We founded Anselme Capital in 1998 on a simple idea: that clients, to us, are friends whose money we happen to manage. Twenty-eight years later, that’s still how the firm feels — small, personal, and turned toward the people it serves.
Marc started a technology company, was a member of an angel investment club, and volunteered with SCORE advising startups. Tech investing is what brought him to investing in the first place. Alex grew up in the Bay Area and did internships for tech startups before joining the firm. Between them they have forty years in the market: Marc with thirty, Alex with ten. Market cycles are long, and an advisor who hasn’t lived through a crash doesn’t have a full deck.
If you work for a startup, or started one yourself, we speak your language.
The logo is a diamond enclosing an ascending peak — a nod to Marc’s years in the Alps and to the way we think about risk. On a mountain you don’t pretend the weather is safe; you prepare for it, and preparation is what makes the climb calm. We manage portfolios the same way: volatility gets as much of our attention as return, because a plan you can hold through a storm is the only plan that works.
How we investMarc’s path to Anselme Capital ran through the French Alps, four countries, two sciences, and a decade of ski racing; Alex’s through Amsterdam, evenings spent learning math with his father, and behavioral economics. Those experiences shaped how we think about investing today.
Marc grew up in a small alpine town where his father forged mountaineering gear — including the first metal-handled ice axe. Summers meant clearing ski trails in the forest; winters meant racing all five alpine disciplines. In the mountains, you never pretend the weather is safe. You prepare for it.
The idea underneath every portfolio we build: respect the storm and be ready before it arrives.
He earned a master’s in chemical engineering at the Institut National Polytechnique of Toulouse while racing the international FIS circuit in the nearby Pyrenees and reaching the national college championship. What surprised him was how much he loved coaching the team.
A habit that would define his life’s work: teaching what you know to the person next to you.
At Georgia Tech, Marc earned a master’s in bioreactor design and a Ph.D. in thermodynamics, with a minor in mathematics (differential equations) — years spent gathering hard data to build more accurate predictive models.
The training behind our evidence-based method: trust what the data shows, not what the story promises.
As a scientist at Shell Research, Marc found that a protein from Antarctic fish could stop crystals from clogging deep-sea pipelines — work that earned two patents and a top company research award. An MBA on the side introduced him to economics and finance, and investing quietly became the hobby he couldn’t set down.
His second career began here, with real curiosity about how markets work.
At Shell’s central office he hedged overnight oil-price swings for the company’s London trading desk and tracked the rise of the internet. Before long he was spending up to four hours a day on investment research. The hobby had outgrown the job.
Managing downside risk was no longer theoretical. It had become part of the work.
Marc began his investment career as a stockbroker with Paine Webber. Working directly with clients, he saw how much people needed honest, clear, unbiased financial advice — and how often the traditional brokerage model failed to provide it.
That experience helped clarify the kind of firm he wanted to build: one centered on advice rather than sales.
Marc left the traditional brokerage world — where advisers are paid to sell — and founded Anselme Capital. He had watched how rarely people were offered honest, clear, unbiased advice, and built a fee-only firm to do nothing else. (Fee-only means we are paid by our clients, never by commissions on what we sell.)
The principle has remained the same since 1998: clear, unbiased advice without a sales incentive behind it.
Running the firm from abroad, Marc hosted a nightly cable-TV program on U.S. markets, going live after the New York close — once even coaxing a nervous ten-year-old Alex onto the set to explain the savings he had invested in a medical-device company. Living between two financial cultures reinforced something Marc had already begun to see: how people feel about risk is deeply personal, and the United States has an unusual capacity to turn technological change into economic opportunity.
Two ideas that still influence the portfolios today: risk is personal, and innovation can create long-term opportunity.
The family settled in the Bay Area for its schools, its climate, and its community of engineers, founders, and investors. The firm’s method matured alongside: portfolios moved toward evidence-based investing grounded in academic research, embracing Dimensional Funds and their factor-based approach. (Factors are well-studied traits — like a company’s size or relative value — that decades of research link to long-run returns.)
Conviction met discipline: back innovation, but build the portfolio on evidence, not hunches.
While mentoring founders through SCORE, Marc worked with Alex — then studying market finance at SKEMA — to design a proprietary algorithm that searches nearly three decades of monthly data across some thirty asset classes for portfolios built to be held through changing markets. They named them Giboulées™, after the sudden alpine spring squalls of Marc’s childhood. In 2016, Alex joined the firm.
