I'm Mike. I spent four years looking inside businesses — now I explain what I saw.

The short version

I did a Master's in Finance at Saint-Joseph University of Beirut, and graduated as valedictorian —Major de Promotion. My thesis looked at how geopolitical risk and the quality of a country's institutions affect market capitalisation in emerging economies, which is a fairly academic way of asking a very practical question: why does the same company get valued differently depending on where it is standing?

After that I spent around four years in external audit at a Big Four firm in Beirut, working across banking, energy and management services. Audit gets described as box-ticking. It isn't. The actual job is to open a business up and work out where the money comes from, where it goes, which numbers are real, and whether the controls around all of it hold up. You see a lot of businesses from the inside, quickly.

Four years of that leaves you with a particular habit of mind: you stop taking a number at face value and start asking what produced it. That habit is most of what this site is.

Why I started writing

Two things kept happening at the same time.

The first was at work. I'd explain something to a client or a junior — why a margin had moved, why cash and profit had gone in opposite directions, what a control was actually protecting against — and watch it land. Not because I'd simplified it into uselessness, but because I'd left the reasoning in and taken the jargon out.

The second was everywhere else. Friends, family, people my age in Lebanon making genuinely consequential decisions — about salaries, about currency, about whether to start something — with very little clear, honest material written for their situation. There is no shortage of financial content. There is a real shortage of financial content that assumes you're intelligent, doesn't try to sell you anything, and is written by someone who has looked at the inside of a balance sheet.

So I started writing the explanations down. That's all this is.

What I'm trying to do here

Everything on this site follows the same chain:

What is happening → why it matters → how it reaches your money, your career or your business → what you should understand or do next.

If a piece can't complete that chain, it doesn't get published. That rule keeps out most of what makes financial content bad: the commentary that describes without explaining, and the advice that instructs without reasoning.

What this is not

• Education, not advice. Everything here explains how something works in general. It can't know your situation — so for decisions about your own money, talk to someone licensed to advise you on it.
• No stock tips, no predictions, no crypto calls. Anyone confidently telling you what a market will do next is guessing.
• No motivation. There's plenty of that already.
• Nothing about my clients. Everything I learned in audit was under confidentiality, and it stays there. What I write about is how these things work in general, never who I worked with or what I saw at any specific company.

Where I'm writing from

Lebanon. That matters, because a lot of standard financial advice quietly assumes a stable currency, a functioning banking relationship and a predictable cost of living. Where those assumptions don't hold, the advice doesn't either. Most of what I write is built for here first — and much of it travels to the rest of the region and to anyone who has left but still has money, family or a business back home.