I spent most of high school working on the debate team, probably at some expense to my grades. Being a member of the team was great training in critical analysis, organization, and logic.

The investing world is a little bit more multidimensional than poker.

Investing in a poker game and investing in stocks, at least the way I do it, it's a very similar skillset.

After my undergraduate, I've written a thesis that was in the government department, but largely, it turned out almost an economic type of thesis. And I was very interested in that, and I wanted to go get a Ph.D. in Economics.

I was extremely lucky as I was in one of the last generations of British students who went to university and had my fees paid, and I had a grant as well. I also earned money from my waitressing and designing and selling my own range of dinosaur cards.

It is a well known urban myth that the French don't trust banks and store their money under their mattress. It's not that they are tight with money - they just don't trust anyone.

Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money.

Open your mouth and purse cautiously, and your stock of wealth and reputation shall, at least in repute, be great.