Thomas Amara

I got into finance at fifteen and haven’t really stopped since.

It started with trying to follow the news properly. I kept reading that a central bank had moved rates and that this was significant, without any real sense of why it should matter to me or anyone I knew. Working that out led to annual reports I only half understood, and eventually to investing small amounts of my own money, which taught me more about risk than the reading had.

Most of what I know since then I picked up by doing. I study Business Management at the University of Southampton and graduate in 2027. I interned at the Financial Conduct Authority as a Summer Associate in Supervision, Policy and Competition, working on mainstream consumer credit lenders. My own research is on market stress, most recently a US bond market stress index built with hidden Markov models and UMAP. I’ve also held leadership positions in student societies, which is where you find out fairly quickly how much of what you know is actually usable.

Why I built Basis

You can do well in this subject and still not know what to do with it.

I could define a discounted cash flow long before I could have talked anyone through one. That isn’t really a criticism of my course. Exams ask you to recognise a correct answer, and almost nothing in a degree asks you to produce one while somebody waits.

Basis is my attempt at the other half. Each lesson teaches the idea in full first and then makes you use it. The Floor goes further: five decisions a day taken from things that actually happened, like SVB in March 2023, the gilt crisis in 2022, or Archegos. You decide how much to stake, you commit, and then you’re shown what really occurred. There is no revising your way out of a position you have already taken, which is roughly the situation everyone in those stories was in.

I write all of it

All 98 lessons and all 449 questions. None of it is generated and pasted in unread. Every lesson has to cover everything its quiz asks about, and every Floor scenario is a real episode with a line at the end on how it played out, because a market game with invented history teaches you nothing.

I get things wrong. If you find a mistake, tell me and I’ll fix it.

There’s more about the research and the investing side on thomas-amara.com, and I’m on LinkedIn.