Marcos de Vasconcellos starts to sign an investment column at Folha

As of this Monday (7), the journalist and founder of Market Monitor Marcos de Vasconcellos will join the team of columnists for the printed version of sheet. His texts will continue with the topics covered in his columns on the site, where he already published on Thursdays: Stock Exchange, companies and investment.

Vasconcellos will be in the space currently occupied by financial planner Marcia Dessen, who will continue to collaborate with the newspaper’s website on Sundays.

The idea, according to Vasconcellos, is for his column to be a space for reflection on the financial market, “to create insights and explain movements to the reader”. The focus will be on the more traditional equity market, although fixed income opportunities and new types of investment such as cryptocurrencies are also on their radar.

The investment area has always been of interest to the journalist, but he began to consider working exclusively in the sector in 2017, when he noticed a rush by Brazilians to the Stock Exchange. That year there was a first jump in individuals on the B3, from 564,528 in the previous year to 620,313. Shy, close to what would come: today, there are more than 5 million.

At the time, Vasconcellos was editor-in-chief of the legal news site Conjur, where he had been since late 2011, when he left the sheet —it was at the newspaper that he began his career, through the Training Program, after graduating from UFF (Universidade Federal Fluminense) in 2010.

The Market Monitor started unpretentiously: a newsletter for colleagues with content on investment. Interested in programming, he created robots to pull data from companies and read balance sheets more efficiently.

Currently, the company has a team to cover the sector and an investment advisory arm, aimed precisely at those who are starting to enter this world. Starting to invest without knowledge and treating the market “like a casino”, he says, leads to big crashes. According to him, it is necessary to play the game of professionals, which is the balance.

“Trying to predict the future usually goes wrong. What you need to do is create a strategy that is useful for all scenarios,” he says. “It has a core logic behind it, which is to create investments that protect each other over time.”

Understanding this alone requires time to study and should be seen as a kind of work, but it is not impossible, according to him. “As an individual, you are fully capable of achieving real diversification with your own investments,” he says.