what Daniel is doing now

I spent the first eight years of my career at a large regional wealth management firm in Niigata. The work was fine, the clients were interesting, and I learned a great deal about portfolio construction and tax planning. What I found harder to live with was the product shelf. Every recommendation had to pass through a compliance filter that was, in practice, also a commercial filter. I watched good clients get steered toward in-house funds that were not the worst option but were rarely the best one. By 2016 I had started keeping a private log of the advice I would have given if the shelf had not existed.

That log became the business plan for Brook Vault Path. I left the firm in early 2017, sat the Chartered Financial Planner exams that autumn (I had been putting them off for years, which I am not proud of), and took on my first three clients in January 2018. Two of them are still with me. The name came from a walk I do most Sunday mornings near where I live: there is a brook, a small stone vault bridge, and a long straight path through the fields. It felt like the right metaphor for what I wanted the practice to be, unhurried and going somewhere specific.