Vale Graham Hand
It is with heavy hearts that we announce Firstlinks’ co-founder and former Managing Editor, Graham Hand, has died aged 66.
It has been a hard day at Morningstar. We lost a team member today. And while that has been challenging there has been a huge outpouring of support. As I write this the announcement of Graham Hand passing away has 130 comments on Firstlinks. Every time someone comments my colleagues and I get an email. Reading them has been both sad and heartwarming. Graham made a difference in countless lives. That is all any of us can ask for as a legacy.
I’ve included some thoughts on Graham that Chris Cuffe, James Gruber, Shani Jayamanne and I shared. Please also see the Firstlinks announcement to see what readers have shared about Graham in the comments.
Chris Cuffe, co-founder of Firstlinks (Cuffelinks)
At 7.33am this morning I heard from Graham Hand’s wife, Debbie, that Graham had passed away earlier in the day. Although Graham’s illness had been well telegraphed by him, the news has saddened me greatly as it will his many friends and admirers.
Graham and I first met each other around 1990 at the State Bank of NSW where we worked (ultimately acquired by the Colonial Group and then Commonwealth Bank many years later). He was the Deputy Treasurer and I was the CEO of their very fledgling wholly owned funds management subsidiary, First State Fund Managers. First State reported through the Treasury Division at that stage so I had a fair bit of interaction with Graham as time passed.
A friendship grew over time and we stayed in regular contact long after we had both left the Colonial/CBA group. It was in 2012 that Graham approached me with an idea about starting an online newsletter. We were both excited by the concept as we had become increasingly dismayed at the lack of good quality financial journalism in Australia. We decided our point of difference (and strength) would be that we would not have journalists doing the writing, but instead we would have industry experts do the writing. We wanted the authors of articles to be investors and market practitioners. We wanted them to share both their knowledge and their battle scars. And we wanted the publication to bring thoughts/ideas from an informed and impartial point of view, without pushing products or promoting services.
The formula we came up with was a weekly online publication comprising around 5 articles with each article being no more than 1,000 words – we wanted each article to be informative, punchy and to the point.
In early 2013 “Cuffelinks” was born with the tag line…. a publishing service providing content written by financial market professionals with experience in wealth management, superannuation, banking, academia and financial advice.
On 6th February 2013 the first article was published by Graham. His opening words…..“The superannuation, advice and investing landscape is facing more game-changers than at any time since the introduction of compulsory superannuation in 1992. Cuffelinks will be covering these subjects regularly during 2013 and beyond.” How true that statement became and the publication continues to this day.
Graham insisted that the publication used my name in the masthead (and have a catchy logo!) because we needed all the profile help we could get at the beginning and I seemed to have become well known over the years in the investment management industry (not all of my doing!). I was not that keen, but Graham was pretty insistent and he wore me down.
To help gain initial attention and credibility for the new publication, I undertook to contact as many heavyweight people that I knew and get them contributing articles. The big coup, right at the start, was convincing Paul Keating to contribute an article or two… how apt for one of the fathers of superannuation. His first article appeared on 7 February 2013 and can still be accessed on the website.
The years passed and Cuffelinks (subsequently renamed Firstlinks) became a great success. Graham was relentless in gaining new readers, selecting/editing the increasing number of articles being submitted for publication, and gaining/keeping sponsors to help defray the costs. He was a machine on a mission. He wanted to create and sustain something special and lasting.
I travelled to Italy on holidays in early 2023 and soon after I arrived the Government announced the proposed additional tax on superannuation balances over $3m. Although we were in opposite time zones, in typical style Graham and I spent hours in the middle of the night in the days following, analysing the proposal… long before others had properly thought about the issues. It was vintage Graham.
A decade after its creation, Firstlinks was ranked the No 1 Investment site in Australia in the Feedspot Report, where they select the top sites from thousands of investment sites using search and social metrics.
The creation and ongoing existence of Firstlinks is one of many legacies left by Graham.
This morning, as the tears welled up in my eyes, I suddenly felt very empty and hollow… like I’d just lost a limb. Graham is a big loss to the world. He was an unusual man of extraordinary integrity and great intellect. He had an enquiring mind. He was a straight shooter (he called a spade a spade and he gave you a view that wasn’t sugar-coated) and he didn’t suffer fools easily. He strove for perfection in whatever he did. He was articulate. He had an enormous sense of “justice”. He was generous and caring. He loved his family dearly.
Graham was not easy to get to know, but once you did he was the type of bloke I could easily hang around and be myself with. Over the years we spent many hours together, sitting by the ocean or in a park or on a veranda pondering the world, swapping ideas, and ruminating on the financial services industry. We talked about “stuff that mattered”. We never had enough time to finish our conversations.
