Reflections after Week 1 at Toro Investimentos

     Today I commence my second week at Toro Investimentos.  Thus far, my transition into working at Toro has been seamless.  Toro Investimentos is a small financial consulting firm that is located in Batel, near the center of the city of Curitiba.  There are only six consultants that work in the office beside me, which makes for an intimate environment to learn and work.  I have felt welcomed and wanted from the start and have been provided the proper tools to succeed and continue to learn the financial consulting business.  Upon arrival, I was given various literature from Toro about the various financial products that Toro sells.  In addition, my boss gave me additional literature to read about the firms overall strategy in investing for their clients and for their own personal portfolios.  One of my ongoing assignments at Toro is to read “The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America”, which is a collaboration of letters that Warren Buffet wrote to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway.  I have found the content to be extremely helpful in terms of understanding the mindset and thinking processes of arguably the greatest investor of all time.

     One of the biggest obstacles I faced in my first few days at Toro was to understand financial terms and phrases in Brazilian Portuguese.   Luckily, one of my fellow consultants provided me with a website that contained an English to Portuguese dictionary of financial terms and their appropriate definitions.  Although I still have a lot to learn in terms of both the language and business, I feel as though I will be given every opportunity to succeed and learn throughout the duration of my tenure at Toro Investimentos.  Furthermore, after I became familiar with the products and strategy of Toro, I was given additional tasks at the office.  One of my fellow consultants gave me a series of PDF files with the names of various clients with information about their accounts that I had to input into a series of Excel files.  In addition, I have been given tasks that must be completed on a weekly basis, mainly in terms of writing articles and blog posts on their website and a financial blog that accompanies their main website.  Last week I wrote a brief essay about the ten richest cities in the world, with accompanying photos and videos.  I initially wrote the essay in English and then worked with one of my fellow consultants to translate it into Portuguese.

     Furthermore, another one of my tasks during my first week at Toro was to compose and present a Powerpoint presentation about myself.  I initially composed the presentation in English and then subsequently translated the text into Portuguese.  The presentation provided a brief background of my education, past work experience, goals and objectives for my tenure at Toro, and my future professional goals.  I tried my best to speak in Portuguese throughout the presentation and my colleagues appreciated my effort and always corrected me when I made a grammatical or contextual error in Portuguese. 

     To date, I cannot complain one bit about my time in Brazil thus far.  I have been blessed with a wonderful and caring host family and a working environment conducive to learning.  My colleagues at work have been very helpful and understanding of the challenges I have faced initially linguistically and have given me every opportunity to succeed thus far.