Eric Santa

Investments & Economics

[Eric Santa @EricSanta98]

En los próximos años quiero encontrar el tiempo para sentarme, reflexionar y escribir sobre cómo ha sido mi experiencia en Londres desde que llegué en 2020 como aupair. Cinco años después, he conseguido el trabajo de mis sueños.

Mirando hacia atrás y uniendo los puntos, diría que hubo tres personas clave que, pese a conocerlas por pura casualidad y sin que me debieran nada, me aconsejaron de una forma que me permitió abrirme camino en el buy-side de la City de Londres, contando únicamente con un grado en Economía de la Universidad de Alicante y un CFA que estudié, en su mayoría, por las noches.

Me considero muy afortunado, y soy consciente de que quizás otras personas en mi misma situación no lleguen a conseguir el trabajo de sus sueños. Pero lo que tengo claro es lo siguiente:

Si partes desde una situación de desventaja (pocos contactos, universidad poco reconocida, etc.), sin hambre estás perdido. Hay muchísima gente con mejores credenciales y más conexiones que tú, especialmente en Londres.

Hablar abiertamente de tus intereses y aspiraciones con las personas que te encuentras en el camino es clave. Gracias a eso, me han presentado a profesionales de la industria que me han orientado y ayudado de forma desinteresada.

Si tienes hambre, eres curioso, respetuoso y buena persona, encontrarás gente en una posición más avanzada que verá en ti a su ‘yo joven’ y querrá echarte una mano.

A veces no se trata de pensar fuera de la caja, sino de romper la caja directamente.

Lo más arriesgado es no asumir riesgos.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

In 2015 a writer named Tim Urban sat down and counted the days he had left with his parents. He was 34, healthy, both parents alive and well. The number came back around 300. Less time than he spent with them in any single year of his childhood.

The post is called The Tail End, on a blog called Wait But Why. The idea is to stop counting your life in years and start counting it in events. Reach 90 and you get about 4,680 weeks, and every one of them fits on a single sheet of paper. Maybe 60 more winters after that. If you read five books a year, that is 300 books, picked from every book ever written.

Those things at least spread out evenly. A third of the way through life means a third of the way through your pizzas. Time with the people you love does not work like that. Almost all of it sits at the very start. Then it is gone.

For your first 18 years you are around your parents nearly every day. Then you leave for college or a job in another city, and a normal adult sees their parents maybe 10 days a year. So the day you move out, you are already at 93 percent. Urban was living in the last 5 percent and had no idea until he drew the chart. He called it the tail end.

It does not stop at parents. His two sisters, after a whole childhood in the same house, had around 15 percent of their time together left. The four friends he played cards with most days in high school were down to their last 7 percent. Nobody had a fight. Nobody moved away angry. Life quietly spends the time for you while you assume there is plenty left.

You do not have to be old to be near the end with someone. If your parents are alive and you live in a different city, you have probably already used more than 90 percent of the days you will ever spend in the same room as them.

His one instruction is about that last stretch. When you are down to the final days with someone you love, treat that time like what it is, which is almost gone. The rest is the tail end, and it is much shorter than it feels.

[Eric Santa @EricSanta98]

@Negative_Pledge Foto en México! Pero ahora por Guatemala

[Eric Santa @EricSanta98]

Due diligence en Latam $MELI

[Javier Caballero @JavierCaballero]

Hace 18 años estudiaba un Máster en Ingeniería Financiera y a la vez trabajaba como auditor de las Tesorerías y Gestoras de Fondos en el Santander.

Al acabar una clase, le pregunté a un profesor cómo aplicar en la práctica algo que acabábamos de ver en teoría.

Me dijo que, para responderme, tendría que pagarle por hora de consultoría.

Años después estudié con Damodaran, probablemente el mejor profesor de finanzas del mundo. En la primera clase nos dijo que su libro era obligatorio para la asignatura y estaba en la tienda de la Universidad. Pero que si buscábamos un poco en su web, lo encontrábamos gratis.

