Full Transcript for Adapt or Die: Maintaining Edge Amongst Hyper-Competition

Chicago, right? And then ⁓ eventually your first jobs with ⁓ Schoenfeld securities. Kind of a famous place, right? I mean, kind of a pioneer in in in in prop trading. What what did what did that experience teach you? speaker-0: So lost our I guess ⁓ the common s ⁓ kind of trade I would say between the ⁓ brokerage and other sales jobs and and Schoenfeld was the ⁓ kind of perseverance that they require. So ⁓ I think sales in general is is great background for for people, whatever they wind up doing, because you learn how to grind and you learn how to take, you know, rejection and figure out, you know, how to modify your approach and you know, get after it. again and you get paid a percentage of what you produce. So all those things were pretty similar to ⁓ to trading. And so when I when I started Schoenfeld, ⁓ it was after I'd been trading on my own while being a broker and I was constantly losing ⁓ the earnings that I was making as a broker by trading for myself. And I really wanted to I really wanted to learn how to trade properly and I I was lucky enough to get that that opportunity. But It came with a base compensation of zero. And so the first ⁓ year, ⁓ I didn't make any money, you know, literally zero. Not like, you know, I didn't make money like getting a percentage of profits, like there were no profits. So ⁓ you know, that kind of weeds people out, like the people that aren't really passionate about it and don't have the ⁓ you know, the fortitude to stick with it and the confidence to, you know, keep betting on themselves. ⁓ you know, get get weeded out. and then ⁓ after that there was a good learning environment if you were kind of proactive about ⁓ you know, finding more experienced traders who were doing well and asking them kind of what they did. And, you know, I picked up different bits and pieces from people and developed them into, you know, kind of my own approach that ⁓ that worked at the time. speaker-1: A lot of gumption though to take that and then go to open your own shop. speaker-0: Yeah, it was a it was a journey. So we we ⁓ we went from ⁓ you know, I went from like an individual trader, ⁓ let's back up from an unprofitable individual trader to ⁓ you know, to a profitable individual trader. Then after that I I asked ⁓ you know, Steve Schoenfell who was the owner of the firm if I could hire people to trade underneath myself, which wasn't like a typical thing that people did there, but they had a few people that did. ⁓ And he sure, if you want to pay for them, you hire whoever you want. so I I took that as a yes and I started hiring people and allocating some of them, some of my you know, risk capital to them. So I kind of learned the initial, you know, ⁓ disciplines of ⁓ capital allocation and risk management through that process. And we developed ⁓ a group over a few years that was consistently, you know, producing ⁓ you know, very good returns. ⁓ and then ⁓ the other thing I did at the time was allocate to ⁓ other hedge funds. So I was ⁓ earning good wages ⁓ as a percent of my PL. And Ste Steve was kind enough to let me co invest with him. and when I said great, I'll do that, I realized that I signed up to be the ⁓ fundifund analyst ⁓ as a as an evening job. And so after trading hours I would call and ⁓ and meet with ⁓ all sorts of different hedge funds and figure out, you know, who we should ⁓ allocate to. ⁓ and that was really interesting because a lot of the people ⁓ who've become very successful over the last twenty-five years, like we were early investors with and got a sense ⁓ not of the you know secret sauce IP but but the basic, you know, kind of approach of how they went about it. you know, I remember cold calling ⁓ Renaissance and seeing if we could get capacity, ⁓ which which they eventually, you know, laughed me out. ⁓ but a lot of the multistrats, a lot of the best quant firms, ⁓ you know, we were an early investor with and that was formative and kind of how we wanted to build our own business. I learned that ⁓ the firms that tended to stand the test of time and put up consistent results over time had lots of different risk takers, lots of different strategies. And so that that always, you know, appealed to me and not just being, you know, the only PM or ending, you know, all the capital yourself, even though that's how we started. And so we went from that to then hiring, you know, fundamental analysts. ⁓ and then to ⁓ becoming a division and then a separate ⁓ you know fund from there. speaker-1: just you know when you start your own firm I mean you you obviously have built a lot of the investment skills that are important but then when when you leave and put out your own shingle there's you got to raise capital right it and you you're this you know immigrant son didn't didn't finish third grade did didn't make a lot of money in his first few years like who's giving you money like how