Graham was a great human being. So many people will feel the loss with his passing. He will not be forgotten.
Mark LaMonica, Director of Personal Finance, Morningstar
Graham Hand passed away this morning after a yearlong battle with brain cancer. I’ve been staring at that sentence for a long time trying to think of what to write next. I keep thinking about sitting in my apartment in October of 2023 on a Sunday night and seeing my phone buzz with a call from Graham. This wasn’t unusual. Graham would often call me with an idea about how to improve Firstlinks and to hear about what I thought about an article he wrote. This call was different.
The news of his diagnosis was devasting, but Graham - for a lack of a better description - was just himself. He was on to the plan his doctors laid out and was reassuring me that he was going to fight this. Despite the odds he was optimistic.
There are so many stories I want to share about Graham. But there is one that I think perfectly encapsulates who Graham was professionally and what he built with Firstlinks. After Morningstar acquired Firstlinks, Graham was running me through the publishing process. He was describing how he read and approved each comment on a Firstlinks’ article.
My suggestion that we find someone else to take over what I ignorantly described as ‘an administrative process’ was met with disbelief. Graham informed me that he was building a community. And to do that he needed to know what his readers were thinking. Those comments were his way of collecting feedback from the only people that mattered – the members of that community.
The first edition of Firstlinks was published on February 8th 2013. And from that moment on Graham was dedicated to building his community. He would take a paper sign-up sheet when he spoke at conferences and take down email addresses. He would tell everyone and anyone that would listen about how great the content was on Firstlinks. And it was ultimately the content more than anything else that made Firstlinks what it is.
In an age of sensationalism and slick sounding investment pitches that are more about the people writing them than the readers, Graham took a different approach. He genuinely cared about his readers. He cared about keeping them informed so they could create a better future for themselves and their loved ones. And in the end that is all that really matters.
Heartwarmingly, that care for his readers was not a one-way street. When Graham disclosed his illness to the Firstlinks community the response was touching. Graham read through each comment and was touched at the outpouring of support. I was reading through the comments again this morning after I learned of his passing. Perhaps that is the best tribute of all to Graham.
James Gruber, Editor at Firstlinks
It’s difficult to write this, and doubly so in the past tense. I didn’t know Graham for as long as many others in the financial industry, yet it felt like I’d known him for longer through reading Firstlinks prior to my working with the newsletter.
Graham hired me in October 2022. He wanted to focus on writing articles and hand over the newsletter’s administrative and editorial tasks to me. I remember on the morning of the first day of my employment, he had a twinkle in his eye and told me, “Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you during the interview process that I’m going away to Europe for six weeks early next week and you’ll be in charge of the newsletter!” He had my head spinning from the get-go.
Upon his return from overseas, I worked closely with Graham and quickly gained several impressions of him.
First, I knew of his standing in finance, though had little idea of the extent of it. He seemed to know everyone in the industry. Not only that, but CEOs regularly sought him out, rather than the other way around. He was almost like a rockstar with a cavalcade of admirers following him.
Second, he was a prodigious worker. He regularly worked weekends and nights to get the newsletter exactly as he wanted it.
Third, he was endlessly curious about investing and many other topics. His in-depth knowledge of superannuation, SMSFs, demographics, retirement issues, and others was intimidating.
Fourth, Graham was a brilliant writer. He had a smooth, measured, thoughtful, and playful way of communicating often complex subjects. He had a novelist’s eye for making finance both readable and entertaining.
Fifth, he loved the Firstlinks community. While many publications don’t allow comments on articles, for Graham, they were a sacrosanct part of the newsletter.
Graham and I were of different generations and consequently were different people with varied views of things. Yet there was always a deep respect in our relationship that went both ways.
As Graham fell ill, we became closely personally as our guards lowered. A few months ago, we took a walk together near his home. He was stoic as usual and profoundly grateful to Deb and his family for all the support they’d given him, as well as to friends and acquaintances who’d reached out to him during the year.
Graham will be dearly missed.
Shani Jayamanne, Senior Investment Specialist
Vale Graham Hand. A wonderful colleague who we were privileged to work alongside. One of the first stories he ever wrote after joining Morningstar was about how younger Aussies no longer had a fair go. He was not a younger Aussie, and he admitted he had a fair go. Graham had the uncanny ability to always see and empathise with both sides of the story - a rare trait in our profession and something his readers appreciated, including myself. It is one of the reasons why he built trust and community with his audience - always putting their interests first.
This photo was taken at one of our Christmas parties. Graham found out that White Claws were the drink of the 'new generation' and stuck on them all night. We will miss the guidance, endless dry humour and Sydney FC propaganda. We are thinking of Graham's family and community today.
