If I'm nervous, it's because I'm performance-based, and not making much $$$. I have a Wife and three Sons.:eek: What coming structural changes?
A few helpful comments here, but as has been typical mostly trash. I will try to add my two cents here. My AUM is down substantially over the last year and a half as I have been dealing with a number of serious health problems. I started trading in the mid nineties and after I had some success I started a club on yahoo for people who might be interested in what I was doing. The club became pretty popular and Ken Wolff from Mtrader got ahold of me to see if I'd like to come into is room and give some classes and whatnot since a lot of his clients where also members of my free club (I really had no idea people would pay for this stuff). I did a few classes there and the result was very good so I formed a company that entered into a partnership with Ken and his partners. It went well and about a year later we decided to go it on our own. During this time we had a number of people who had subscribed to our chatroom and newsletters, so I had a wide exposure to people. I was suprised at the types of people who read my stuff (for examle one person is the largest Wendy's Franchiser in the world and used to own the TGI Fridays on Time Square, another was one of the first commodites managers in Europe to cross over 100million AUM In the early 80's). At anyrate, I did an interview for Innerworth and someone who had listened to the recording of it got ahold of me and wanted to know if I'd ever had interest in managing money. He was an established and successful CTA, and was willing to fund me from his own money. We got that going and I did a piss poor job. I was nervous the entire time, the market had just entered the 2000 bear, and I was afraid to buy anything, but also afraid that we might be oversold and as soon as I shorted things would bounce. He was a great mentor for me, but I did not do well with the accounts and we closed them in June or July of 2001. The next time I tried was about a year later, this time with a broker assisted trading program. This program had a number of issues from the get go, and I closed it after about 7 months, down around 8% overall from the start. In Feb of 2003 I got another opportunity to manage money from a long time newsletter client. He started me with $250,000 and I have done well with that since then. Since then I mostly have grown from word of mouth and people who have read my stuff on the internet. I don't take small accounts and I get to know the potential client very well before we open the account. Things have gone pretty well with that aside from my health. I recently brought in a partner, Anthony, who is a Columbia University graduate and has experiance as an Ibanker with UBS and an alalyst at Merril. This has helped significantly in getting instiutional accounts and I'm starting to slowly grown the business again as I trust Anthony more and more to do things when I'm away. There really are not a ton of things I'd have done differently. I had great guidance from the first person I managed money for since he had been in the business a long time. I'd try to have more confidence in myself, since he gave me the money in the first place since I was good at what I did, but the confidence did eventually come with time.
here are the only keys: investment talent with a compelling story and returns distribution/marketing channels business management skills/talent at a high level meet these 3 things, you will succeed. fail at any one, and kiss success goodbye. dsg
They have arrived, my brother. How are you holding up? My close friend HLJ tried to get the word out, if only he was listened to, surf