did how did how did you convince people to give you money? speaker-0: I really think the way we started is a a reasonable way to start, which is with your own capital. So I basically took, you know, the earnings that that I was making and ⁓ Schoenfeld ⁓ you know, matched me and that was our initial trading capital. ⁓ and that's kind of how we started. And I think that's a good way to start, right? Because ⁓ when you're managing your own money, like you're very on top of ⁓ of the risk. ⁓ You know, everything you're doing is with a focus on return on capital. and that's how we ran it for the first couple of years. And so by the time we went out to raise ⁓ really third party capital in ⁓ in in any type of scale, you know, we had a a a good ⁓ track record and we had, you know, a bunch of people and we had some back office, etc. but you know, that process was was very ⁓ you know, challenging. We'd never managed ⁓ you know, institutional capital. ⁓ you know, we did what hedge fund managers at the time typically did, which was, you know, go to Geneva ⁓ and basically went door

to door and raised the initial ⁓ institutional capital from that. you know, we probably had a 10% drawdown. and we found out that institutional investors did not appreciate that ⁓ as opposed to was kind of Typical for running prop capital at the time because you were shooting for, you know, more leverage, better returns. ⁓ so we learned a lot from that process. and we had a lot of ⁓ ups and downs on ⁓ figuring out the right way to partner with institutions over time. ⁓ and you know, that's evolved. And today we have a, you know, very strong investor base, a lot of the biggest ⁓ you know, institutional investors on the pension side, sovereign side around the world, as well as, you know, families that have been with us for for a long time. ⁓ but that's definitely been a process and you kind of learn and ⁓ get the right people on the team ⁓ over time to do that. speaker-1: So we we've we've kind of hit on some of the elements of it, but we should probably define for for those listening ⁓ what is a kind of multi manager or pod shop ⁓ as you're often referred to. speaker-0: I don't love the term pot shop because I think it ⁓ kind of devalues what the business actually is and it gives the ⁓ impression that basically you just kind of hire people and and give them capital and hope for the best. ⁓ there's there's certainly an element of that and and we definitely do a lot of a lot of hiring, but ⁓ what people don't appreciate is kind of the business of the business. Right. There's A tremendous amount of effort that goes into building ⁓ all the infrastructure, all the central PLs, ⁓ the technology, the research, the data, the AI. ⁓ you know, we have 2,600 people, almost half of them are on the ⁓ you know, business side, right? Where they're not ⁓ actively investing. So you really try to create a a ⁓ platform upon which ⁓ you can build. different businesses. And those businesses are, you know, long short equity or commodities or global macro or, you know, quant, arbitrage, all these different businesses. And every year or two you're ⁓ trying to extend them to the next kind of logical, next logical substrategy where you can continue to find uncorrelated, ⁓ you know, strong returns and improve the the market intelligence that you're getting across, you know, the platform. speaker-1: maybe it kind of pulling on this on this thread ⁓ a little bit longer on kind of how it works, right? Because if These strategies, these handful of of platforms that you're a part of have done very well, right? Produce amazing risk adjuster returns for multiple decades. But like theoretically, I I always scratch my head a little bit, right? Because especially early on, and you and we'll talk more about BAM and how you've evolved here in a little bit, but you know, when a lot of these started. They were predominantly equities in large liquid equities that in academic theory should be the most efficient areas of the market. How do you produce all these amazing returns? speaker-0: Yeah, I I don't really agree with the ⁓ academic theories, ⁓ which is why I think academic ⁓ academics are in academia. there's a trade off between liquidity and and efficiency, right? So if you're picking ⁓ you know, smaller cap equities, for example, to stick to the equity example, ⁓ you you have much higher Trading costs and your ability to cut your losses or change your mind is much more constrained if you're trading size than if you're trading larger gap equities. So the if you know kind of informational efficiencies and the kind of delta versus expectations that you can figure out might be larger, but ⁓ usually that's that's offset. And so majority of RPO, and I think that of of most large funds tends to be in the largest ⁓ strategies and in the largest ⁓ you know securities within those strategies. Now is the the markets have grown quite a bit. So you know the equity markets, the market