We are delighted to welcome Ulrich Volk back to the Zurich Project. Ulrich has become a treasured voice in our community, and we are grateful that he again chose to share his wisdom with the group. We keep Zurich Project proceedings confidential by default. With Ulrich’s kind approval, we are making an exception here: the full audio replay and his talk script accompany this post, so every reader can take in the session in his own words.
For those meeting him for the first time, Ulrich is a private investor in Abu Dhabi, where he invests globally across equities and fixed income with a focus on quality compounders. From 2010 to 2022 he served on ADIA’s Europe investment mandate, at the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, and before that he spent eighteen years at Capital Group in London. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Freiburg and an MBA from London Business School, a combination that gives this talk its unusual range.
Titled “Life, Philosophy, and Investing: The First 64 Years,” the talk is built as three lessons from investing, two from life, and one thought experiment from philosophy. On investing, Ulrich argues for a style that fits who you are; his own is buying “sleep-well-at-night compounders,” businesses earning 20%-plus returns on capital in cash as well as earnings, with durable competitive advantages, long growth runways, and a model he can actually understand.
He is candid about the two biases that have cost him most: selling winners too early and fear of missing out, holding that errors of commission hurt far more than errors of omission. He presses on circle of competence and Nassim Taleb’s “subtractive epistemology,” the discipline of cataloguing what you do not know, and surviving drawdowns, with a 100-year chart of the S&P 500 pinned above his desk.
The closing sections widen the lens. Drawing on his own 2008 crisis, Ulrich offers a hard truth about how people actually change, and reads Aristotle on the three kinds of friendship. He ends with Peter Singer’s “Shallow Pond,” a provocation on affluence and obligation that he reframes, with Warren Buffett, as a meditation on gratitude.
This is a rare talk: personal yet rigorous. Set aside the time, listen to the full replay or read the speech, and take in decades of reflection.
