✦ our story

Finance is fascinating.
It just needed better PR.

Leed Financial exists to make alternative assets — and investing in general — accessible to everyone, not just people who went to business school or grew up talking about the stock market at the dinner table.

How this started

I watched The Big Short in high school and was completely gripped — but had absolutely no idea what was actually happening. So I read the book with Investopedia open on my phone, stopping every few sentences to decode what a CDO or a credit default swap actually was. It took forever. It was also kind of thrilling.

That experience stuck with me. Finance is full of genuinely wild stories — markets that moved because of a tweet, a vintage Pokémon card worth half a million dollars, a hedge fund that bet against an entire housing market and won. None of that is boring. But the way finance is usually explained? Very, very boring.

I studied art history and went on to work in the art finance department at Christie's, where I got obsessed with investments that live outside the traditional stocks-and-bonds world — fine art, wine, farmland, collectibles. These assets are fascinating, increasingly accessible, and almost nobody talks about them in plain English. So I decided to.

our mission

"Make alternative assets accessible to anyone who's curious — regardless of their background, their degree, or whether their family ever talked about money at the dinner table."

What we believe

📖

Finance literacy is a right, not a privilege

You shouldn't need a college degree or a Bloomberg terminal to understand how money works. We write for people who are starting from zero — and we don't apologize for making it simple.

🎢

Finance is actually kind of wild

The stories are insane. The characters are larger than life. The stakes are real. We think the best way to learn is to get hooked on the drama first, then fill in the concepts.

🖼️

Alternative assets deserve more attention

Most beginner investing content is about index funds. Fine — index funds are great. But there's a whole world of art, wine, farmland, collectibles, and commodities that gets almost no coverage for beginners. That's the gap we're filling.

😂

Serious doesn't have to mean boring

Finance is high-stakes and real. We take the information seriously. We just don't think you have to be stuffy about it. If a joke helps a concept land, we're using the joke.

Who's behind this

Katherine Lee

Founder, Leed Financial

Art history graduate. Former Christie's art finance. Self-taught finance nerd who started because she couldn't stop watching The Big Short and asking "wait, what does that mean?" Currently building the resource she wished had existed when she started.

Who this is for

You. If you've ever felt like finance content was written for people who already know finance. If you're curious about how people make money from art, or wine, or farmland, or Pokémon cards. If you've Googled a term during a conversation and still didn't fully get it. If you think The Big Short was a great movie but couldn't quite explain what happened at the end.

You don't need a background in finance. You just need to be curious. We'll handle the rest.

✦

Want to get in touch?

Feedback, story tips, interview requests, or just want to say hi — we'd love to hear from you.