caps, ⁓ you you know you could pick your favorite tech stock. you know, the kind of market caps we have today were you know unheard of you know 10, 20 years ago. So there's a lot more market cap, there's a lot more liquidity. So you you could trade a lot more ⁓ size. Right. ⁓ and then there's ⁓ lots of other ⁓ you know strategies, whether currencies or rates or gas or power. ⁓ a lot of these weren't that big a markets if you go further back. ⁓ things like you know index rebalancing has has grown you know quite a bit, right? and newer strategies that are enabled by better infrastructure, like all the quant Strategies and things like that, where you could you could do them on bigger scale today than you could before. ⁓ so we try to spread the bets across lots of different teams and lots of different strategies. speaker-1: I hear you on your kind of, hey, I don't love pod shops. I prefer platforms. And maybe platforms a a a much better kind of terminology to to use because you know, if I think of the success that you have produced and and other organizations to to ⁓ to a certain degree, you know, there are a few things that I think are are maybe exceptional or or different than maybe other hedge funds. You know, for for for a platform, you need talent, you need, you know, risk and portfolio construction, and you need like great infrastructure. So I'd love to talk a little bit about those maybe three pieces. Maybe the first being talent. Like how how do you assess and then recruit talent to come to Ballyastny? Well speaker-0: It starts with your reputation and what your offering is to the talent. So it's incredibly competitive. So to avoid being negatively selected, you need to have ⁓ compelling value proposition to the talent you're trying to recruit. Right. ⁓ when people start funds, oftentimes they have, you know, very nice ⁓ ⁓ you know, diagrams and and you know, PowerPoints of everyone they want to hire in a in a fairly short, you know, period of time. ⁓ but to do that without getting negatively selected is is incredibly hard to do. Like you have very

strong competitors in all the different spaces, and the people who you want to hire are not really looking for jobs, right? Like they have good track records, they're doing well wherever they are. so it starts with your reputation and the value proposition. So for us, ⁓ we've always tried to combine like the best of ⁓ a platform offering in terms of access to a lot of capital, the best infrastructure for your particular strategy, you know, large resources and quantitative research and risk, portfolio construction, you know, a we have outstanding AI capabilities, ⁓ etc. ⁓ with the best aspects of a smaller, you know, traditionally single manager fund, which are culture. Like we try to have a really strong team partnership culture. We have 20 partners today split across management and top portfolio managers, collaboration across, you know, within strategies, across strategies, and very much like a learning, you know, improvement type of environment. speaker-1: I should point out that is different than other shops where there's collaboration is kind of prohibited. They want everybody to kind of have their own ideas and not share it. So that's kind of unique. speaker-0: I have a different philosophical view there. Like I don't think that ⁓ encouraging collaboration typically leads to groupthink on individual ideas. you know, it it can, but it it typically doesn't. ⁓ and the reason for that is ⁓ one, you're hiring specialists. So, you know, just because you know, tech PM likes a particular ⁓ AI stock doesn't mean your healthcare PM is going to go buy that stock. But the insights in how you know the AI is ⁓ kind of getting rolled out ⁓ might lead them to think about something in their space. Right. ⁓ and understanding the you know sector rotations and kind of catalyst roadmaps might be helpful for them and and ⁓ you know timing into some of their ideas. Right. So that's one. And then two, there's a lot of ⁓ process collaboration as opposed to a particular investment idea. All right. ⁓ so we really try to spread kind of best practices around, whether they're, you know, risk oriented, ⁓ research oriented, AI oriented, ⁓ people development. ⁓ there's, you know, a million things that you don't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel unlike somebody might have figured out a good way to to go about that. ⁓ And there's a lot of collaboration across strategies. So if there's something going on in in rates ⁓ that's significant, it's going to impact the equity market at some point. And you better have an understanding of what's happening there. And it's you're more likely to have that understanding if you have a strong in-house team that's ⁓ kind of sharing their views as opposed to just hearing what's, you know, being published and from the street. ⁓ you know, same thing from you know, commodity markets, ⁓ you know, et cetera. ⁓ and lastly, like ⁓ if you're hiring senior people ⁓ who are strong in their spaces, like they disagree more often than they agree. So if you put, you know, five PMs in a in a room to debate a stock, like you you'll typically get five different opinions. And if they all do their own work and and come to a the same consensus, like usually that's a pretty good, pretty good signal. speaker-1: Is it do you think that your time at at Schoenfeld and and picking some of the other traders' brains on like how to actually make money helped you to kind of form a a a a culture that is a little bit more collaborative than some of your your peers versus if you would your first job was somewhere else. speaker-0: ⁓ I think so. But at the time they were much more of a generalist trading firm. You know, they've evolved quite a bit as well and now are much more of a specialist firm also. ⁓ so it's much riskier to do that within a generalist firm, right? Because the best practice stuff is great. ⁓ but the market views within a generalist firm are are riskier, right? Because you can't have a lot of people lined up with similar positions. Whereas when you have lots of different strategies and geographies and and specialist PMs, ⁓ you know, the risk of that is is lower just because you're much more diversified by design. speaker-1: Before we kind of maybe move on to to kind of some of those other areas, portfolio construction or risk management, you know, y you've spent a lot of time, you know, acquiring talent and part of the the attraction ⁓ is your culture, some of it is is your infrastructure. Where does compensation come in? Well speaker-0: important to get right and we spend all we spend a lot of time on it. we try to align it with ⁓ what we want to allocate our own capital and and our partners capital which is ⁓ the best way to reward consistent long term performance but also you you want to have a structure that ⁓ is stabilizing for ⁓ the team. So you need to have some sort of ⁓ you know downside protection ⁓ as well. so you know when I started like the teams were much smaller and you didn't really need that. ⁓ but today as people are managing much more capital and this you know it's much more competitive and efficient you know the average team is kind of five to ten people. All right. And so being able to support the hiring of best in class people, ⁓ their development and promotion, and the stabilization if somebody's having a difficult period are all important, in addition to the usual, you know, kind of upside incentives ⁓ that are aligned, you know, those are pretty cleanly aligned with putting up returns, you know, for the fund. Right. ⁓ We've experimented with lots of different mixes between ⁓ kind of central and individual comp. ⁓ we found that most top performers want the majority of their comp to be paid based on their performance and it's cleaner and easier and there's less, you know, arguing. and so we have a structure that that enables that. speaker-1: So you you you get the talent, you figure out the right way to compensate them that kind of aligns the interests of GPLP. Then you

put risk management and portfolio construction around that. Maybe t talk a little bit about how you how you think about that. speaker-0: As part of the process, when we're bringing somebody on and evaluating them, you're basically iterating on a business plan together. So they're presenting what they currently do and what they'd like to do, right, in in the form of a plan. And that covers their team, their universe that they're trading, the research process, the portfolio construction, you know, sample portfolios, you know, we look at their old attribution, correlations, et cetera. And we iterate on the plan with them. And typically it's a phased approach of, you know, here's kind of phase one and the initial team and the initial amount of ⁓ capital that we allocate to them. ⁓ that's going well and you're hitting your targets. Here's how we're planning for it to grow. And then you kind of get to phase two of, you know, building the team and the business, ⁓ which usually involves additional hiring, additional coverage, additional capital. You know, so we try to align on that. and if they have ⁓ you know, real business building ability and and ⁓ ambition, ⁓ you know, there could be phase three where it's a much larger ⁓ group. We we have some teams that are, you know, twenty plus people on the team, cover cover a wide variety of ⁓ of instruments ⁓ in their particular area of of specialty. speaker-1: Yeah, you've only talked about really the the right tail distribution. You even talked about, you know, you talked about performance is good, we'll give you more money, you can build your team. How do you talk about the left tail, you know, drawdowns, correlations? speaker-0: It's pretty rare that somebody gets stopped out. It does happen, but it's it's pretty rare. Most of the time, ⁓ somebody's just not doing well enough for an extended period of