Paul Wan

This industry is hard on the person inside the professional — I've lived every version of its pressure across twenty-plus years: the sell-side grind, with its poll seasons when the votes didn't come and your worth is measured in public; the buy-side P&L; the pod. The heaviest years by far were the five-plus I spent independent — founder, CIO, licensed Responsible Officer — with no salary, no institution behind me, my own name on the regulatory line, and client capital that could walk at short notice. And the pressure was never only professional: I left Hong Kong as a schoolboy for the UK, spent a decade in Japan as the perpetual outsider, and came home after sixteen years to a city I barely recognized. I know what it is to feel foreign everywhere — including where you're from. Then life delivered its own bear market: a serious illness and other hard seasons in life. What followed was a deliberate, years-long rebuild. I sat with psychiatrists, psychologists, and counsellors; tried both Western and herbal practice; learned meditation properly; returned to serious hiking; worked through long stretches of insomnia and depression. What I came out with wasn't a quick fix but an architecture — physical and mental health rebuilt together — and, most importantly, happiness genuinely regained. I also came out with a conviction: almost every professional I consulted was skilled, but nearly none had lived our world. They could address the symptom; they couldn't recognize what a bad vote season, a shrinking book, a stalled venture, or an identity fused to a P&L actually does to a person. That's what I offer — a peer who has been through the storm and done the recovery work, for people in this industry going through theirs: on a desk, carrying a book, building a firm with your own name on the door, or starting over in a city far from home. Let me say the important part plainly: I'm not a therapist, and I'll tell you honestly if I think you need one; what I do sits alongside licensed care, never in place of it. What we work on together are the things this life quietly erodes — sleep, health, marriages and family squeezed by the job, the dislocation of living and working across cultures, who you are beyond the P&L — and the real crossroads: endure, change seats, strike out on your own, move across the world, or walk away. I've stood at every one of those forks myself. You won't have to explain the vocabulary or the stakes before you can talk about yourself. In my experience, that alone changes everything.