Los mediocres esconden, los mejores dan.

[Martin Varsavsky @martinvars]

España tiene dos complejos mal resueltos: se siente inferior a Europa y superior a Hispanoamérica. Los dos son falsos y los dos le hacen daño.

Inferior a Europa, porque olvida que España tiene idioma global, historia, empresas, talento, ciudades extraordinarias y una conexión cultural que ningún burócrata de Bruselas puede fabricar. Superior a Hispanoamérica, porque confunde renta per cápita con civilización y no entiende que buena parte del futuro español también está al otro lado del Atlántico.

España debería mirar menos hacia arriba y más hacia afuera. Su ventaja no es parecerse a Alemania. Es ser el puente natural de 500 millones de hispanohablantes.

[Aimen Dean @AimenDean]

Hot take that will get me crucified in the UK 🇬🇧💀:

The NHS costs $255 billion a year. That’s more than the entire national budgets of Egypt, Bangladesh, and Pakistan combined - three countries running health, education, defence, and everything else for 550 million people - and they’re still $40 billion short of matching what Britain spends on “free” GP appointments and hip replacements for 65 million.

It’s not a health service. It’s a bureaucratic Godzilla in a hospital gown, devouring the economy one billion at a time.

The UK can’t tax its way out of this. You can squeeze the rich until they flee (they already are), hike taxes until no one bothers earning (getting there), and the beast will still be hungry next fiscal year, asking for another 5%.

The NHS isn’t free. It’s just invoiced to your grandchildren.

Break it up. Privatise it. Sell it off in pieces over 10 years. Use the proceeds to pay down the debt before it hits 200% of GDP and Britain becomes a museum of its former self.

“But healthcare is a right!” Sure. So is food … and Tesco seems to manage without a £200 billion state bureaucracy and an 18-month waiting list for a sandwich!

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth he can accept about himself without running away.”

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Powerful and true. You should always listen to people you respect, but you have to make your own decisions.

My parents often told me that I never listened. I told them that was not true. I always listened very carefully, but I always made my own decisions.

You have to live your own life.

[Eric Santa @EricSanta98]

@vctrjmnz Waitrose in Clapham Common!

[Eric Santa @EricSanta98]

Seriously. Nothing works in this country when >25 degrees.

[Terry Hague @TezzaBelle88]

30° abroad: “let’s explore this town.”

30° in the UK: “I may not survive this Sainsbury’s trip.”

[Sidecar Investor @sidecarcap]

I used to think investing was about being contrarian.

Now I realize it’s more like riding a wave that is far larger and longer than people expect.

[Eric Santa @EricSanta98]

@Esautomatix1 Ahora dilo sin llorar

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

Es vergonzoso ser español cuando uno comprueba lo que ya sospecha desde hace tiempo: un antiguo presidente del gobierno involucrado en casos de corrupción sistemática junto a dictaduras crueles. Que más adelante un juez pueda determinar que la evidencia está probada más allá de toda duda razonable (un criterio muy estricto) es muy diferente de la clara acumulación de evidencia que ya tenemos sobre la mesa.

Pero si esto fuera un caso aislado de corrupción, la vergüenza podría sobrellevarse. Lo preocupante es que forma parte de un patrón sistemático. Zapatero fue presidente del gobierno bajo Juan Carlos I, quien tuvo que abdicar por casos de corrupción intolerables (corrupción que, por otra parte, ha sido constante e invariable en la dinastía Borbón en España desde la regencia de María Cristina de Borbón).

Y a Zapatero le sucedió Rajoy, sí, el Rajoy de “Luis, sé fuerte”. IU y su espacio (como se llame esa semana) tampoco se han librado de estos problemas cuando han tenido pequeños resortes de poder. Moral Santín es el caso más claro.

