Professor Russell Napier is author of The Solid Ground investment report for institutional investors and co-founder of the investment research portal ERIC – a business he now co-owns with D.C. Thomson. Russell has worked in the investment business for 30 years and has been advising global institutional investors on asset allocation since 1995. He is the author of The Asian Financial Crisis 1995-98 and Anatomy of The Bear: Lessons From Wall Street’s Four Great Bottoms (‘a cult classic’ according to the FT) and he is founder and course director of The Practical History of Financial Markets course that is hosted by Heriot-Watt University.
Russell is a director of the Mid Wynd International Investment Trust. He is a member of the investment advisory committees of two fund management companies, Cerno Capital and Kennox Asset Management.
In 2014 Russell founded the charitable venture The Library of Mistakes, a business and financial history library in Edinburgh that now has branches in India and Switzerland.
Russell Napier has degrees in law from Queen’s University Belfast and Magdalene College Cambridge. He is a Fellow of The CFA Society of the UK and is an Honorary Professor at both Heriot-Watt University and The University of Stirling.
Russell began writing his Solid Ground global macro strategy report for CLSA in 1995. He forecast what was to become of the Asian economic crisis and was voted Asia’s No.1 equity strategist in all leading polls at that time. From 1999 to 2014 he continued writing and publishing, as a consultant for CLSA, and featured prominently in the research polls. Russell is a financial historian and his work features lessons from financial history with a particular focus on trends in money and credit. His book Anatomy of The Bear (published in 2006) forecast a major correction for the US stock market and, using the conclusions of the book, he wrote a report for CLSA called ‘Finding The Bottom’, published in 1Q 2009, forecasting that the market had bottomed. For the past few years his work has focused on the growing evidence that the world is living through a breakdown in the global monetary system and has advised clients to invest for such an outcome rather than invest as if we are living in just another business cycle expansion.
When not engaged in the activities above Russell reads too much financial history, is a keen fly fisherman and grows his own organic vegetables.