Skin in the game

No Pain, No Gain !! 💪💪

Hi 👋 welcome to Recompound Blog - The Investment Mindshift. We help you better your mindset on investment and economics one article at a time. More: Our Values | Advisory | Get to know us | Picks

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As a business owner, every day I wake up on a big mission. To build the investment advisory space in Indonesia? I am more practical than Toby. As business owners, I want more customers. In the investment space, however, there are all sorts of investment offerings, stock tips, and trading plans that service providers can offer to people. While our work setup is notably different at Recompound, it is commonly misunderstood.

I mean come on, we have all the recipe to be misunderstood be mistaken by another “stocktip channel / provider” by people:

Giving buy and sell signal?
Bro, ChatGPT, Deepseek and AI are here. That’s a 2015 business model

WhatsApp group? That’s virtually the setup of all stocktip givers

Pay when profit? Huh, doesn’t that sound like a scam?

And you trust your clients to say the truth if they have bought and sold the stocks??

You don’t get a business owner bashing his own business appearance every day now do you? 😓

Ignore the gimmicks, and the setup. This is the summary in one simple sentence

We treat our clients’ money like our own - because it actually is our own.

I was recently yet in another conversation with a prospective client who asked a simple but revealing question:

“Do you give different stock recommendations to different clients?”

My answer was: No, we don’t.

We recommend stocks to our clients — because we invest in those very same stocks ourselves. Not just in tiny amount either — we, the founders, invest a significant portion of our own net worth in the stocks we recommend.

We don’t believe in saying one thing and doing another.

We eat our own cooking. And that’s why we have real skin in the game.

Indeed, the WhatsApp Groups, Buy-Sell signals, and Performance Fees are accessories

They are simply tools to make your workflow to be as familiar as possible.

• Performance fees have been around since Warren Buffett was young and handsome. We need not reinvent the wheel, on the business model.

• WhatsApp groups to manage people have been utilized in many service providers. It provides an excellent human touch for our customers to feel at ease and in touch with us.

But get this, the “main feature” or the “real deal” is having skin in the game. Otherwise, the buy and sell signal is not valuable. Because our incentives are not aligned with our customers’.

In short we are not just advisors — we’re Co-Investors

Unlike traditional financial advisors who categorize clients into “low risk” / “medium risk” / “high risk” buckets and recommend different products accordingly, we see things differently.

We believe an investment opportunity worth investing should be the lowest risk possible while still offering the highest potential return — not just for our clients, but for us too.

Because it is our money on the line. If we wouldn’t put a sizeable portion of our own wealth into a stock, we won’t recommend it.

I think that this alignment is not just ethical — it’s essential.

So what we are saying is that we’re not Gods who know it all. We’re Humans — But Disciplined Ones

We won’t pretend to be perfect. We make mistakes too. Not all of our analysis is 100% correct. A public company that has a sizeable market capitalisation is huge and it is impossible to know every single detail about a company. Unexpected and black swans events can and are expected to happen to companies.

This is why we would strive to focus on what’s important and what’s knowable and only invest when there is a large Margin of Safety.

This in our view allows us to mitigate risks and contain mistakes that happen from time to time. So our strategy is built on preservation first, upside second.

Even if a stock doesn’t play out the way we hoped, it doesn’t derail y(our) future.

And when the next great opportunity comes — which it always does — our clients are in a strong position to bounce back and reach new all-time highs in their net worth.

Our Philosophy: Enduring Wealth, Not Fast Hype

Some people call our approach too slow. Some say it’s boring.

And to be honest, that’s exactly the point.

We are firm believers in the principles of value investing — as practiced by Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, and Howard Marks.

Their track record isn’t just impressive for a few years. Their strategies have endured through decades — building and protecting wealth across economic cycles, bubbles, crashes, and fads.

Our focus has always been on managing risk, buying with large margin of safety, and avoiding unnecessary short-term market timing.

In our view, those chasing hype may get rich for a while — maybe even 10 years — but history shows that hype rarely builds lasting wealth.

Just look at Jesse Livermore, one of the most legendary traders in history. He made — and lost — several fortunes because he couldn’t contain his own greed. He died broke.

Our Stocks May Be “Boring” — But They’ve Kept Us (and Our Clients) Safe

We’ve heard it before:

“Why are your stock picks so boring?”

“Why not recommend trending sectors or the next hot IPO ?”

Many investors who chased the flashiest stories — whether it’s speculative tech stocks, trendy IPOs, or financial influencers promoting high-yield Peer to Peer Lending platforms — found themselves stranded when reality hit.

Our stock selection may seem boring — and to some, even our returns might seem boring. We’re not here to post screenshots of triple-digit percentage gains or show off luxury cars on social media.

What we attempt to deliver is something far more valuable and rare in this industry: consistent, above-risk-free returns, year after year, grounded in logic and discipline.

We’re proud to say that so far, 94% of our clients’ portfolios have outperformed Indonesia’s risk-free rate and equity mutual funds over time — without taking wild risks or making reckless bets.

For our clients who are still in the 6%, we feel you & sincerely apologize 🙏, we are trying our best to get your portfolio into the green!

We don’t try to sell a dream of overnight riches, because in investing, the people who promise you a Ferrari usually earn it off your money, not their own.

We’ve deliberately avoided that path. And that discipline is the reason we’ve survived, and why our clients’ portfolios have remained resilient.

In investing, avoiding the big mistakes & not dying is often more important than chasing every opportunity recklessly.

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We Don’t Get Paid Sizeably Unless You Win

This is also why our business model is performance-based.

You pay a small one-time registration fee, and after that — we only earn when your portfolio grows. That’s it.

We’ve rejected the fixed subscription model that many advisory services or stock groups use, where they get paid no matter what happens to your returns.

We are also careful with associating ourselves from financial influencers who promote investment vehicles that they don’t invest in themselves. Don’t get me wrong, not all influencers are misleading and bad. Some are genuinely helpful and informative and they are very much needed and looked up to.

But the money and kickbacks can be a potential pitfall for endorsing fundamentally unsound products to mass market, citing unrealistic expectations and ignoring hidden risks that are not clear without much due diligence.

Building Something That Lasts

I know at the start that I said that I wake up in the morning to get customers. But maybe Toby is right. We started Recompound not just to run an advisory business — but to build a legacy.

Indonesia deserves an investment advisory firm that actually gives a damn. That operates on principle, not pressure. One that sees trust not as a marketing slogan, but embedded in the purpose of the core product.

We don’t take shortcuts. We don’t pretend to know everything. But we do know this:

If it’s not good enough for our own money, it’s not good enough for our clients’. That’s what it means to have skin in the game.

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Ready to Invest with Partners Who Are In It With You?

If you’re looking for an advisory that genuinely cares about your wealth — not just in words, but with real skin in the game — you’re in the right place.

• Ready to get started? You can register directly at register.recompound.id

• Prefer to talk first? Book a free call with our founders at calendly.com/recompound/budi-ryan

We’d love to learn more about you — and show you how we invest alongside you, not ahead of you.