Sheep Sheds and Credit Spreads

By Ryan Falls, Investment Analyst, Mint Asset Management

People who work in professional services often start autobiographical profiles on their journey into their career with a contrived metaphor that loosely relates to their chosen career, and this text will be no different.

‘If you don’t want to do the work then forget about it’ – admittedly harsh words directed at me, many a time in my youth. The aim was twofold; to remind me of the value of hard graft, and as a verbal stick to coax me into getting off my rear end to help on our family sheep farm in the North of Ireland.

Embarrassingly, for a qualified actuary specialising in investment and finance, I cannot claim to have a strong grip on basic counting during my time growing up on the farm. My father would grow ever more exasperated at my inability to accurately tell him how many ewes were in a certain field.