By David Morgan
|
Get Trading Recommendations and Read Analysis for just $50 per month. |
David Morgan & Joel Salomon (Mindful Money Management) Podcast
Transcript–
David Morgan:
Welcome everyone. This is early May 2018. David Morgan with you and this is a special podcast I’m doing on a book I just read. I met this gentleman through my LinkedIn associations. It’s Joel Salomon in New York and the book is called Mindful Money Management: Memoirs of a Hedge Fund Manager. Being in the financial market for so long, there are so many things in this book, Joel that I could relate to. I’ll try to stay in some type of order, but let’s talk about your early years and you were striving to become a hedge fund manager. Why don’t you introduce who you are, why you wrote the book, and your early years?
Joel Salomon:
Thanks so much, David. First of all, thanks so much for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate it. It’s a pleasure. Thanks, also, for just noting that you were inspired because that really touches my heart. I appreciate that so much. So, to answer your questions, first of all let me just say I’m a dedicated father to two amazing, beautiful, inspiring daughters, Lauren and Morgan from which my company is actually named: SaLaurMor. As background, what I’m currently doing, I’m working as a prosperity coach. Some have called me a money shrink. My goal is to help at least 100,000 people become financially free. I work with clients to help identify and overcome their money roadblocks standing in the way of their personal financial freedom.
No one really talks about what they’ve learned about regarding money growing up subconsciously between age 0 when they born and say age 10. This is sometimes stopping them from taking action. They live in fear. Some people live in fear about investing in different markets. They can’t invest in real estate or stocks, or currencies, or commodities because of this fear that they actually have subconsciously. It creates a poverty consciousness. So, I work with them on overcoming these blocks so that they can move on their way to financial freedom.
Now, to tell you a little bit about my career and how I got here, it’s unusual I think, to say the least. I started my career as an actuary. Some people don’t really know exactly what an actuary was. I distinguish an actuary, an actuary and accountant by saying an actuary looks at his feet when he talks to you, an accountant looks at your feet.
An actuary does a lot of different things. They’ll calculate the reserves for an insurance company for their future claims. They’ll calculate your dividends or your premiums. I did a lot of those types of things at a company called New York Life Insurance Company. I worked as an actuary, became a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries going through a series of exams, and became a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, but really didn’t love my day job.
I had a dream to manage money whether it was as a hedge fund manager or a mutual fund manager. That was my dream back in 1993. Everyone I talked to at the time, gave me massive doubt. They said that’s impossible, you’re an actuary, there’s no way you can become an investor. But, I talked to one actuary who was on Wall Street. He said you need to get credit analysis experience if you want to be a great investor in financial securities. So, I made the move to Moody’s Investor Service, a credit rating
agency-. got the basics of credit analysis and actually, ultimately, got a portfolio of companies that I assigned ratings to and then learned everything I thought I needed to then get to the next level. A recruiter called and said, “Do you want to be a private equity investor?” I said, “Okay, that’s one step closer to being a hedge fund manager or mutual fund investor.” So, I jumped at that opportunity at a reinsurance company called Swiss Re, first in New York.
I’m working in New York for about year when my whole group was disbanded. That actually got me the opportunity to work in Zurich. I say in my book, Mindful Money Management, that from “bad things come good things, and from terrible things, come awesome great things.” So, from this potential bad thing of getting laid off, I got the opportunity to live and work in Zurich for almost a year-and-a-half. As I say in the book, and I have two appendices on travel because it’s one of my biggest passions in life, I got to travel to more than 30 countries, 40 towns across Europe and really had a great time there, but I came back to New York and realized I wasn’t one step closer to my dream and started looking. I found a job at a small hedge fund and that got me one step closer to my dream and ultimately in January 2008, after getting a call from my Citigroup salesperson in late 2007, I started in my dream job working as a hedge fund manager at Citigroup, and actually managing money. So, that’s the short story, I guess, of how I got to live at least for a few years, my dream and then I, of course, started my own company SaLaurMor Capital in late 2012 using insurance company money to invest and did that for a few years before I made the transition to become a …read more
From:: David Morgan