About Me

Understanding the world through investing.

I’m Francie. I began investing at 18, using money set aside for my tuition. What drew me to markets was a desire to understand how the world really works: what drives economies, how policy shapes incentives, and why change so often unfolds differently from what people expect.

Investing gave that curiosity a discipline. Having an opinion is easy. Committing capital to it means living with the consequences and continually testing my understanding against reality.

That is the idea behind Beyond Prices.

A decade of learning through markets

I started investing in foreign exchange in 2015. Currency markets became my lens into the connections between countries, politics, trade, and capital.

Over the following decade, I grew my FX portfolio to approximately seven times its original size, with annualized returns of approximately 22% before fees and 18% after fees.

Those results matter to me as feedback on my thinking. They are not proof that every thesis was right: timing, risk-taking, and luck all influence outcomes. But over time, investing has helped me distinguish between a compelling explanation and one that holds up in practice.

The main views that have shaped my investing include:

• 2015: China and commodities. I expected slowing Chinese demand to weigh on commodity markets.
• 2016: Brexit. I questioned whether its economic implications were as uniformly negative as prevailing sentiment suggested.
• 2019: Globalization and inflation. I began positioning around the idea that globalization would reverse course and inflationary pressures would return.
• Late 2019: Fiscal sustainability. I grew concerned about the sustainability of government finances across major currency economies.
• Late 2020: Europe. I saw structural weaknesses in the European economy that I believed were insufficiently reflected in market expectations.
• 2022: Poland and the Czech Republic. I took a contrarian view of the war’s implications for the Polish zloty and Czech koruna, seeing potential longer-term support for both currencies despite the immediate shock.
• Mid-2025: Canada. Following Mark Carney’s arrival as prime minister, I remained concerned about the scale of Canada’s economic challenges.
• Late 2025: Japan. With Sanae Takaichi’s rise to leadership, I saw the possibility of a turning point after decades of economic weakness.

These are starting points for inquiry. Each view has required me to keep learning, reassess the evidence, and adjust my exposure.

From currencies to companies

My career in financial services came with restrictions on personal equity trading. When those restrictions lifted in 2024, I expanded into equities, applying the same curiosity about economic change to individual businesses. Over approximately two and a half years, my equity portfolio has generated an annualized return of around 12%.

In 2024, one of my central views was that Canada and the United States would begin cutting interest rates. Since late 2025, I have focused increasingly on the energy demand created by AI adoption and the businesses that could help meet it.

Why I write

Beyond Prices is where I document what I see, what I believe, and what changes my mind.

I want to understand the forces behind the numbers: the incentives, decisions, and structural shifts that shape economies and businesses. Writing helps me make that understanding explicit, so it can be questioned and improved.

Investing is how I explore the world. Results are one way the world answers back.