@vrexec
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I still have a LinkedIn. On my desktop. Because people message me there. It's frustrating but necessary, sadly. But literally every single time I open it lately, the feed shows me people dying. Like a spouse sharing how his/her other half had a great career cut short and now has a terminal illness. Often there's a link to a gofundme page. Or someone's child who is sick. Or a friend posting on behalf of someone who has died. It's purely the algorithm because I have no idea who these people are.
Pure macabre.
Why is this happening?
I find it interesting that nobody ever models their own financials as they would a business. At least I never hear about this.
You Inc.
You have your topline "gross" revenue, then "net sales" after income tax.
Then your COGS... the expenses required for you to generate those sales... like your commute, your clothes, maintaining your social and professional networks (i.e. memberships, dues), etc.
Then your fixed overhead costs.. your house, personal vehicles, insurance, property tax, etc.
Then you have your actual real "earnings."
One of the most gravitas-filled moments I remember working on Wall Street was... one morning years ago we had a top well-known economist in the room and someone was peppering him with questions about his past views/analyses and how they square with the latest data releases... seemingly trying to put him on the spot.
He calmly looked up and said the following 6 words.
"When the facts change, I change."
Such beautiful, simple elegance in it.
I think about this moment all the time.
What's cool/creepy about Claude lately is...
You'll be working on something and Claude will tell you that it's having trouble pulling certain data from the web... and you'll move on and go about it a different way...
... then you'll notice that Claude is suddenly now grabbing the data it said earlier that it couldn't access...
... as if it was never a problem... it's as if it launched an agent in the background to brute force attack the problem, solved it, and just never told you it solved it...
My parents want us to come back to the US, as you'd imagine.
What's funny about it, though, is they complained about "how far away" we lived even when we all lived in NJ.
My parents live in North Jersey and we were living in the central NJ area... they'd complain about the 45-60 minute drive and how they can't "just swing by."
I guess the lesson is that unless your kids live next door to their grandparents... they'll always complain about where you live!
Good morning...
This account began as the "Virtual Executive Officer"... VEO... a parody of the COVID-era virtual assistant or "VA" trend.
The first thing I pursued going out on my own was small business brokerage, so I used this account and fun provocative rhetoric like "performative careerism" and "humiliation rituals" to push people toward buying small businesses, the trades, or otherwise betting on themselves... especially young fathers.
If I'm honest, I was also a little lonely... self employment was an unknown forest and I wanted some company. I've made so many incredible friends from here over the years.. and I even sourced a couple engagements because of my content. Remarkable looking back at it all.
Over my first ~2 years I sold nine SMBs... to strategics, PE, and even to corporate executives looking to "escape the matrix" as they say... what a run it was.
Anyway, I've always said my audience is very specific. I've rarely ever looked at X analytics but it seems to hold... mostly American men, 25 to 34. Exactly who I was at 32 when I resigned from Wall Street.
I was on the doorstep of a big career but felt a deep lack of "real economy" experience, despite growing up in construction. I felt there were still far too many boxes I needed to check.
So I left... and after SMB brokerage came much larger deals closer to M&A advisory, building a venture portfolio, and building a data and strategy consultancy... all while being present for my wife and two young kids in their early years and then moving the family overseas in yet another wild adventure. It was the craziest challenge I could conceive of at 32, and it's been wonderful.
That's what this account has really been about... encouraging others that it's OK to think this way and execute against their ideas or dreams. Be "agentic"... build confidence, ignore the expected path and what others think. You only get one life.
What's changing now is that I'm almost 39 and aging out of that window myself. The kids aren't toddlers anymore. I have far less to prove... I feel like I've climbed a humongous mountain, and now I'm looking across the horizon at what comes next.
After more than five years of the so-called "portfolio life", I'm itching to consolidate all my energy into one focused pursuit. And with AI and other tools especially, there's so much deep work that can be done now, believe it or not... whether that's the kind of work I did on Wall Street or going much deeper with the clients and projects already on my plate. Less context switching. More committed depth.
I've always said there are seasons to life and you're in charge of how you spend them...
VEO out.
Has anyone enjoyed a long corporate/law/finance career in which they invested for retirement with traditional vehicles (e.g. 401K or IRA), then actually retired and are funding a life of relative leisure with those retirement funds?
I'm collecting examples of these roads actually traveled.
With respect to those who've asked... I'm not going to share the model or the prompt. As others have rightly pointed out, the only valuable aspects of this business going forward are... the prompt and the process.
The prompt and the process are the result of experience and judgement... which in turn come from longevity in the market covering the sector and understanding what matters, what doesn't, what metrics move the stocks, how to track those metrics, etc. Also creativity and unique ways to thinking about problems.
Posting or sharing my process and the deliverable itself would be giving away the farm.
I'll probably monetize this work soon.
Inspired by Brett's and others' commentary lately, I put my old equity research hat on (I was on a top II-ranked team at Evercore) and built a financial model for a packaged food company I know extremely well... using all of my best practices, knowledge, and dream wish list features.
The process took about 4 hours. 2-3 hours of that was Opus 5.5 grinding out compute. I burned a noticeable chunk of my AI usage credits in the process.
It is an absolute machine. A work of art. It's literally the greatest financial model I have ever seen.
Highly unlikely, dare I say zero chance, that anyone on Wall Street -- sell side or buy side -- possessed such a model on this company three years ago. I suspect many on Wall Street have this now.. or at least are able to create it if they shared my same knowhow and experience... or perhaps they can't as they are internally constrained.. I don't know.
Then I documented my workflow in detail, and created models for two additional names... adding new learnings and nuances to the workflow as they're encountered.
Now I have an army of agents building a coverage universe worth of models based on my detailed instructions.