Y en Cataluña vimos que la antigua CiU y la familia Pujol eran una mafia. El único sitio donde el sistema no ha generado escándalos vergonzosos es el País Vasco, aunque uno sospecha que es más bien consecuencia de la ausencia práctica de libertad de expresión que de su ausencia real.

En otras palabras: los españoles hemos visto cómo la Monarquía, el PSOE, el PP, IU y los grandes partidos nacionalistas han vulnerado de manera sistemática todo tipo de normas éticas y penales.

Mientras tanto, los salarios están estancados, la vivienda está por las nubes, la seguridad social está en una situación límite y la prosperidad actual es un espejismo empujado por una inmigración no sostenible que solo traerá problemas profundos a largo plazo (la figura de @SantiCalvo_Eco lo dice todo).

Quizás sea el momento de aceptar que esto no se arregla cambiando a quien gobierna, sino cambiando las reglas que hacen que casi dé igual quién lo haga.

[Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos]

Thank you. The important part is zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. Best way to put money in someone’s pocket is to not take it out in the first place. Bottom half is only 3% of total tax revenue. But it’s very meaningful to that person. Zero it out.

[Eric Santa @EricSanta98]

@CapexAndChill The $WSE of the payment solutions... Interesting

[Sean Fitzgerald (Actual Justice Warrior) @IamSean90]

This is Central Park. Which was in such decay due to the City's horrible mismanagement that a non-profit took it over the 80s & the wealthy folks on the board did such an amazing job cleaning it up, that Low IQ posters like this enjoy it, without even understanding who to thank

[Rene Sellmann @ReneSellmann]

Nick Sleep returned 921% over 13 years at Nomad by mastering a single, counter-intuitive concept:

Scale Economies Shared.

To measure it, he invented the "Robustness Ratio" – a tool that calculates exactly how much value a company gives back to its customers relative to what it keeps for shareholders.

Costco $COST famously operates at a ratio of around 5:1 (back when Sleep did his calculations at least).

"At Costco, we think the customer saving is around five dollars, compared to shopping at most supermarkets, for every dollar retained by the company."

But there’s a fintech disruptor that just listed in the US that is weaponizing this exact formula today at an even higher clip; a firm led by @kaarmann that just listed on the NASDAQ last week. In $WISE's NASDAQ listing presentation, we got some fresh numbers, helping me to update the robustness ratio Wise produces.

So let’s update my calculations on Wise ($WISE) from around two years ago (I'll link my post from back then in a comment below).

Back then, in FY23, Wise saved its customers £1.5 billion while retaining £114 million in net income – yielding a jaw-dropping robustness ratio of 13.2.

It was a textbook example of a company aggressively choosing market share and customer goodwill over short-term margin gouging.

How does that "moat" look today? Let's refresh the math using their latest financial disclosures:

✅ Customer Value Proposition (Savings): $3.3 billion
✅ Preliminary FY26 Revenue Estimate: $2.5 billion
✅ Net Income Margin: 18% (based on their H1 FY26 financial profile)
✅ Estimated Net Income: $450 million

Robustness Ratio = $ Retained for Shareholders / Customer Value Proposition (Savings or Benefits)​

So when you divide that $3.3 billion in customer savings by the estimated $450 million in shareholder profit, Wise lands at a current robustness ratio of 7.33.

This decline in the Robustness Ratio isn't a sign of Wise losing its edge – it's the footprint of a business successfully diversifying its empire. Back in FY23, cross-border remittance was Wise's main engine, driving around 70% of total revenue. Today, cross-border has stepped down to 52%, while Interest Income and Card Services have scaled up to command a massive 48% combined share of the mix. Even with these new profit centers lifting shareholder returns, a robustness ratio of 7.33 is an absolute powerhouse. It means that for every $1.00 Wise retains in profit, it still leaves over $7.00 in its users' pockets compared to traditional banks.

[Eric Santa @EricSanta98]

@Spotify @C0DE_ND I love it.