A few days ago, economist Álvaro Bandeira was going up in his building’s elevator, in the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Gávea, when he was approached by a neighbor. Like most tenants there, she knows the nature of his work from his frequent television and newspaper interviews. The neighbor wanted to know if he was well, if he wasn’t working too much and feeling stressed out. “Working a lot, yes. Stressed out? No”, he answered, with his customary peaceful countenance.

Considering his routine as director and chief economist at Ágora, Brazil’s leading home broker, and the stock market’s volatility these days, one could reach the conclusion that calm is truly a strong personality trait of Bandeira’s. He arrives at work at 7:15 A.M., after reading the papers and tuning in to Bloomberg TV at home. During the next hour, he immerses himself in websites and international markets to write an article that will be published on the broker’s Web portal at 8:30 A.M.. If darkness looms over the day, with brutal falls in Asia and Europe, for example, he doesn’t even have anyone to talk to. “At that hour, nobody has gotten in yet”, he says with resignation.

The entire day will be a rush and will include recording three bulletins for Ágora TV, two for TV Aeroporto and one for Globo Online. “The information is absolutely continuous; I receive and process it at the same time”, he says. “Analyzing and passing on information quickly is important, to explain what’s going on to investors and try to calm them down.” Bandeira’s task is a difficult one.

To achieve this task in his explanations, Bandeira relies on the support of his team and on 38 years of capital market expertise. Even though, upon enrolling at Rio de Janeiro’s Federal University (UFRJ), he planned to become a “pure” economist, who would work for the government or in academics, Bandeira ended up hooked on the capital market during his first internship at the bank Brascan. When he threatened to move on to a different internship, at Ipea, he was invited to become an investment analyst at the bank. “I never stopped from there. The capital market became a passion, an addiction”, he says. “What seduces me is the dynamic, the possibility of reading between the lines, making discoveries and changing course.”

It was thanks to the precision, and profusion, of successes that Bandeira started to stand out as an investment manager at the start of his career. At Chase Manhattan’s Lar Brasileiro bank, the fund he managed led the “most profitable” ranking for two consecutive years. When he switched to Bamerindus, he was able to take his investment fund from 14th to 6th place in just a few months. The following year, he was already a leader at his new home. His experience as a corporate analyst from 1971 to 1974 helped him in asset valuation, though at the time most companies did not excel in transparency of information disclosure.

“At my first interview as an analyst, the company’s vice-president said right from the start that he wasn’t going to answer a thing”, Bandeira says. He didn’t give up, after all the job was better than his previous one, in which he spent the day jotting down quotations “chanted out” by the radio every 15 minutes. In the stock exchange, phones were reserved for brokers, and banks tracked via radio the alterations made on the trading floor’s blackboard.

It was within this precarious context that Álvaro Bandeira saw the Brazilian stock market’s first crisis up close, starting in 1971. “You can’t even make a comparison, because the market is different, such was the extent of modernization.” He took an active part in this history as an advisor to the Rio de Janeiro Stock Exchange, after the Nahas Case, and worked on its merger process with Bovespa. He currently presides over the Association of Capital Market Analysts and Investment Professionals (Apimec - National). “If, in the past, companies did not even disclose their sales, today there’s so much information that it’s even hard to digest it all. The challenge is knowing how to deal with the number of variables that need to be analyzed.”

Excited by the advances of recent years, Bandeira is not disheartened by somber market forecasts for the short term. “I’m a die-hard optimist”, he says. “But the crisis is planetary and we should speak of it openly to investors, to put an end to rumors, if nothing else.” And what about when one of these investors, especially a newcomer to the market, gets a little overwrought? “At moments like that, I remind them that it’s not the end of the world. If they invested in good companies, even at much higher prices than now, with good governance, that pay their dividends and hail from solid sectors, one day things will get back to where they were.” To his wife, whom he caught the other day at the computer, indignant with the price of her shares, Bandeira reserved some extra advice: don’t even look at the screen, to avoid distress. “Not everyone manages to keep their cool”, he says. He definitely can. On the day of this interview, the New York Exchange reached its lowest level in five years with the expected bankruptcy of U.S. car manufacturers and the minutes from a Federal Reserve meeting forecasting up to 0.2% shrinkage in the country’s economy. At the broker’s studio, spotlights already on, Bandeira was preparing to go on the air and explain, once again, what was going on.

Information sources – Mainly the official ones. He has a team to research websites, such as those of the IBGE, Ipea and CVM, all day long. On the IMF and World Bank websites, he says, there are usually excellent studies to be found. “For us, the newspaper is old news. I run my eyes diagonally through the pages and cut out what I want to look at later, when I have the time.” Admiration – Economists Celso Furtado and William Sharpe. “I had an aversion to Furtado because I was forced to read one of his books in school and I didn’t understand a thing. When I got into college and a professor, [former Brazilian Minister of Finance] Pedro Malan, recommended that we read Furtado, I was awestruck. As for Sharpe, the Nobel prize winner and pope of investment evaluation, I had the honor of meeting and even having lunch with him.” Ambition – “I was born to have friends. My ambition is to keep old friends and make new ones.” Optimism X pessimism – “I’m a die-hard optimist. The difference between one and the other is that the pessimist suffers more.” Health – He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke much, walks on the beach and “jumps on a bike once in a while”. “Market experience helps me to avoid stress.” Hobbies – Listening to music and reading novels. “I love Rubem Fonseca and Josué Montello.” Bedside book – “Jitterbug Perfume”, by Tom Robbins, about the quest for immortality. “Somebody took the book from my house and I managed to get hold of another copy, all patched up, from a secondhand book website.” Sleep – Five hours per night. “The rest of the time, I’m always up and running, working or writing articles at home. But on the weekends I tune out completely.” A crisis is good for ... – Learning and purging. “It would be nice if learning like that didn’t leave marks in our flesh.” Moments of achievement – Writing, not just technical articles, but also stories. “I keep them to myself, but sometimes I think about writing a book to tell the tales of these 38 years in the market.” Pet peeves – Lies and insincere people. “I like transparent people and I hate people who put on faces.” Ten years ago – He was a director at the Senso brokerage. Ten years from now – “I hope to have another ten years in the capital market and see the crisis blow over.” Advice for beginners – Enjoy the market’s dynamic, study a lot and know how to look at the world as a whole. “You have to like what you do to be able to work 13- or 14-hour days.” A talent he would like to have – To be a musician. Technical x fundamental analysis – “The more tool-based, the better the assessment.” Regulation or self-regulation – “Regulation will toughen, but we don’t know exactly how much. Self-regulation will have to be exercised by each group. At Apimec, we are preparing to act as a watchdog and to provide continuous training.” Mea-culpa – “From early 2007 we had been alerting investors to the risks, but today I think we could have done more.” About forecasts – “I don’t believe in stratospheric forecasts, made to mark a position”.