Jun 26, 2026 · 1 hr 15 min · 12 segments
Harald Berlinicke shares his remarkable journey from a teenage investor witnessing Black Monday, through building an €8 billion structured credit business before the Global Financial Crisis, to…
Harald BerlinickeGuestJamesHost
You wanted to sort of know the origins of how my investing journey started.
Yeah, I mean, it started very early on at a really... quite a young age that I showed interest in money, managing money.
Originally, I got sort of exposed and in touch with sort of physical coins, old coins, part of numismatic collections of my ancestors who introduced those to me.
I held my first Krugerrand ounce of gold in my hands at a pretty young age as well, which, you know, was a quite exciting thing.
Really surprisingly, my parents never really showed a lot of interest in managing money.
So I saw from an early age, I saw a lot of inefficiencies and sort of money just sitting idle in current accounts or not really earning interest.
in the early 80s when you could earn a very high interest for money market accounts or short term deposits.
So I was really not even a teenager when I started shopping around at the local bank branches.
And then I basically asked my dad to come along and, you know, with the savings books and et cetera, and then opening accounts, moving accounts.
And then the most exciting catalyst, of course, was when Black Monday of 1987 happened, the big crash.
It was exactly in that week that I did a bank apprenticeship as a 15 year old.
You know, these very wealthy, affluent clients of that bank branch, you know, just popping their heads into the branch and sort of mayhem, complete mayhem.
And they shouting at the securities advisor to sell, you know, thousand shares of this, thousand shares of that.
And there was I, you know, that little fella sitting next to the very experienced securities advisor of the bank branch.
And yeah, I mean, that clearly, there's no other way of looking at it now that that's when I caught the investing bug.
it about that particular experience, Harold, do you think that actually hooked you in? Because obviously that must have been quite a chaotic time with all the panic selling and things like that.
You wanted to sort of know the origins of how my investing journey started.
Yeah, I mean, it started very early on at a really... quite a young age that I showed interest in money, managing money.
Originally, I got sort of exposed and in touch with sort of physical coins, old coins, part of numismatic collections of my ancestors who introduced those to me.
I held my first Krugerrand ounce of gold in my hands at a pretty young age as well, which, you know, was a quite exciting thing.
Really surprisingly, my parents never really showed a lot of interest in managing money.
So I saw from an early age, I saw a lot of inefficiencies and sort of money just sitting idle in current accounts or not really earning interest.
in the early 80s when you could earn a very high interest for money market accounts or short term deposits.
So I was really not even a teenager when I started shopping around at the local bank branches.
And then I basically asked my dad to come along and, you know, with the savings books and et cetera, and then opening accounts, moving accounts.
And then the most exciting catalyst, of course, was when Black Monday of 1987 happened, the big crash.
It was exactly in that week that I did a bank apprenticeship as a 15 year old.
You know, these very wealthy, affluent clients of that bank branch, you know, just popping their heads into the branch and sort of mayhem, complete mayhem.
And they shouting at the securities advisor to sell, you know, thousand shares of this, thousand shares of that.
And there was I, you know, that little fella sitting next to the very experienced securities advisor of the bank branch.
And yeah, I mean, that clearly, there's no other way of looking at it now that that's when I caught the investing bug.
it about that particular experience, Harold, do you think that actually hooked you in? Because obviously that must have been quite a chaotic time with all the panic selling and things like that.
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