About
British, born 1983, based in Teesside and travelling often for business and family. Law-trained, technically fluent, and equally at home in an investment committee, a commercial negotiation or a codebase.
I started in frontier private equity in Baku, Azerbaijan, working on deal origination, due diligence and portfolio companies in an environment where the rulebook was still being written. That is where I learned that the interesting returns sit where the information is hardest to get, and that most of the work is verification rather than analysis.
From 2010 to 2016 I worked in investment management and private equity in London, and I ran Optionality, an appointed representative firm helping emerging fund managers and frontier-market companies raise capital. In 2012 I took the CISI Certificate in Investment Management. In 2013 I joined Logik Communications, becoming its Commercial Director the following year, which put me into wholesale telecoms: a high-velocity business of counterparty negotiation, routing economics and margin management. That is the reason I understand infrastructure as a trade rather than as a concept.
In 2017 I founded Bartr, building distributed-ledger technology for managing global telecoms networks. It raised, it hired well, it won a place in a Horizon 2020 European Commission consortium, and it did not work. There is a page on this site about what happened and what I would do differently, because it was the most expensive education I have had.
In 2019 I founded HW Legacy Group, a UK family investment company, with my brothers Martin and Michael. It holds property in the Tees Valley through a set of SPVs. In 2020 I bought a pub in Billingham, which turned into something else entirely. In 2026 I incorporated Georgian Land Limited as an acquisition vehicle for land in the Republic of Georgia, and I continue to run Eranos Partners, a cross-border investment and advisory business.
Alongside all of it I build software. Not as a hobby that sounds good in a biography, but because the leverage in a small operation now comes from systems that do the work, and I would rather build those than hire around them.
Qualifications
LL.B (Hons) Solicitors Exempting Degree, 2:1
Northumbria University, 2006. The exempting degree combines the academic stage of legal education with the Legal Practice Course. I did not go on to a training contract and I have never been admitted to the roll, so I am law-trained rather than a practising lawyer. I use that training constantly in structuring, negotiation and dispute work, and I am careful about the distinction because the law is careful about it.
CISI Certificate in Investment Management
Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment, 2012.
How I read markets
Three frameworks do most of the work. The Fourth Turning generational model, which says institutions decay and are rebuilt on a roughly eighty-year rhythm and that we are late in the decay. The Georgist eighteen-year land cycle, which explains more about property and credit than any macro forecast I have read. And credit dynamics: the observation that the monetary system we grew up inside is in its terminal phase, which makes holding cash a position rather than a neutral resting state.
None of these are contrarian poses. They are the base case I actually invest from, and if they are wrong I lose money, which is the only test of a framework that counts.