ETF Strategist Nicholas Vardy is the latest addition to The Oxford Club.
Based in Europe, Nicholas is a widely recognized expert on exchange-traded funds and an accomplished investment expert. Nicholas has been a regular commentator on CNN International and Fox Business Network. He has also been cited in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Fox Business News, CBS MarketWatch, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money Central.
Here’s a little more about the journey that led him to you…
Growing up in Pittsburgh, Nicholas earned spending money by selling flavored ice cubes at Little League baseball games, delivering the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 5:00 a.m. and shoveling snow during the harsh Pennsylvania winters.
For a kid from the Rust Belt who was a big Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers fan, he also lived a double life. He spent his summers studying in West Germany (before unification), France, Italy and communist Hungary on scholarships he diligently applied for while in high school.
I was lucky. My parents made me aware of opportunities other kids couldn’t even dream about. Every summer, I had the chance to dip into a completely different language, reality and culture. During the bad old days of the Cold War, not a lot of kids from the United States were spending their summers in Europe, let alone behind the Iron Curtain. It was as if I got to visit another planet each summer. And then I spent the school year back on planet earth.
Luckily, this was the kind of unusual background that top colleges were looking for.
Nicholas earned a B.A. in both economics and history and an M.A. in history in less than four years from Stanford University.
There, he discovered the work of free market economist Friedrich Hayek and wrote two theses on his work.
That work put him on track to win a Fulbright scholarship to the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest, making him one of the first Fulbright scholars to study behind the Iron Curtain.
Assuming his academic interests in the Soviet Union and centrally planned economies was a professional dead-end, he turned down an economics Ph.D scholarship to Oxford University and went on to attend Harvard Law School instead.
Truth be told, he wasn’t a big fan of the law. Compared with the exciting world of clashing economic ideals, law seemed pedestrian and boring. Harvard proved better fit for his classmates, including future president Barack Obama and good friend, now Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch.
As luck would have it, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down before he graduated. Suddenly, Eastern Europe and Russia were open for business.
After Harvard, he joined the world’s largest law firm, which had just opened offices in Eastern Europe. His mission – as he put it then – was to “help dismantle centrally planned economies.”
For nearly four years, he worked on the privatizations of some of the leading banks, oil companies and telecom companies in the region, listing them on regional stock exchanges. It’s this work that first exposed him to the fascinating world of investing.
Nicholas then set out to learn all he could about finance and embarked on a successful and varied business career, including launching several investment funds in Europe, founding a London-based roundtable of leading investment experts like Steve Forbes and Nassim Taleb, and writing for Eagle Publishing’s The Global Guru for 12 years alongside four other investment advisory newsletters.
In January 2018, Nicholas became The Oxford Club’s first and only ETF strategist, writing for the daily Liberty Through Wealth e-letter (formerly Investment U) and our flagship newsletter, The Oxford Communiqué.
Outside of work, Nicholas focuses on managing his personal investments and his growing family.
Articles by Nicholas
Is U.S. Capitalism a Myth? November 15, 2018 - If you believe in capitalism, free markets and competition, the oppressive power of a handful of companies in the U.S. should worry you.
How to Bet Big on the Bounce November 12, 2018 - Sharp market moves give you the opportunity to profit from what may turn out to be a traditional year-end rally.
What You Can Learn From Buffett’s Billion-Dollar Buyback November 8, 2018 - Knowing this one fact alone makes a strong case for buying Berkshire stock.
Why You Should Never Sell Into Market Panic November 6, 2018 - Here’s a fundamental insight they don’t teach you in any finance textbook: The biggest challenge of investing is managing your own psychology.
How to Survive the Market Correction November 1, 2018 - Corrections are as much about managing your psychology as they are about managing your money.
Is This the Single Best ETF to Own in a Down Market? October 31, 2018 - Some strategies thrive in “go-go” bull markets. Others, like this one, shine when the market bear is growling at your door.
Should You Buy Into the Buyback Boom? October 25, 2018 - How can you best profit from the coming uptick in corporate buybacks? Nicholas has the answer...
Why the U.S. Expansion Will Last Through 2019 October 23, 2018 - The U.S. economy is not on the verge of entering a recession, so don’t run for the hills quite yet. Here’s why...
How I’m Winning The Wall Street Journal’s Stock-Picking Contest October 18, 2018 - My bet on the Direxion Daily MSCI Brazil Bull 3X ETF is winning The Wall Street Journal’s Stock-Picking Contest... but it won’t last.
Why I’m Betting on a Rebound October 16, 2018 - As the markets dropped this past week, financial pundits struggled to answer “What happened... and why now?” Here’s my surprising answer...
