Richard Golian

1995-born. Charles University alum. Head of Performance at Mixit. 10+ years in marketing and data.

Castellano Français Slovenčina

Manage subscription Choose a plan

RSS
Newsletter
New articles to your inbox

Article

Where I Invest Today: Raw Materials, Real Estate, and Leaving the Stock Market

Personal finance, family, shifting priorities
Richard Golian
Richard Golian · 1 561 reads
Hi, I am Richard. On this blog I share my thoughts, not investment advice. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell securities.
Listen to this article
0:00 / 0:00

August 2025

In April, I wrote about how I am no longer as active in the stock market. And that before I can answer the question, “What should I invest in?”, I first need to ask another: “What will the world look like in 2040?”

It is not a bad question—but it is far from the only one I need to ask myself. The next is: “How do I want to live? What makes sense to me today?”

Once I answered those questions honestly, concrete steps followed.

The House I Grew Up In

House investment Banská Bystrica
The attic of the house my grandfather built. Photo taken before renovation began.

I decided to invest in improving family property—specifically, in buying and restoring a house in my hometown, Banská Bystrica. My grandparents built it with their own hands. I spent my childhood there, and today it means a lot to me that I can renovate it while my grandmother is still here.

My grandfather will not see it anymore, but I believe he would be happy. At least as happy as when I used to pick pears for my grandfather’s homemade hruškovica, a traditional Slovak pear spirit. :)

For me, this is not just a real estate investment. It is an investment in family, in myself, and in entirely new experiences.

Continue

Continue reading

Enter your email to unlock this article and join the newsletter. You can unsubscribe anytime.

Disclaimer

This article is intended for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any securities, or a guarantee of future market performance. The views expressed are solely those of the author, who may also be an investor. Investing in financial markets involves risk, and each reader should make their own decisions independently and, if necessary, consult with a licensed professional.

Summary

Two questions guide my decisions: What will the world look like in 2040? And how do I want to live? I reduced my stock market exposure, redirected capital into strategic raw materials, and started restoring my grandparents' house in Banska Bystrica. Not every investment is financial. Some are about identity, family, and the kind of life worth building.
Richard Golian

If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.

Related articles

Building an AI Stock Market Prediction System That Grades Itself

I am building an AI system to predict the S&P 500. It runs on my own machine, uses free public data — yfinance, FRED, the Shiller dataset — and grades every forecast against reality. This series documents the build itself: the decisions, the methodology, the mistakes. What I will eventually share from the running system is a separate question, and an honest one.

26 April 2026·612 reads
The Risk–Reward Principle I Didn’t Explain Clearly in My Article on Cyclical Opportunities

If I take a certain risk, how much can I gain — and how much can I lose?

1 March 2026 ·741 reads
Cyclical Opportunities in the Stock Market

Interesting opportunities often appear where nothing seems to be happening.

29 January 2026·859 reads

More articles

Where the Money Goes When AI Takes the Work

Prague, 13 May 2026. On my way to work I started thinking about something that stayed with me for days. If most routine work on a computer disappears in the next ten years, and a large share of repetitive manual work disappears with it, what happens to the flow of money? Who pays whom for what? Which economic layers will exist, how large will they be, and what relationships will run between them? This is the six-layer map I sketched as an answer.

15 May 2026·40 reads
AI sales forecast: 9 traps so far

Yesterday I could not tear myself away from the computer. When I lifted my head, it was half past eight in the evening. I had been sitting alone upstairs for about three hours.

25 April 2026·582 reads
Will AI take my job?

Will AI take my job? A certified Google trainer told me in June 2024 that my profession would cease to exist. Twenty-two months later, my job title has not changed — but ninety percent of what I do during the day is different. I have delegated more of my thinking to AI agents than I thought possible. I am not afraid. This is why, and what it means for anyone asking the same question.

23 April 2026·364 reads
€50,000 Quote vs. Two Hours with Claude Code

One hour. Fifty-five minutes. That is how long it took to build what a Czech software firm had quoted at over €50,000. I built it with Claude Code. Not a prototype. Not a proof of concept. A working tool — the one the company actually needed. By the evening of the same day, it was running on staging. This is not about Claude Code. It is about what Claude Code exposes.

18 April 2026·719 reads
Is AI Making Us Dumber?

I have conducted roughly one hundred and fifty practical interviews over the past four years. Fifty for data specialist roles. A hundred for advertising and performance marketing specialists. Almost every one of them involved sitting down with a candidate over a practical task — something close to a real problem we actually need to solve at the company. Not theory. Not trivia. Applied problem-solving. Over time, I started noticing a pattern.

14 April 2026·671 reads
What AI Hides From You

Before you can teach AI to understand anything, you need to see what it is hiding from you.

11 April 2026·668 reads
When Your AI Agent Joins the Team

The moment other people needed access to it, the problem changed completely. It was no longer about whether the agent could learn. It was about who gets to teach it.

8 April 2026·825 reads
Training an AI Agent That Learns Between Sessions

I wanted to build an agent that doesn't just assist. One that acts.

4 April 2026·875 reads
Local AI Model Limitations: Why I Switched from Ollama to Claude for Autonomous Agents

This is what I learned about local vs cloud AI, and why I switched to Claude Code.

3 April 2026·1 476 reads
Full AI agents or fully offline.

Four days in Catalonia. No computer, no AI, almost no social media. I bought this notebook so that I could write down what I would think about, and what I would come across and learn on the trip.

10.5.2026·322 reads
NEWSLETTER
What I write about, what I am working on, what I learned.
Sent the first Sunday of the month. Unsubscribe anytime.