time. Right. And in those cases, like we're giving them a lot of feedback on what we see from you know the risk side, from the ⁓ strategy side of of that business, in terms of maybe it's the portfolio construction issues, maybe it's risk issues, maybe there's Something in the research process we can iterate on. ⁓ maybe it's ⁓ when we look at the attribution, maybe there's somebody on the team that's that's not pulling their weight, ⁓ and we can look to upgrade that. so it's it's an iterative process. We look at ourselves as like a venture partner, right? Where we're taking a defined amount of risk. ⁓ we're growing the risk if somebody's doing well. and we're iterating with them how to turn it around if they're not doing well. ⁓ but if a period of time passes and we're not seeing the the results, you know, then then we have to move on. Like we're in the business of putting up returns. speaker-1: So we talked about the the the construction p risk management. Guess the last thing is is is providing them great infrastructure. And I I think ⁓ and there you could infrastructure can mean a lot of things. It can mean

trading, but I I wanted to talk a little bit more about mainly about research. I mean, some of the things you've done, especially with AI, are are ⁓ are pretty cool. Do you wanna kinda share some of that? speaker-0: Yeah, I think this goes back to like the value proposition when you're asking about ⁓ on the recruiting side. Like if the only thing you're offering people is a sign up check and that's how you're trying to differentiate, ⁓ that's a very hard game to win. Like maybe you could do that if you're the biggest, but beyond that, ⁓ you know, ⁓ you're gonna get negatively selected because there's always someone that's willing to to match or pay more. Right. so having centralized infrastructure and research research and resources that enable people to generate more PL with the same risk allocation and more consistent PL because the resources they have access to are better than across the street. That's a real differentiator. Right. So that starts with, you know, collaboration across, you know, all the different spaces. ⁓ but then also like all the centralized groups. So we have them geopolitics group, we have an economics group, ⁓ we have a proprietary research group that does individual projects in collaboration with the investing teams when they want someone to go make, you know, ⁓ 500 calls on a particular subject to see if they could figure it out better than someone else. ⁓ that's very time consuming. ⁓ you know, we have the manpower to ⁓ allow them to do that. Right. we have ⁓ you know very strong AI team that It's a central team. And then we have people that we assign to individual teams. ⁓ and they build, again, in partnership with with the teams, they build ⁓ a whole host of tools that enable you to improve your research process. So some of them were productivity tools. ⁓ now they're kind of moving up the stack towards ⁓ more research ⁓ tools, and I think it's gonna be ⁓ an advantage for a period of time, and then eventually that'll be table stakes, and you have to kind of You know, figure out the next thing. speaker-1: Does it change how you invest or just improve the process of investing? speaker-0: I think it improves the process, I kinda think about it like ⁓ when other waves of kind of investing innovation have come, right? So if you think back 25 years ago when we were building out and and and our peers were building out long short businesses, ⁓ like getting teams that built their own models ⁓ was a big edge. Like nobody built their own models back then. Right. And so people that built their own models had an edge for a long time. Right. But the edge from that today is much smaller than it used to be. Right. So then you go another 10 years pass and ⁓ alternative data started coming around. ⁓ you know, nobody had alternative data before. Right. ⁓ but then all of a sudden, first in consumer stocks and then in other stocks, internet then kind of made its way around. ⁓ and that was a big edge for a while. And the firms and people that figured that out earlier ⁓ did amazingly well. And ⁓ you know, it's still an edge today, but the edge is much, much smaller, right? Because everybody does it. So that's kind of how I think, you know, AI is ⁓ the teams that are able to harness that ⁓ intelligently and combine it, you know, it's not gonna make money by itself. They combine it with all the other things they do well. ⁓ you know, they have an edge. and I think they will for for a period of time. It makes you more productive, you can figure stuff out faster, you can get deeper on more names and more concepts. ⁓ But you know, that's not gonna last forever forever either. So you have to kinda lean into it and you know, then you figure out the next thing. speaker-1: probably a good segue to adapt or die. Is that the same mentality you're applying to technology today? It's just sort of this