About Me
The Homepage sets out what I produce. This page is about why my background is relevant.
I trained as a Law Accountant in Edinburgh, a discipline most people outside the legal profession have never come across. Law Accountants assess legal costs: the line-by-line scrutiny of what was charged, whether it was fair and reasonable, and whether it could be justified under statute and case law.
It is painstaking work. Every number has to be correct and every reference accurate. You spend your days building arguments about why a particular figure should stand or fall under hostile examination. If your conclusion does not hold up, you hear about it fairly quickly.
I did not know it at the time, but that training shaped everything I do today.
I moved to London and continued as a Cost Lawyer, the same discipline at a larger scale. Bigger cases, bigger firms, higher stakes. The analytical standard was identical throughout: precision, evidence, and the ability to construct an argument that holds up under challenge.
What the City gave me beyond the legal work itself was proximity to financial markets. I was surrounded by people who traded, managed money and understood how capital moved. That proximity planted a seed that took a while to grow into something.
The FCA’s Fair Value Assessment requirement asks IFA firms to analyse their charges, describe the benefits delivered, assess whether there is reasonable correspondence between the two, and identify whether any client groups are bearing disproportionate cost. That is structurally identical to Cost Lawyer work. I have been conducting this form of analysis, under a different name, in a different arena, to the same standard of rigour, for most of my professional life. No financial copywriter I am aware of can say the same.
When an IFA firm commissions a Fair Value Assessment from me, they are not getting a financial writer who has read the FCA’s guidance and done their best. They are getting someone whose professional training is a direct precedent for what the FCA now requires. That is a materially different level of qualification, and it tends to show in the document.
After leaving law I did something most financial writers never do. I traded my own account, and not in any theoretical sense. I sat in front of screens, watched prices move, made decisions with real money on the line and lived with what followed.
I learned to read a balance sheet not as an academic exercise but because my own capital depended on getting the analysis right. I learned the difference between a headline that sounds alarming and a set of numbers that actually warrant concern. That experience runs through how I write about markets now. It draws on years of watching how investors actually behave and where the gap tends to open up between what people fear and what the figures show.
In the early 2000s I published an investment magazine called Dimensions. A different discipline from trading, but one that drew on the same foundation: taking complex financial material and making it genuinely readable. Not simplified beyond recognition or buried in jargon, but written so that someone with real money at stake came away better informed than before.
Running a publication taught me things that trading never could. How to hold a reader’s attention across 3,000 words. How to structure an argument so the conclusion arrives feeling earned rather than imposed. And something a bit harder to pin down: how to write about risk without either alarming people unduly or nudging them towards a complacency they cannot really afford.
LEGAL FOUNDATION
Edinburgh & the City
1980s-1990s
Precision. Evidence.
Regulatory rigour.
MARKET EXPERIENCE
Traded own account
across equities & derivatives
Real money. Real
Consequences. Real insight.
PUBLISHING
Investment publication
early 2000s
3,000-word features.
Complex subjects made
genuinely readable.
A well-produced deliverable with nothing to say is worse than no content at all. It tells people that your firm cares about appearances but not about depth. The prospects worth winning can generally see through it straight away. Every paragraph has to earn its place. If it does not educate, build trust, or move the reader closer to a decision, it does not belong there.
Most copywriters treat compliance as a hurdle to clear and move on from. That is a mistake. When content is fair, clear and not misleading, it tends to be more persuasive as well. Compliance makes content honest, and honest content does a better job. If it is also boring, that is a writing problem, not a regulatory one.
A Fair Value Assessment or Outcomes Monitoring Framework that reads as though it was assembled to satisfy a checklist is unlikely to hold up under scrutiny. A document that is genuinely analytical, clearly argued and evidently the product of some professional thought is quite a different matter.
I live and work in Gibraltar with my wife, daughters and my son and, since she insists on a mention, a three-kilo Chihuahua who is entirely convinced she is a Caucasian Shepherd. I have been here long enough that it genuinely feels like home, though the Scottish accent has proved stubbornly resistant to the Mediterranean climate.
When I am not writing, you will most likely find me on one of the courses in Sotogrande, just across the border in Spain. I have been playing golf for a good number of years now and remain remarkably bad at it. That probably says something about the limits of persistence where talent has declined to show up.
Working remotely with UK firms is not a practical issue in any meaningful sense. The time difference is one hour. Calls, emails and video meetings work exactly as they would if I were based in London or Edinburgh.
