Jim Bradley, CFA, CFP®, CAIA

Founder & Chief Investment Officer

Jim is curious. This sense of curiosity got him into the financial planning business in the first place!

Working on back-office functions for a large investment manager back in the 1900s, Jim became curious about who the firm was managing money for – and the purposes for all the investments. He enrolled in the first ever ‘Personal Financial Planning’ course offered as part of the UConn MBA program and was instantly aware that behind all these numbers on all these reports he was generating, were people – families and individuals setting aside money to pay for retirement income, college educations, home purchases and scores of other things. He decided then and there that the best place for him was working with these individuals, experiencing the industry where the ‘rubber hits the road’!

Over 25 years later, Jim continues to dig into all the areas of personal finance, trying to maintain a sense not only about how personal finance works, but how pieces of it relate to others. Synthesis is a word that best describes what he seeks. He’s achieved numerous financial industry designations, and all of them have been driven by curiosity around these connections.

This curiosity has driven him to get his pilot license and has pushed him further to become a flight instructor and commercial pilot. It drove him to learn about gardening and pushed him further to become a Master Gardener volunteer. Curiosity drove him to pick up a musical instrument in his 40s and to pursue opportunities to learn more about music theory, history, and technique – and to join a bluegrass band!

At his core, Jim is ‘mathy’, ‘chatty’, and always in search of a better mousetrap. His least favorite phrase is ‘that’s how it’s always been done’. You can find him unraveling a financial challenge for a client, digging in a community garden, working on crosswind landings with a flight student and practicing arpeggios on his mandolin – often, all within the same day!