Losing $50K to Winning Big: Craig Eppler on Private Lending, Rental Portfolios, and Launching a Debt Fund

I think to your point about if you've been investing long enough, you're bound to lose money.

So I think if you can get that out of the way and kind of get your mindset right there, then that's more helpful.

It still doesn't help when it actually happens.

It still hurts.

But yeah, I think that's super important.

And honestly, if someone came to me and said, hey, I have this awesome fund and I've never lost money, I would question whether they've learned anything during the career.

But anyway, yeah.

Yeah, so I went to your college, small school out in central Pennsylvania, did cross country and track there, which frankly, I think helped a lot in terms of discipline and investing.

And the two are very closely correlated, I think.

But I got a job offer.

I did a bunch of internships during college, had no idea what I wanted to do.

But my final internship was at Vanguard.

I'm the large asset management company in the Philly suburbs.

I was a derivatives trader there.

So I worked there for about two years.

Being a trader at a large company like that sounds super sexy.

But in reality, after the first few weeks of moving a lot of money around...

You realize that it was a very simple strategy.

It's a great firm.

I'm not going to talk crap on Vanguard.

What we were doing was very much matching the indexes.

There wasn't a lot of strategy involved with what my job was.

I really wanted to get more on the strategy side and understand how the larger investment world works.

I moved over to an investment advisory firm also in the Philadelphia area.

I say the Philadelphia area because I was living in downtown Philly and commuting out to Malvern.