Photography by Mike Kremer

Luxembourg-born Kari Peters ACSI has sport in his blood – he was surrounded by highly competitive sportspeople from a young age. His father, Nico Peters, participated in some kayaking world championships, and his younger brother is a professional triathlete.

Kari started alpine skiing at the age of five as a hobby during winter holidays with his family, but at the age of 16 he decided to take a serious approach to cross-country skiing and went to Norway for three months initially to "get a real idea of what cross country skiing is all about". He was 17 when he joined a ski boarding school in the Bavarian Alps in 2003, where he stayed for a year. Here he had normal school lessons during the day and trained at the Olympic centre there in the afternoons.

Fast forward to December 2013: he was the first-ever athlete to qualify in cross-country skiing for Luxembourg in the Winter Olympics and represented the country in 2014 in Sochi, Russia.

However, he's recently gone off-piste to pursue a career in finance. In June 2020 he achieved his CISI level 4 Certificate in Advanced Wealth Management and is planning to take other qualifications with the CISI. Kari is still mapping out his future qualifications and career, but believes he would prefer a back-office type role.

From cross-country to finance

After leaving the ski boarding school in 2008, Kari joined the Luxembourg army. After completing basic training, which takes roughly three to four months, he joined the Army Elite Sports Section (section des sports d'élite de l'armée), which sponsors athletes who want to devote themselves full time to sport at a high level. He has remained in this exclusive army sports section and has been training full-time since.

"In skiing, you have to adapt really fast to the conditions of the weather, tracks and other skiers. In finance, you have to adapt to the markets"In 2012 Kari completed an online graphic design degree at a German-based distant learning school, but soon realised that he wasn't interested in pursuing it as a career. He enjoyed creating advertising-type campaigns during his studies, but he realised that he wasn't going to be able to do things the way he wanted to in a corporate graphic design role, as "the client is always right, they say".

Furthering his interest in finance

He says, "my real interests lie in the financial markets and investment sector", which came from reading a lot of financial literature over the years in his spare time. He started reading biographies of entrepreneurs and investors, such as The snowball: Warren Buffett and the business of life. "Within the first couple of pages of The Snowball, I was looking up all the different financial terms used and searching for books to learn the basics", he says. He then went on to read books by economists such as Benjamin Graham, Peter Lynch and Robert Shiller, which further spurred his interest in how finance works in a wider landscape.

Kari sees similarities between sports and finance, in that you are "working on a long-term approach". He explains that if you rush training in sports, you end up with an injury or illness. And in finance, if you rush decisions to make short-term gains, you'll end up injured in terms of losing money, for example. Kari is able to apply some of his sporting mindset to finance, too. He says that the "discipline and mental toughness one acquires over the years in sport will give you the right approach to keep going after setbacks".

He says that there is a need for flexibility in both finance and skiing. "In skiing, you have to adapt really fast to the conditions of the weather, tracks and other skiers. In finance, you have to adapt to the markets," he says.
"I have been reading investing and corporate finance literature for years and had taken basic courses before buying my first stock"

In May 2018 he decided to enrol on an online programme at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in business foundations and from there decided to keep on educating himself in the sector.

Kari joined the CISI as a student member in December 2018. He wanted to learn about investing and making the most out of savings and to "get a more detailed and deeper look into the sector, and implement this new knowledge", he says. "I realised pretty fast from my world-class skier colleagues that it's almost impossible to make money through sponsors in cross-country skiing, so I was looking for a way to grow my savings and educated myself in-between training".

Since December 2018 he has achieved the CISI level 3 Introduction to Securities & Investment (international version) qualification and was awarded the level 3 International Certificate in Wealth & Investment Management in July 2019, and the aforementioned level 4 Certificate in Advanced Wealth Management.

Studying for the level 4 certificate was a challenge for Kari, as this was at the beginning of lockdown due to Covid-19 and right after the winter training season for skiing, which had been cut short due to the pandemic. During the winter season, between races, Kari lives and trains in Bavaria as there's no snow in Luxembourg. "I was stuck in my one-room apartment in Bavaria, where I had to study, eat and sleep for two months, all by myself. I was allowed to train outside once a day. That's the kind of situation I never want to find myself in again."

Then came more difficulties. He had to postpone the exam twice as he was not able to return to Luxembourg, where the exam was booked to take place, without quarantining, but he used this as an opportunity to "train mental strength and discipline". After completing the exam, he says he was exhausted, but that it was all worth it.

To help with his studying, he wrote a lot of notes and tried to find real-world examples to internalise the study materials from the CISI. He also used the Revision Express study tool and sample tests offered, which, he says, are helpful methods to get used to the exam format.

Representing Luxembourg

Kari says his experience at the Winter Olympics 2014 came with a lot of media interest, which he was not prepared for. "To this day, I'm wondering how I was able to achieve my best results points-wise during that period," due to the stress of media pressure, he says.

"It would be hard to define my dream job right now, but working for a hedge fund or a VC fund would probably be the best fit"Finding out he was successful in qualifying for the Olympics was "more of a relief than a joy", he explains. "Four years before, I had achieved a semi-qualification for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, but missed qualifying fully by 0.3 seconds," he says.

At the 2014 Winter Olympics, Kari faced some disappointment due to ill health at one of his sprint events. He got to the starting line, recovering from the flu with a fever at high altitude and he knew he would not be able to compete at his usual level. Post-2014 Winter Olympics, he says he was in "revenge mode", due to not being able to perform his best, but this resulted in overtraining and receiving injuries and going through surgery over three years. "It was at this point I knew I had to find a better balance between sports and other subjects," he says.
The crossover

Kari has been managing his own personal investment portfolio for the past few years, which he started as part of the process to translate his acquired knowledge into the real world. "I have been reading investing and corporate finance literature for years and had taken basic courses before buying my first stock," he says. However, not everyone does this. "Unfortunately, a lot of private/commercial investors don’t want to log in the hours of learning, which, in my opinion, are necessary to make at least a half-educated guess about which stocks, bonds or financial products to choose to invest in."

Is there a financial career in the future for Kari? "I've not come up with a detailed plan yet," he explains, and says he doesn’t want to be limited to the wealth management sector. The financial markets have always intrigued him, but he is also interested in the venture capital (VC) sector, inspired by friends who have started their own tech companies. "It would be hard to define my dream job right now, but working for a hedge fund or a VC fund would probably be the best fit, as there you can find the broad range of elements I'm interested in," he says.