How a Rust-Belt Town Kid Found His Way to Wall Street

My parents moved to the United States from Italy a year before I was born. My father was in the cement business (surprise, surprise) and my mother worked as a secretary at Chrysler. I grew up in a small town in southeast Michigan littered with its fair share of skeleton factories.

I realized at a young age that going the route many of the elders in my community had simply wasn’t an option for me. In other words, there were no options for a decent-paying job with minimal qualifications.

So, I had to go the education route. Admittedly, at the beginning of my college experience, it wasn’t my primary choice. I built a solid reputation as a soccer player in my high school years, and ended up being an All-State player for two years in a row. This led me into college soccer, where I started off at a mid-major D1 school, University of Detroit-Mercy.

But between injuries and disciplinary issues (I was young and wild), it became clear after a year that it wasn’t the place for me. I transferred over to a smaller school, University of Michigan-Dearborn, the following year. I played soccer for a year there, but once again, injury and disciplinary issues were a problem.

I realized the clock was running out on my sporting ambitions, and made an executive decision to cut my losses. 

In hindsight, this may have been an early sign of my trading instincts, but in reality… I had no idea what I was getting into.

I was another broke college kid with student loans, and virtually no business network. I needed a job, and there weren’t many at the time.

But I did belong to a local athletic club. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was the best network I had at my disposal. I approached the manager, and was offered a job making $7.40 an hour doing basic maintenance at the facility. I made more at my first job when I was 16, but whatever - I needed work, and the job came with a free gym membership.

Nonetheless, I decided to put my head down and build out a good reputation at the gym. There were a lot of good people that exercised there, and unfortunately, it closed permanently back in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.

One day, when I was off the clock, I was in the locker room about to partake in a sauna session. I had been interested in the workings of Wall Street for a couple of years already (it was 2014), and I was talking about a few stocks.

A guy next to me was sitting and reading the Wall Street journal. He chimed in that he ran a local financial advisory business - and that he’d been doing it for more than 30 years.

Obviously, this caught my interest right away. I didn’t want to come off as desperate, but I told the guy that I was an economics student, and asked if I could drop off my resume the next day.

I did, and the rest is history. I passed my Series 7 before I even graduated college, and probably spent too much time arguing with my professors about how the economy ought to operate. 

But that didn’t matter. I already had my lucky break, and got my foot in the door. This advisor ran a $250 million portfolio, and he wanted someone tech savvy to place its trades. 

That wasn’t even the most exciting part. Instead, it was the lineup of investment companies that wanted us to give them the portfolio’s dollars. PIMCO, Fidelity, Blackrock - you name it, they wanted that capital.

Multiple times per week, they were coming to the office to take us out to lunch and pitch their funds. Not only that, but they arranged calls with portfolio managers of these funds so they could explain their approach.

The advisor running the show had already heard it all before, so I was put in the position of listening, and above all, learning. It made me realize early that markets are built around access to information, and not just that - it was about how this information was applied. 

I was all about the fundamentals at first, but after watching the market on a daily basis long enough (I was being paid to do it), I realized there was a hidden order to the chaos. I had already been experimenting with technical analysis while I was in college, but seeing its application in real-time made me realize that this trading business was a pathway to freedom.

And now, here we are, 13 years later.