tell us.
Alex McGuigan
Yeah, it's not really very exciting either. No, passwords is not very exciting.
Camilla Love
The efficiency of passwords in your drawings. My hidden talent is.
Alex McGuigan
Oh, reciting poetry.
Camilla Love
What?
Alex McGuigan
Reciting poetry.
Camilla Love
Can you tell some now? Come on, you can do it. Come on.
Alex McGuigan
I used to have this one poem that I used to win all of the estate around Sydney. And for anyone who's not into acting or whatever, it's very lucrative business. So when you get to the open stage when you're 16 years old, there's like, $100 cheque, which was a lot of money back in the 90s. So I used to make my mom drive me around all around Sydney, and I used to recite the same poem and just, like, clean up.
Camilla Love
Do you remember it?
Alex McGuigan
I can tell you the night. Yes, of course I remember it. My family still walks around the house going, Knight herons. Judith. Right. They mock me to know it.
Camilla Love
And you're like, But I still got cash for that.
Alex McGuigan
I got cash for that and I got an apartment. So who had the last laugh?
Camilla Love
Indeed. Indeed. And the final question is a career in finance is freedom.
Alex McGuigan
That's it.
Camilla Love
I think that's fabulous way to end. So, Alex, fabulous. So good to hear from you. I really miss you for being in Singapore. Come home and visit us soon. Thanks for being so wonderful and such a great, organic conversation. And thanks for sharing your ups and downs and your Nuggets of information. And if anyone wants to take anything away, never underestimate Alex Miguel.
Alex McGuigan
Never underestimate the mediocrity of others. That's the best one. But if anyone wants to contact me, any students want to know anything, contact me through LinkedIn. I'm happy to help in any way I can. Hunter Women in Finance has free memberships for students. So if you want to get involved and learn more about just start to learn the dialogue and the language, the different events they're on, all that kind of stuff. Just let me know and I'm very happy to help.
Camilla Love
Thanks, Alex. Okay, hopefully see you soon.
Alex McGuigan
Thanks, Kim.
Camilla Love
Bye. For more information on what we do at F Three, Head to F Three.com Au. I look forward to you joining us next episode Where we continue to interview some fabulous people. Thank you. The Inside Scoop On Careers in Finance. Bye. For now, you know the information that is in this podcast.
Camilla Love
We always talk about finance in this podcast.
Camilla Love
But it's not financial advice. It's actually really careers advice. If you really want financial advice, I recommend that you speak to a financial planner or a broker and work out your own personal circumstances with that. But this is all about careers advice and how I'm Finance will be a fabulous career for you.