Marc Ashton is an entrepreneur, day trader and financial journalist.

He plies his trade for South Africa’s leading online financial news publication Fin24.com and its print partner Finweek magazine. He covers banks, insurers, trading and stockpicking as well as small business.

He was acknowledged as the 2008 Sanlam Best Newcomer in Financial Journalism and won the Telkom Classic Business Journalism awards for March 2010 as well as the Small Business journalist of the year in 2010.   

In his other guise Marc is an entrepreneur – although apparently not a very good one which is part of the reason behind this blog.

In 2006 he launched a business called Rival Industrial which does corporate wellness programs, holds various publishing interests, a medical practice and is involved in some small scale social responsibility projects.

He also owns Bundublog.com – one of the larger free blogging platforms in South Africa.

After a shaky start to his entrepreneurial exploits Marc launched the Bad Entrepreneur blog aimed at going over some of the mistakes and lessons learnt from his escapades.

Somehow he is still standing and ploughing off into various ventures.

In November 2009 he launched the Rival Pioneers initiative aimed at assisting up and coming young entrepreneurs to get their business off the ground.

He is also involved in the development of an exciting up and coming start-up financing program… more on this to follow.

In short Marc is nuts and probably not altogether right in the head but he has a lot of fun following the financial markets and trying his hand at a collection of entrepreneurial ventures in the hope that at least one pays off for him before he loses it all again.