The Trusted Navigator

My fascination with navigation began in 1970, when at age five my parents, Gisela and Eberhard Köpp moved our family across the Atlantic from Bonn, West-Germany to Washington D.C. where my father spent the next 25 years at the World Bank.  My Grandfather, Hans-Georg Köpp did the same in 1927 when he boarded a freight ship in Germany and headed for New York City. With little money and no formal education, the idea was “to gain work experience” in the new world. He began doing odd jobs like washing dishes to various clerk jobs. He learned the language quickly and soon landed a job at a fish-tackle distributor and travelled to all corners the smallest towns in America to sell fishing equipment.  A year after his arrival in New York, he sent for his fiancé, Hulda, who he married within days of her arrival in New York harbor (she is in the bottom right row in the picture). As a result, my father and aunt were born in Manhattan at Lenox Hill hospital in the 1930s.  So began our family’s history in New York.

When I started working in New York in 1993 for Deutsche Morgan Grenfell/C.J.Lawrence (the long name for Deutsche Bank at the time), after a four-year stint as a banker in London, the circle was complete. The connection to New York has obviously not only shaped my family but also how I navigate through the ever-shifting financial markets. I believe this perspective gives me an edge when giving financial advice to private and institutional investors.