The ex-Citi MD living his best life cycling to see clients on a Brompton bike
When Matt King lost his job as a Citi MD and global markets strategist in June 2023, he was upbeat about the experience and posted a photograph of all the books he intended to read on social media. Fifteen months later, King has presumably read those books and is thriving, but on his own terms.
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Like other strategists past and other strategists to come, King is now working for himself as the sole employee of independent research firm Satori Insights. He's still a respected voice in the market and recently appeared on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast musing on the August crash. However, he now works from home instead of Canary Wharf and travels a lot less than before.
"There is more flexibility about when and where you work from, which is a tremendous advantage," says King of his self-employed life. "I waste significantly less time travelling."
King says he's also conscious that he's emitting far less pollution now. Citi's most recent sustainability report indicates that employees generated 111,000 metric tons of carbon while travelling in 2022. Now that King doesn't work there, he's no longer implicated in this. "At a bank (travelling like crazy, together with all the discomfort that goes with it) I was terribly conscious of the stat that 1% of the population generates >50% of the aviation emissions," he says. "You really couldn't do much about it - and even when banks professed to, there was always the feeling (as with lots of bureaucracy) that it was more about the box-ticking than about the underlying issue."
Now that he makes his own choices, King says he tries to be a more modest traveller: "When I do travel, I do it on my own terms: on my last business trip I rode a Brompton to and from each airport, stayed in a sustainable hotel and cycled to and from the clients."
There's a longish history of strategists going it alone, and King is treading in the footsteps of predecessors like Bilal Hafeez from Nomura and Bobby Vedral from Goldman Sachs. He says he's found clients in places he'd never expected, including investment firms and independent strategy firms. He mostly lets his name speak for itself, doesn't do marketing, but does offer a free trial. His trial subscription rate is close to 1:1.
King's fine time as a free agent might offer some encouragement to Marko Kolanovic, the former chief global markets strategist at JPMorgan, who was let go in July - seemingly for being too bearish - and who has spent the past few weeks tweeting reasons why this was the correct stance. It's not clear what Kolanovic intends to do next, and he didn't respond to a request to comment for this article, but he too may resurface with his own firm.
King says his new life is absolutely preferable given the current state of banks. "When I went into banking, the mantra was, 'Our reputation is extremely important to us. We're going to hire first-class people and require them to behave in a first-class way.' By the time I came out 25 years later, it seemed to be: 'Our reputation is extremely important to us. We're going to create such a controlled environment that it's extremely difficult for anyone to do anything,'" he says. "That feeling of an ever smaller front-office supporting an ever larger back-office was inevitably a weight - and obviously applies to more than just research."
Self-employment does not, however, mean complete disentanglement from big institutions' bureaucracies. "As an independent, you have no internal bureaucracy of your own, but end up interfacing very directly with clients', the amount of which varies massively (and is a significant impediment to doing business with larger firms)," says King. "One sent me a 200-question survey as a precondition of doing business. I think I must be the only one-person business on the planet that now has a published anti-slavery policy!"
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