Be careful what you wish for.

I crunch a few salt and vinegar potato chips and go back to the fridge to get the hoagie I stashed in there yesterday afternoon, wrapped in wax paper, now wet. I didn’t think I would be this hungry.

It’s 5 am. CN will be here in an hour. There is a TV in the other room. No TV in my office. I could go out there and watch TV, but this time of night, it would just be infomercials.

Nobody to call, not at this hour.

I applied for a job to be a trader from a classified ad in the newspaper. I have to be the only person on Wall Street who got his job from a classified ad in the newspaper. I was too young to understand that most reputable firms do not advertise in the newspaper. I took the Series 7, passed it. All I am doing is executing agency orders, applying a commission. They give me an order, I trade it. In between orders, I sit there. This isn’t trading, I told them. People apparently spend entire careers doing this. I guess that is basically what CN does, but at least he is really good at it.

Then First Chicago. Eat what you kill. It was there I learned how to manage a drawdown. Lose half a percent, they blow you out. It wasn’t hard to distinguish myself there. Keeping 25% of what you make seems like a good deal until you consider that they’re keeping 75%. When it came time for them to write me the check, they do what most people do when large amounts of money are involved. They cheated. So I left. I vowed not to work for anyone again.

When you go to Harvard Business School, people expect great things from you. You are supposed to become a CEO, get famous, whatever. You are not supposed to start a hedge fund, not after what happened to Milken, and Drexel, and all of Wall Street in the early nineties. You sit around and do case studies and smell your own farts and then go start a company that is completely useless. At least, that was my experience.

More than anywhere else, HBS is for the connections. But I wasn’t interested in the connections. I started to get interested in money, and I started reading about mutual funds, and I did a paper on how mutual fund manager returns were serially correlated, which meant that skill, not luck, determined success, which ran counter to the prevailing academic research at the time, which said that the stock market was completely random. So I wanted to trade stocks. Everyone else wanted to be a brand manager, or a consultant, or something.

It is hard to raise money for a hedge fund, especially for a kid coming out of business school, even Harvard. My pitch was pretty simple—that the United States was on the cusp of massive technological growth, made possible in part by declining interest rates, free trade, and political stability. Trouble was, everyone thought I was nuts. We were in the midst of a recession, a commercial real estate bust, and a banking crisis from which people thought it would take years to recover. I got money, but it was mostly from other hedge fund managers who wanted diversification, and rich kooks.