Shearson

Simply put, leverage is debt upon debt upon debt upon debt.

And so like Shearson, which was my alma mater, so I was watching that like a hawk because that's where I was a stockbroker.

That's where I learned about currencies and currency life cycles.

And they were leveraged, admittedly, 30 to 1.

I was still new, but they were very aggressive.

They're the ones that taught me how to read the technical language of the markets.

Not the two and a half years that Shearson ultimately put me through in education to understand how to do this.

No, no, no.

I was a certified financial planner.

And the reason I bring that up is because after Hutton went bankrupt, Shearson took him over.

And I don't know if it was at Merrill.

The years kind of meld together.

In fact, one of my early...

This is related to the candlesticks.

When I started my company in 96, because I was still working at Shearson and Merrill.

When I started my company in 96, I went out on my own crusade back in 96.

And he just runs it again and again.

He buys a firm called Shearson in 1974 and does something clever.

Shearson's a classier name than his.

So he takes their name.

Then in 1979, he buys Loeb Roads and the whole thing becomes Shearson Loeb Roads.

the second biggest brokerage in America, behind only Merrill Lynch.

In 20 years, he'd gone from four guys and $200,000 to a Wall Street giant entirely by buying troubled companies and stitching them together.

He renames the whole empire Travelers Group.

And my mom used to work for, at the time, the predecessor to Lehman Brothers in the 70s.

She was, you know, in the type suite for these CEO and other sort of senior leaders at that organization, Shearson, they were known as.

And so when I had the book, what was it, Barbarians at the Gate? I don't know if you're familiar with that book, but it was written a while ago.

Yeah, it talked about RJR Nabisco and it was them.