Marcus Okafor

Marcus's first market was a foreign-exchange bureau in Lagos that his aunt ran with a ledger and a locked drawer. He spent school holidays watching her price uncertainty in real time, and everything he has written about markets since is a footnote to what that desk taught him: the quoted rate is an opinion, the settled cash is a fact.

He came up through equities desks in London and Sao Paulo before switching sides to write about the people he used to trade against. The move to the Gulf followed the money, literally: he wanted to be where fixed income, project finance, and family capital meet, which is a shorter walk in Dubai than anywhere else he has worked.

His pieces start with a number and stay close to it. Working capital, spreads, invoice terms, the gap between announced and deployed. If a deal is described in adjectives, he wants to see the term sheet. Colleagues call his standard question the Okafor test: who actually receives money, when, and what happens if they do not.