Who is behind this newspaper?
Well, for now, I am alone in the Off Market adventure. Even though I would like to eventually build a team to move faster, I still need a little more time to lay the foundations of this media. Today, I prefer to remain anonymous to protect my family from those who might naively think that I keep my investments at home. But I can still share a bit of my story with you.
Where do I come from?
I come from a modest family, with a father who was a railway worker and a mother who was a hairdresser, in a small town near Angers. I grew up in an environment where you learn to do a lot with little. My father had the good idea to invest in real estate during the crisis of the 1990s. He bought the apartment where we lived and the commercial space just below. He then spent ten years of his life renovating, alongside his job, what would become our family home. A ruin transformed into a beautiful house ideally located with a view of the Loire. To finance the renovations, he spent his weekends hunting for bargains at flea markets, looking for tools or items to resell. Even today, in retirement, he continues to renovate houses and develop his real estate portfolio.
My journey
As for me, I have always sought to gain independence. From a very young age, I was involved in various small businesses, like buying and reselling phones on Leboncoin or Backmarket. After high school, I launched my first online business: an affiliate site that allowed me to earn commissions on sign-ups for dating sites. Thanks to automated systems, I attracted traffic from Instagram to feed my blog. The project was doing well until a platform update came along and stopped everything.
At that time, I was traveling and working around the world: Thailand, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States… It was also during this period that I started to become interested in investing. It was 2017, and everyone was talking about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. I invested just before the bubble burst. I lost money, but I gained a lot of learning experiences.
After three years of traveling, I returned to my studies and obtained a Master's degree in business school. It was at that moment that I took investing really seriously. I dedicated hundreds of hours to studying each category of investment: stock market, real estate investment trusts, crowdfunding, private equity... I tested different players and platforms to gradually build the strategy that suited me best.
Where do I want to go?
Today, I work as a Marketing and Communication Manager at a data-focused company in Paris. At the same time, I created Off Market to share my experiences and discoveries in the world of tangible assets. I talk about watches, wine, art, and other rare items that have a story to tell.
Off Market is a journal for the curious, those who want to learn and go further. When you have a passive and long-term wealth strategy, it can become monotonous. Here, we step out of purely digital finance to explore the intricacies of watchmaking houses, the expertise of vineyards, or the history behind a coin. Off Market is my logbook, where I share my successes, my mistakes, and my discoveries, always striving to be as concrete, transparent, and data-driven as possible.
Happy reading.