About

I am Federico de Narváez. Investor and researcher. I got here the long way round. I studied international relations, then finance, and spent the first fifteen years of my working life in real estate, running large projects in Argentina and the United States. Real estate taught me that the things that last are built slowly and financed carefully. That took me to finance proper, and to the question of how a family keeps what it has built. Finance, in turn, led me to agriculture, first in Uruguay and then in the American Midwest, where I learned the oldest lesson in investing from people who never called it that: you plant, you wait, and you do not argue with the weather. Academia came last, as a way of writing down what the other three had taught me.

I grew up in a part of the world where fortunes are made and lost inside a single generation, and I have watched it happen more than once, from close enough to remember the faces. That is the question that has followed me through every job I have had: not how to make money, which many people know how to do, but how to keep it, through the bad years, long enough to hand it on. I went back to school more times than is reasonable to try to answer it. One bachelor’s degree and three master’s degrees later, it was clear that every answer I had found came with two new questions attached, and that at some stage a person has to stop studying the question and start answering it. So I am now a doctoral candidate at Universidad de San Andrés, where I finally get to study it properly. My research program is called Designing Survivable Portfolios. The name says what it is about: not how to build a fortune, but how to build one that survives. And if twenty years of looking have taught me anything, it is that what separates the fortunes that last from the ones that don’t is almost never the investments. It is the rules the family set for itself before the trouble started.

The site has three parts: the note that started it, the letters, and the history of the ideas behind them.

All that said, the best investment I ever made owed nothing to any of these theories and everything to extraordinary luck: I married a remarkable woman, and together we have a daughter, Gala, who is the reason these notes exist. The snowdrop, Galanthus, is the flower that comes up through the snow before anything else, and the first note on the home page explains why it gives the place its name.