adapt or die. speaker-0: Definitely. I I I I think if if you look back at the list of largest hedge funds over time, right? It comes out every year, they've had it for a long time. ⁓ there's been tremendous turnover on that list. And I think it's not unique to hedge funds. You it's if you look at the largest companies in ⁓ you know, SP, right? So I think if you don't constantly innovate and adapt and try to figure out the new new thing and how to implement that and combine it with the rest of your things that you do well, you know, you become mediocre and eventually you get passed up. And in almost every industry, there's a fairly small number of firms that, you know, generate either most of the PL or most of the alpha in the hedge fund world. ⁓ and I think this is no no different. So, you know, ⁓ adapting to the markets and adapting to kind of process changes as one of our key, you know, principles. And the teams that do a good job of that tend to you know, perform year in and year out. Like not every year is a record year, but they're very consistent and they're that's constantly because they're reinventing their their process all the time. So You know, we definitely ⁓ try to do that as ⁓ as a firm to stay on the leading edge. How do you speaker-1: You I mean culture is a big a big thing for you and and I know you spent a lot of time thinking about it. How do you develop a culture that can adapt ⁓ and it's not become bureaucratic? Because you you're a big organization with locations around the world versus just a few guys in Chicago when you started in 2001. speaker-0: Yeah, I think it's not easy. it starts with hiring ⁓ really good people and being consistent culturally in what you're looking for. So we have pretty involved interview process where ⁓ we might take a little bit longer than others to to make an offer ⁓ because we want a number of different folks, both in management and peers, to speak with the candidate. ⁓ But I think that translates to we're more committed to the to the Canada when they join. And we we understand their strategy ⁓ and their pluses and minuses better. And ⁓ through

that process, people usually self-select on joining as well. Because if they want to be at a place where they kind of sit in the corner and are left alone, like they they tend to self-select somewhere else. ⁓ if they want to be part of a larger team and enjoy ⁓ kind of talking markets and process, you know, with with their colleagues and constantly trying to figure out how to ⁓ you know iterate their approach, ⁓ you know, they appreciate it. and are usually more, you know, more committed. speaker-1: Another kind of qu question for you is just that if you think about your flagship fund, your flagship fund is called Atlas. And Atlas ⁓ is, I believe, drive from Ayn Rand and ⁓ who another ⁓ immigrant from the former Soviet Union. How has her work kind of influenced the way you think about investing or life? speaker-0: Well, I I think in general, like psychology and philosophy are very important, ⁓ to understand where people are coming from. And I think they're integral to ⁓ people's success or or lack thereof over time. ⁓ if you look at a at you know, the most successful people and you know, investing in business and other areas, like like they tend to have like a very kind of stable psychology and a very ⁓ ⁓ you know kind of thoughtful philosophy on what they're trying to to achieve. Right. ⁓ So with Ayn Rand in particular, I read her work when I when I started in college, I read Atlas Shru ⁓ Atlas Shrugged and then ⁓ all the rest of her books and have reread Atlas a number of times over over the years. ⁓ it basically articulated a ⁓ moral philosophy of capitalism and you know, life in general, right? A lot of things that kind of intuitively, you know, made sense to me, where ⁓ you know, in the a lot of the media or or different publications or academia are presented as contradictions of you could, you know, make money or be a good person, or you could have a profitable business, or you could help people, like like those are not real contradictions. Right. And so ⁓ she created like a very thoughtful you know, philosophical framework that's presented in ⁓ very enjoyable, you know, fiction books, ⁓ which are much easier to read than the, you know, nonfiction philosophy, and tell the story and you could really ⁓ relate to it and ⁓ and you know kind of grasp it ⁓ without being ⁓ you know PhD in philosophy. speaker-1: And you also have the Atlas Fellows. I mean, that that is can you talk a little bit about that and some of the other work that you've done there? speaker-0: I've always been interested in in kind of scholarship ⁓ initiatives. and we we looked around ⁓ my my wife Rebecca and I looked around ⁓ at all the different you know options and programs that that were out there. and we didn't find one that ⁓ combined finance related work and internships and direction. with ⁓ scholarships that weren't, you