Today we are delighted to interview one of our international team members who make possible to cover the markets 24/7: Mário Blaščák, FXStreet’s News Chief Editor. On this interview, we get to know a bit more of Mario’s life as a journalist but also his true passion for music. As Blaščák would say… “welcome to the dark side of heavy metal!”.
Mario at work
How does a day in the life of the News Chief Editor at FXStreet look?
Life looks very nice, especially when you work in Barcelona because it has a beautiful weather but I’m not placed in Barcelona all the time, I travel to work.
Normally, I spend most of the time working from home and then I travel every other month to the central office in Barcelona, where we discuss face to face the issues that we most of the time communicate by email and chat. Working in Barcelona means that I work much longer than normal hours but normally it takes about 8 to 10 hours a day to handle everything that it’s required to manage the team and the news flow.
As you said, you work from home and you visit FXStreet headquarters in Barcelona once per month. Do you prefer working remotely almost 100% of the time or working at the office?
Both faces have different profiles so working from home is more on the operational side of the business that means checking the news flow, making sure that news editors are ready for the major releases and keeping in touch with people on the electronic communication with the staff.
On the other hand, in Barcelona is more face to face; meetings are much longer and in consequence, we can discuss issues deeper. And of course, getting to know people in person is a great advantage for me because meeting different cultures from the one I know from Slovakia it is very important. So I consider both faces very important for reaching the optimal structure.
Have you ever wanted to move to Barcelona in order to work every day at FXStreet headquarters?
Yeah, that would be fantastic and that would be an optimal solution because I could spend more time with my colleagues but as I have a family with small kids it’s complicated by the fact that my kids don’t speak Catalan, neither Spanish, and my wife doesn’t have yet any job in Barcelona. So it’s complicated for the normal life.
Talking about your professional career, if you were not the News Chief Editor of FXStreet, what would you like to do for a living?
I would probably play or sing in a band, I would do something related to music. Maybe working for a radio as a DJ. I like hard music, heavy metal music, so this would be probably my interest. Or maybe just journalism in general.
Mario in his personal life
What do you typically do when you finish your working day?
At home, I typically do the dinner for the family and for my kids I make sure they have all the school tasks ready for the next day. If they have longer tasks then I try to do the things with them. Also, my kids do a lot of sports activities so I’m driving them to different places: to gyms, the swimming pool or the tennis arena.
On the other hand, on evenings I play sport myself. I play football and volleyball and I spend three days a week in the gym. Otherwise, I have a metal band so I rehearse with the band twice a week.
You love music and you also have a band. What’s the story behind “Ruka hore!”?
I started with music when I was very young. I studied for 11 years violin play so I have a school diploma for violin playing. My mother is really much into music, she writes music and she is involved with a folkloric band in East Slovakia. She leads the singing group and she writes songs for that group.
In my case, I started to play when I was a teenager in a rock band. Then I moved to a more “jazzy” stat where I played the guitar, drums and percussions. Then I stopped during my banking career for 15 years. I was not playing in any band because I had a lot of work and I traveled a lot but recently two years ago I started my own band, “Ruka hore!”, which is a band of friends after 40 years old, so we like the same kind of music. We play together covers but even if we play covers we use our own lyrics and some of the covers that we do we try to make them look like originals but we also produce our own music.
The story is very simple, it’s about enjoying time with friends.
What is your favorite band of all time?
There are tons of bands that I like very much. It’s hard to pick one as a top one but if I had to pick one of all hard rock and heavy metal classics, probably I would choose Led Zeppelin, one of my most favorite. But also I like Pink Floyd, which is not hard rock at all. On metal bands, ACDC, Metallica and Halloween.
Apart from your band, do you have other hobbies?
I play music, I write music, not only for my band but also for other bands. Also, I do write stories for different magazines, so apart from financial markets journalism I do general journalism. I read a lot of books, and other of my hobbies is to travel to know new countries.
You love traveling too. What are your holiday plans for this year?
I don’t have yet the plans for this year because I have to reconcile my vacation with the team at FXStreet, so I don’t have any detail plans for this year but last summer we did travel through the beaches from Wales so we went two weeks to see Wales and part of England. I have traveled to Scotland before but my favorite country that I have ever visited is probably New Zealand, it’s a very nice and beautiful country.
And now let’s talk about a dynamic topic, do you like or practice any sport?
I like football, I have a football club in Slovakia. We play also the men after 40 but playing football is not any kind of a big sportsmanship activity. We support the youth football so our main activity is oriented on children up to the age of 10 years old. Every year we do big football tournaments for kids that are actually now on the list of the coaches and the trainers from the Slovak first league.
Also, I used to play ice hockey before. Ice hockey has a lot of big tradition in Slovakia, our country is one-time world champion in ice hockey back in 2002. So my kids play also ice hockey. This winter sport is very good, very dynamic, it’s much faster than other sports. I can say that football and ice hockey are my favorite sports.