Questions.
Straight answers.

I am a CFA, ACCA, and CIMA charterholder with an MBA from IIT Roorkee. Every exam cleared on the first attempt. Ranked number one in the Middle East for ACCA Advanced Financial Management. Above 90th percentile in the CFA exams.

I have spent over two decades executing complex cross-border transactions across four countries. I have lived and worked in Dubai, Singapore, London, and India. I understand how money is taxed, structured, protected, and moved across jurisdictions. That is the credential.

Over 20 cross-border, high-value transactions totalling deal value exceeding USD 1 billion. These were not advisory roles from the sidelines. I sourced, structured, negotiated, and closed them. I have reviewed the work of Big 4 firms on financial and tax due diligence, negotiated complex legal documents in rooms full of top-tier law firm lawyers, and walked away from deals when the numbers did not hold up after scrutiny.

I am based in the Gulf region and have lived and worked in Dubai, Singapore, London, and India. Sessions happen over video call. Location is not a constraint.

I work full-time as a senior finance professional. Taking paid advisory work on the side would create a conflict with my employer, so I do not do it. What I can offer is two weekend sessions a month to people whose situations I find genuinely interesting.

There is no business here. No pipeline, no upsell, no referral fee. I do it because I find it worthwhile and because most people with serious money get genuinely terrible advice.

Because quality matters more than volume. If I took on more, I would not be able to give each situation the attention it deserves. Two sessions done properly is worth more than ten done quickly.

You send me your complete financial picture in advance using a structured template I provide. I analyse it before we meet. The session itself is spent on my assessment and recommendations, not on collecting information. You ask questions. I give straight answers. You leave with a clear view of where you stand and what I would do in your place.

No. I give you my analysis and recommendations. What you do with them is your decision. I hold no mandate, no discretion, and no power of attorney over anyone's assets.

I am not. SEBI registration is designed for people running a paid advisory business in India. I am not doing that. I am a full-time professional based outside India offering pro-bono analysis to two people a month.

For the record, the SEBI Investment Adviser qualification is a straightforward exam. To give you a sense of what serious finance actually involves: options pricing requires you to understand partial differential equations, stochastic calculus, and how volatility surfaces behave across strike prices and maturities. Most people in finance cannot explain why a bond's yield moves inversely to its price, let alone the difference between the coupon rate, the running yield, and the yield to maturity, or what an inverted yield curve signals and why it has historically preceded recessions.

No. It means it is not regulated under Indian law, which you should be aware of and which is stated clearly in the disclaimer. My qualifications are internationally recognised and come with enforceable codes of conduct. The CFA Institute's Code of Ethics requires me to act with integrity and place professional standards above personal interest. That applies regardless of SEBI registration.

They are genuinely different disciplines and each fills a gap the others leave open.

The CFA is the gold standard for investment analysis and portfolio management. It covers financial markets, asset valuation, portfolio construction, risk management, and ethics in depth. It requires rigorous knowledge of statistics, probability, and quantitative methods. Without that mathematical foundation, you cannot properly evaluate a derivatives position, model a discounted cash flow, or understand what a Sharpe ratio is actually measuring. But the CFA does not make you an expert at reading financial statements the way an accountant reads them. A CFA charterholder without deep accounting knowledge can miss things buried in the notes to the accounts that an experienced auditor would catch immediately.

The ACCA fills that gap. It is one of the most rigorous accounting qualifications in the world and covers financial reporting, audit, taxation, and governance in detail. It trains you to read what a balance sheet is actually saying, including the parts that are structured to obscure rather than reveal. But accounting alone does not give you the tools to say whether an equity is cheap or expensive, or how to build a portfolio around an investor's real liabilities.

The CIMA adds the management accounting dimension: cost structures, strategic financial management, and how finance connects to actual business decisions. It is the operational layer that ties financial theory to what happens inside real organisations.

The MBA from IIT Roorkee adds strategic and general management context. Finance does not exist in isolation from markets, competition, and how organisations actually behave.

On X, YouTube, and Instagram at @iamHarjesh. I publish a weekly market recap on this site every weekend. Longer articles on personal finance are in the Articles section.

No. Posts are observations and commentary, not personalised advice. They are useful for understanding how I think. They are not a substitute for a proper assessment of your specific situation.