Tom Hardin

So in my early 20s, I loved leaving investment banking, which was just sort of focused on servicing clients, and getting into the game where I'm actually seeing

my percentage of the profits of my stock trades calculated in Excel.

And at 23, 24, 25 years old, that starts to become a number I've never seen in my life.

It starts to become a big number.

And so that's happening.

I loved it because it was a meritocracy, I called it.

There wasn't politics.

Hey, you pick the right stocks, you're going to make a lot of money.

If you don't, you're going to get fired.

And I liked actually having the scorecard there real time, but that can also lead to making other decisions, which we'll talk about and other pressures.

So there's this need for a short-term performance.

We have investors who want to make money every quarter.

So we need shorter term opportunities, you know, to kind of make money in the short term too.

There was 12 analysts at my first firm.

So it's sort of like an NBA team where like, you know, these young people making a lot of money.

You can be replaced very easily if you start sort of missing your free throws, picking bad stocks.

We had the brokers where we were their clients.

So like the Goldman Sachs would take us to like the Kentucky Derby.

hang out in the tent or the Superbowl.

One of our traders is playing like flag football with Michael Vick at the Superbowl.