After decades of refining his approach, Marc found a new collaborator in his son.
Everything above is Marc’s road to the firm. Alex’s developed alongside it — shaped by a different generation and a different journey across the Atlantic. Over time, the two paths converged around a shared approach to investing and, eventually, a shared firm.
Alex was born in Amsterdam into a family that moved frequently across the Atlantic — the Netherlands, the United States, Paris — before he’d finished grade school. He grew up switching languages, currencies, and classrooms.
He learned early that the way people think about money and risk is strongly influenced by where and how they live.
From first grade, his father sat him down for long evenings of math. He wasn’t always a willing student — but Marc had a way of pushing Alex past mental blocks to teach him things like how to add numbers from the left column first for faster mental math.
He learned that hard ideas can yield to patience — the same conviction behind every plain-language explanation the firm gives a client.
When Alex was seven, Marc created a pretend savings account for him and tracked it in Excel. To make saving hard to resist, he gave the account an exaggerated interest rate — sometimes 100 or 200 percent. Every time Alex put money in, he watched it grow. This simple exercise changed the way Alex thought about money. The benefits of saving and compound growth became immediate and easy to understand.
The firm still encourages parents to use this approach when teaching their own children about saving and investing.
At ten, his dad put him on his Paris cable show to explain, live, on air, what he owned and why — the small portfolio he’d invested his own savings in. He was a sweaty, nervous wreck, and he learned early he would always rather do the work than stand in the spotlight.
It was also an unusually early introduction to explaining investment decisions out loud.
At the University of Oregon he reached economics the scenic way — computer science first, then psychology, then philosophy — before landing on behavioral economics: the study of how real people, not textbooks, actually decide about money.
It gave an academic framework to something he had observed for years: the human side of financial decision-making.
He went on to SKEMA Business School in the South of France to study financial markets and investments — a program built to turn out day traders, which was not what he was after. At graduation, the realization arrived plainly: he wanted work with a personal dimension, not a life spent alone with numbers and charts. What interested him was the other side of the job — helping clients make progress and knowing he had contributed to it.
It reinforced one of the firm’s core beliefs: investing is ultimately about people, not just portfolios.
His graduate thesis studied home bias — the way investors over-concentrate in their own country’s assets for reasons that are more psychological than rational. That work didn’t stay on the shelf: its findings are built into the firm’s optimization algorithm today and inform how we account for currency risk for clients with cross-border lives.
The research became part of the practical framework the firm still uses today.
Still in school, Alex and his father set out to answer a single question: over the long run, which mix of asset classes best balances return against volatility? Run across nearly three decades of monthly data and some thirty asset classes, it became the Giboulées™ family of portfolios — built to be held through changing markets and named for the sudden alpine spring squalls of Marc’s childhood.
Marc’s investment philosophy and Alex’s quantitative work came together in a method they could build on.
Before Anselme Capital, Alex worked at A.M.A Selections, where he was drawn to a particular kind of problem: taking slow, cumbersome processes and finding a better way to do them. He automated an accounting procedure that took sixteen hours each month, reducing it to three, and built a receipt-management system that several businesses eventually adopted.
This early work demonstrated a strength that would become central to his work at Anselme Capital: understanding how a system works, identifying where it can be improved, and using technology to make it more efficient, reliable, and useful.
In 2016, Alex joined the firm his father founded in 1998. Today he is its CFO, Series 65 licensed, and works to keep Anselme Capital efficient and responsive. Away from the desk, he’s an avid, if by his own account not especially gifted, basketball player, tennis player, and cook.
The math lessons above the garage evolved into a broader role: helping build and improve the systems the firm relies on today.
Marc works from the San Francisco Bay Area; Alex works from Seattle. We have clients in Rhode Island, New York, Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii — including U.S. tax residents living abroad. We visit both coasts regularly and work in English and French.
What matters more than a nearby office is that you like your advisor and that the conversation is easy, useful, and worth having. You can judge that over a twenty-minute video call. Don’t pick an office. Pick a person.
It’s a fair question for a small firm, and part of why our structure matters. Your assets are held in your own name at Charles Schwab or Interactive Brokers — they never sit with us, so they don’t depend on us being here. Marc and Alex each know every client relationship and can step in for the other.
We also maintain a written business-continuity and succession plan, so that if neither of us could continue, your accounts would be managed or transitioned in an orderly way — never stranded. Ask us and we’ll walk you through it.