Ramtin Naimi

I couldn't close the pencil box anymore.

So I ran to the bathroom and I took out like a garbage bag and I just started stuffing it with cash.

And then that became like a business that ran for like the next couple of years until it didn't really make sense to host parties.

So how much money would you make on a party or in summer?

I would net like 2000 bucks a weekend.

Then I would do like two to three parties per month.

It wasn't until my senior year of high school that I actually made money trading.

I got very fortunate through a combination of lucking out with volatility and not understanding risk management.

where I was trading out of the money call options and put options against triple levered ETFs that track the banking sector during the financial crisis.

An ETF that would swing, you know, anywhere between 10 to 30% on a daily basis, given what the Federal Reserve was doing on TARP or no TARP or Lehman getting bankrupt or Bear Stearns getting acquired by JPM.

And I had made a few hundred thousand bucks trading over a few short week windows on derivatives against those instruments.

And that was like a good thing and a bad thing for me.

The good thing was that it gave me a ton of confidence in myself and I convinced myself that I was a genius.

And the bad thing was it gave me way too much confidence in myself and convinced me that I was a genius.

I decided that I wasn't going to go to college and I was going to start a hedge fund straight out of high school.

I got a Series 65 license, which is the license you need to start a hedge fund.

There was a local financial advisor that I spent some time with for a summer and he did PWM for some high net worth individuals.

And some of those guys saw me trading on my screen.

They're like, oh, if you start something, we'll put like 10, 15, 20,000 bucks into it.

I ended up raising a fund in January of 09.