Patrick Bourbon, CFA, CFP®
Patrick is your personal Chief Financial Officer. He is knowledgeable in preserving and growing your wealth, as well as risk management, asset allocation, and mutual funds / ETF selection having relationships with more than 400 investment managers and having selected funds / ETF for more than 20 years. His aspiration is to make sure that you have enough assets as long as you live so that you can enjoy a comfortable retirement at your chosen lifestyle.
Patrick's main goal is to give you the best tools possible to improve your financial decisions given your loss tolerance. He provides knowledge and customized strategies in order to make effective diversified investments. He explains the possibilities so that you can make wiser and better long-term decisions depending on your unique situation. He hopes to bring organization to your financial life.
French by birth, Patrick has personal experience with the life and technical financial planning opportunities and challenges faced by expatriates (around 50% of his clients are Europeans living in the U.S. or Americans living abroad). He has lived overseas half his life, visited 40 countries, and enjoys a cross-cultural marriage. He helps you reach your global goals, and go beyond the legal complexity and cross-border tax/currency planning.
Patrick’s passion for investments started in his early teens, when his mother took him for visit of the Paris stock exchange. At that time, he was given a $2 bill. From that point on, he became fascinated by currency management and he started to check its value in French Francs every week. His interest in stocks grew when he created an investment club in 1997.
Patrick strongly believes in giving back to Chicago. He is very engaged in Chicago's civic community, actively serving as chairman of Stuart Investments, member of the Board of Advisors of the Stuart School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the treasurer of the South Shore Drill Team. Since 2006, he has been the President of UFEC/AFFC. In 2014, he was elected “Conseiller Consulaire” with the Consulate of France.
Patrick loves sports. For 10 years, he has participated in ski and tennis competitions, winning more than 25 contests. Competition has taught him concentration, persistence, discipline, self-control, humility, and confidence. It has helped him understand that defeats / failure experiences are to be expected and are good learning opportunities. Ultimate success can be attained by learning from past experiences. Sports and its mental side was a constant positive and influence in his life. Sometimes, the main adversary is yourself. Like in entrepreneurship, you need discipline and determination to compete. Move quickly from past mistakes or you will miss opportunities.
He enjoys wine tastings (Pomerol and Champagne are his favorites) and traveling. So far, he’s been to more than 30 countries and speaks English, French, and Spanish. He also studied Japanese, Russian and Greek. Patrick also has a French accent that he polishes every morning.
When it comes to investing, Patrick believes in discipline, precision, simplification, slowing down, independent thinking, having a systematic process, keeping questioning past decisions, being methodical, using checklists, and relying on data (what it says and what it does not say). He is focused, pragmatic, analytical, cautious, humble, and believes that there is always room for improvement and seek ways to get better.