know, ⁓ for a particular company. So, you know, a bank might have one where you, you know, you work for the bank and then you get ⁓ you know a scholarship ⁓ but then you have to come back and work for the bank and you know that's fine and those are great. But we I wanted to do something bigger where you know you weren't tied to just coming to work for us. We wanted to find kids who were ⁓ super smart, super driven, ⁓ were were ⁓ doing great in school. and we're interested in finance as a potential career, but we're sort of under resourced in the finance world. whether they're first generation to to go to college or their parents ⁓ might be in a completely different industry, they might be in a different place where there's no connectivity. and so we combined ⁓ finance internships, four years of ⁓ paid internships, ⁓ the first one being at BAM, and then we help place them with top tier ⁓ finance firms, ⁓ hedge funds, VC funds, exchanges, ⁓ banks ⁓ over the years, with a ⁓ college scholarship to help fill some of the ⁓ need that they have to bridge the gap to go to a to go to a top school. ⁓ And so we we started with an initial class ⁓ that just ⁓ graduated ⁓ from college. They they all got jobs in ⁓ in finance ⁓ upon graduation. ⁓ so that was pretty cool. And we've expanded it. So now there's ⁓ I'm gonna screw up the number, but I think it's pretty close to 150 people ⁓ in the program, ⁓ all on ⁓ you know, four year scholarships ⁓ with four year internships. And ⁓ we're ⁓ you know trying to grow it every year. speaker-1: That's very cool. Very cool. F final couple questions for you and we'll then we'll we'll let you go. So what is your what was a book maybe that you would recommend in terms of either investing culture or life? And you can't say when Atlas Shrugged or Fountainhead. speaker-0: Yeah, we have a whole reading list that we that we give out. so th there's a there's a bunch of good ones. ⁓ I think on ⁓ on trading and markets, I always tell people to start with market wizards. I think Chuck Schwager does a great job of ⁓ profiling through very thoughtful interviews ⁓ a lot of the ⁓ perennial top performers in the business. So I think in particular the first ⁓ two or three. He's done like a bunch of different volumes, but like the first two or three that he did, I read when I was starting out. ⁓ you know, and they were interviews with ⁓ a lot of folks that have ⁓ you know were already legendary at the time, but certainly today are. ⁓ so I would start with that. And I think the interesting takeaways there is the psychological ingredients are pretty consistent across a lot of the participants. ⁓ but they're Approach, the approaches are completely all over the map, just in terms of what they trade, how they trade, you know, how they risk manage, ⁓ you know, holding periods, completely all over the map. ⁓ but the psychological elements of how to be, you know, consistent and come back from from drawdowns and you know iterating approaches, you know, those tend to be ⁓ pretty consistent. So I would start with that. speaker-1: That is a good one. That is defin on my bookshelf as well. And then last question, I mean, look, you're you're you're a family man, which I have kids can be stressful at times. You are a founder, you run a hedge fund, markets can be stressful. What do you do? What are your hobbies that help you distress? speaker-0: I like to do ⁓ kind of active stuff that ⁓ gets your head out of work for a couple hours. So ⁓ ideally outdoors. so I like to ski, I like to mountain bike, I like to ⁓ play ⁓ racket sports, ⁓ table tennis, badell, stuff like that, basketball, like anything that ⁓ you know is fast paced enough. that, you know, you can't really do it and think about anything else. ⁓ you know, or you're gonna wipe out pretty quickly. so I I I think it's important to get your head out of ⁓ out of the markets and out of work for a little bit and come back ⁓ come back refreshed. speaker-1: You heard it, you got to love the market, you gotta work hard, but occasionally you need to unplug and rus brain. So that's ⁓ that is good advice. Hey Dimitri, thank you so much for ⁓ being a part of our podcast today. We really appreciate it. If you are interested in more information on FEG, check out our website at www.feg.com. And don't forget to subscribe to our communications so you don't miss the next episode. speaker-0: My pleasure. Thanks, Greg. speaker-1: Please keep in mind that this information is intended to be general education that needs to be framed within the unique risk and return objectives of each client. Therefore, nobody should consider these to be FEG recommendations. This podcast was prepared by FEG. Neither the information nor any opinion expressed in this podcast constitutes an offer or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any securities. The views and opinions expressed by guest speakers are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of their firm or of FEG.