One year of live mandate work across MENA, Africa and South Asia.

I cold emailed the Managing Director of a Dubai M&A boutique in April 2025. He replied eleven minutes later.

I spent that summer at CBE Capital in Addis Ababa, on Ethiopia’s new securities exchange, so I started at Trident in August, the month that internship ended. A year later I am still there.

Trident is small, and that is the point. There is no research desk to pass work to, and no associate layer to absorb the vague briefs. When a Managing Director is preparing for a meeting in Istanbul on Tuesday and needs to know who might buy a Turkish fabric dyeing business, the question arrives on Sunday and the answer has to be defensible by Monday night.

Since then that has meant a comparable company and precedent transaction library for the global cement sector, built region by region. A full accretion and dilution model for a 130 million dollar acquisition. Buyer and target screens across textiles, food, industrials, energy storage, insurance brokerage and e-commerce. Company profiles built from audited accounts. And rolling coverage of more than 500 transactions across five sectors, used by the Managing Director to source live mandates.

What that gave me is not range for its own sake. It is that everything I produced went to a Managing Director and a Senior Associate who had run these mandates before, and who told me plainly when I was wrong.

A 300 hectare almond orchard in Georgia, in its second year of production, carried a discounted cash flow valuation at roughly 20 million dollars. I was asked to check it. The check turned into a rebuild, because the number doing the work was not in the forecast.

The forecast itself was defensible: roughly six million dollars of revenue and a 75 percent EBITDA margin at steady state in four years. The discount rate was the problem. One imported rate cannot price an orchard that earns in lari and is financed in dollars, so I built two, under a 20 percent debt capital structure, using Damodaran's agricultural beta, currency specific risk free rates and borrowing costs, Georgia country risk and a project stage premium. They came out at 13.3 percent in USD and 16.5 percent in GEL. The spread between them is the currency, priced rather than assumed.

Then I checked the asset against the market twice. Fifteen listed agricultural producers gave a median EV to EBITDA. Eight almond and pistachio transactions under 100 million dollars gave a value per hectare, which is the unit a buyer of an orchard actually thinks in.

The easy read is that the orchard is worth 25 million and the cash flow is conservative. I do not think that is right. Every name in both sets is a mature asset at full yield, in a country a buyer can underwrite without a premium. This orchard is in year two of a four year ramp, in Georgia. The gap is not upside waiting to be booked. It is the market's price for the remaining yield ramp, country risk and execution, and the honest thing to do with it is to name it rather than move the cash flow up to meet it.

That is the general point, and it is the one I would defend. When two methods disagree, the disagreement is usually the answer to a better question than the one you were asked.

Enterprise value per ton is the metric a strategic buyer actually thinks in, because it prices the plant rather than the earnings stream. Africa is the sharpest read on the page. Listed African producers carry 151 dollars of enterprise value per ton of capacity, while capacity that has actually changed hands went for 77 dollars, roughly half. Asia and the Middle East are the only regions where buyers paid a premium per ton.

That is the same finding the EBITDA tables give, expressed in the unit that matters when an asset is being recapitalized rather than bought outright.

Reading the two tables against each other is where the library earns its keep. In four of the six regions, control changes hands above where the listed producers trade, which is what a control premium is supposed to look like. North America pays 22 percent more on EBITDA, Asia 12 percent, Latin America 8 percent, Europe roughly nothing.

The Middle East and Africa go the other way. African assets transact at 6.89 times EBITDA against 8.27 times where listed African producers trade, a 17 percent discount. The Middle East is wider still at 22 percent. Control in those two markets is moving for less than the public market pays for the same cash flows.

That is a small sample and I would not lean on it harder than it will bear, since the African precedent EBITDA median rests on four disclosed multiples. But it is the shape you would expect where sellers are motivated and the buyer list is short, and it is consistent with what the African precedent set shows about who has actually been buying. Across the coverage program I have now tracked more than five hundred transactions.

I examined post earnings announcement drift across more than 60,000 United States earnings events, using Python and empirical asset pricing methods. Post earnings drift is the tendency for prices to keep moving in the direction of an earnings surprise for weeks after the announcement, which should not happen if information is absorbed at once.

The answer was front loaded but incomplete adjustment. Moving from the worst surprise decile to the best is worth about 8.4 percentage points in the two days around the announcement, and a further 3.4 points over the following sixty trading days. The drift is statistically there. It is also mostly gone by the time transaction costs, size constraints and factor controls are applied, which is a more useful result than a clean anomaly would have been.

The interest is not academic. The gap between how markets are expected to behave and how investors actually process information is where systematic strategies live, and it is the reason I am drawn to rules based investing rather than discretionary stock picking.

Separately, I captained a team in the Bloomberg ADNOC Trading Challenge, finishing in the top ten overall on an event driven strategy, with a 17 out of 18 trade success rate and 5.2 percent outperformance against the ADSMI index over a single month.

I was born and raised in Ethiopia, where questions about development, institutions and access to capital are not abstract. They shape which businesses can grow, which ideas get funded, and how opportunity is distributed. That is what drew me to economics and finance in the first place, not as technical disciplines but as tools for understanding how businesses, investors, governments and markets interact.

At NYU Abu Dhabi I studied Economics with a concentration in Finance, graduating magna cum laude with a 3.96 grade point average on a full merit scholarship. The university put me in classrooms with more than 100 nationalities, so even technical questions were rarely seen through one market or one culture. Living in Abu Dhabi gave me a close view of the Gulf becoming a global center for capital and trade.

A June term in Berlin added a European lens on political economy and the institutions that shape markets. A study away semester at NYU Stern in New York sharpened the technical side: equity valuation, mergers and acquisitions, investment banking and private equity, advanced corporate finance, asset pricing and derivatives, Islamic finance and financial econometrics. Moving across Ethiopia, Abu Dhabi, Berlin and New York made my education comparative by nature.

I am saying that here rather than at the top of the page because I have not yet earned the right to lead with it. What I do have is the reason.

Most Shariah compliant equity products are either expensive discretionary management or an index tracker with a screen bolted on, and very little sits between the two. Systematic investing and Islamic finance share a structure that makes them unusually compatible, because both are rules based and both require you to state in advance what you will and will not own. Hijra Bank taught me that the constraint belongs in the instrument. The capstone taught me where systematic edge actually comes from.

The immediate ambition is more basic: to become an excellent investor and adviser. To understand businesses deeply, evaluate risk without losing sight of opportunity, and help direct capital toward markets that stay under researched despite being worth the work.