I can quite literally... within 3-4 weeks build an automated equity research platform with technical resources (i.e. models, data repositories, analytical tools, etc) that would dwarf anything that existed on the sell-side when I was there.
And it's such an exciting concept that... I just might!
Inspired by Brett's and others' commentary lately, I put my old equity research hat on (I was on a top II-ranked team at Evercore) and built a financial model for a packaged food company I know extremely well... using all of my best practices, knowledge, and dream wish list features.
The process took about 4 hours. 2-3 hours of that was Opus 5.5 grinding out compute. I burned a noticeable chunk of my AI usage credits in the process.
It is an absolute machine. A work of art. It's literally the greatest financial model I have ever seen.
Highly unlikely, dare I say zero chance, that anyone on Wall Street -- sell side or buy side -- possessed such a model on this company three years ago. I suspect many on Wall Street have this now.. or at least are able to create it if they shared my same knowhow and experience... or perhaps they can't as they are internally constrained.. I don't know.
Then I documented my workflow in detail, and created models for two additional names... adding new learnings and nuances to the workflow as they're encountered.
Now I have an army of agents building a coverage universe worth of models based on my detailed instructions.
I can quite literally... within 3-4 weeks build an automated equity research platform with technical resources (i.e. models, data repositories, analytical tools, etc) that would dwarf anything that existed on the sell-side when I was there.
And it's such an exciting concept that... I just might!
Every investment decision I've ever made has been informed by a Excel spreadsheet. A financial model that serves as a business simulation and a translation layer between research & insight. The model ultimately is a place to quantify my variant perception and quantify the downside if I am wrong, the two critical pillars of any good public market investment thesis.
One of my PM friends says his analysts spend all day with "their noses in models", identifying and researching the hinge variables in a business. This is the game of alpha generation, simple not easy. A cornerstone of the hedge fund interview process is the modeling test, and hedge funds routinely hire ex bankers & private equity for this skill. (A certain hedge fund founder is rumored to have fired analysts who tried to repurpose sell-side models as their own.)
When you peel back the onion on Tier 1 fundamental research process, four years since the Chat GPT 3.5 moment, AI adoption is slow & uneven with the median investment process far from transformed (despite an exceptional amount of tokens burned...). Why is that?
To me, it's simple. The "bar to impress" a public equity investor with AI has to start with the financial model architecture as the nerve center of the investment process. Almost every AI workflow for investors I've seen is a "hey this is sort of interesting", but not a "you will take this from me over my dead body" workflow. An agent that can summarize your morning inbox well is convenient but won't bend the curve of alpha. An automated, auditable, full-stack research system built around an architecture of Excel models that can help me do the rigor and depth of investment research in 3 days that used to take me 3 weeks? That changes everything.
Financial modeling as the foundational layer in that workflow, the critical unlock to truly enact a full end to end research & risk system. Yes, it is productivity, but ultimately it is more about speed to insight and surfacing the right insight to the decision maker at the right time (this is what great analysts do). "But judgment will still sit with the PM, right?" What is investment judgment if not gathering and weighing as many unique insights about a business as possible then continuously comparing that view to market implied expectations?
"Brett, but won't modeling move to JSON?". I've heard selective instance of that. Perhaps eventually. But Excel is just this beautiful, auditable, sharable, trusted substrate on Wall Street. It won't die a quick death. The challenge investors have of reinventing their investment process while running risk is materially different than software engineers adopting coding agents.
Until September 22nd when Opus 5.5 was released, the technology wasn't there. It's here now.
For this simple reason, I believe we are entering a period of accelerated adoption of AI in Finance, particularly in public equity investment process.
I am having conversations with firms who are interested in co-developing and enacting this vision for their investment teams. If this resonates with you, please DM.
One of the worst takes of all time.
My wife says my relationship with work changed for the worse ever since I lost my personal assistant at the investment bank I worked for in my late 20s/early 30s. I had every little administrative matter handled. Booking flights/trains/cars, submitting expenses, letting people into the office for meetings, marketing, client organization and analysis, etc. Basically anything that wasn’t directly tied to revenue and could be done compliantly (i.e. without a FINRA registration) was handled. I rarely lifted a finger on those tasks… which let me focus 100% of my time and acuity on research/modeling/writing/client interaction.
What makes having a personal assistant possible (professional, experienced, six-figure comp) is scale.
Folks have asked why I don’t just scale my business.
At this point in my life… this “season”… I don’t want scale because scale introduces complexity.
I’m having the best year I’ve ever had so far on my self-employment journey… but another leg of growth would require people commit their time and effort to me, and me to them, with an indefinite or long-term understanding.
I’ve hesitated to do this because I want to maintain maximum optionality… get up and go at any time.. no tethers or expectations.
I can’t “close up shop” for weeks and travel with my family with little to no concerns about who might “check in” or need something.
This is the “wealth in anonymity” I talked about yesterday in my Triad of Wealth graphic.
It would therefore be counterintuitive and misleading to hire someone who would be expecting consistent long term work and income. I can’t do that to someone. And I’d only hire someone if they were to provide such a commitment.. no part time or overseas or fractional or “AI” services. Those are all half-ass replacements for true partnership.
People have asked why I don’t “take over” my father’s construction business back home in the states.. or why I decided not to acquire an SMB. It’s because these require commitment to people who work at the company, subcontractors expecting steady work, customers digging in for months or years-long projects. I’m not in the season for such commitment… one day I will be.
Today, my wife and I like to be kites… flying in the wind… no tethers.
The downside is that we are on our own… no admin, assistants, HR folks to handle the little things.
But the little things need to be done… they are extremely important… the hydraulic fluid in a crane or excavator… and they can be brutal and overwhelming…
