Play Long Term Games with Long Term People. All returns in life come from compound interest.
-Naval Ravikant
A couple of years ago I wrote about Long Term People. It was a meaningful post for me because I was announcing the sale of the Exponential ETFs sub-advisory business, a business that I watched Charles Ragauss build from scratch, and it was a post about people on both sides of the deal table who were and are very special to me.
I opened up that post with a story about Laura Morrison, the best example of Long Term Person I could find, and who happened to have just told me a great story about working with Long Term People.
At the time Laura hadn’t gone public with her cancer story. And anyway, she isn’t the attention-seeker that I’ve become. So I changed “she” to “he” to disguise her identity and sent the post out like that.
It’s hard to believe, but almost two and a half years have passed since I wrote that. And in that time everyone involved has continued to flourish.
Toroso Investments raised $32 million in funding and became Tidal Financial Group. They’ve brought in some of the best people, launched some of the best funds, and continue to be wildly successful.
Charles and Qiao and Eric have integrated the sub-advisor business into Tidal, and they fit like a glove. They too have added people and assets and have accomplished amazing things.
Laura Morrison is now driving growth at Direxion ETFs, and the two amazing Long Term People who had helped her build the BATS/Cboe listing business from scratch, Rob Marrocco and Giang Bui, are now managing the ETF listing businesses for Cboe and Nasdaq respectively.
These are good days for the good guys. And I’m feeling nostalgic.
I am feeling nostalgic because I got to spend some time with each of this people this week, at the Exchange ETF conference in Miami. The winter ETF conference trip has been something of an annual ritual for the 15 years. 15 years is a long time to build a network, build relationships, and build reputations.
I’ve been remarkably fortunate to have had the opportunity to be out and about with clients and partners. And I’ve been even more fortunate to have been in an industry where people understand the value of being Long Term People and playing Long Term Games. Not every industry is like that. The ETF industry is.
And that’s all I want to say with this post. No snark, no shock-jock one-liners, no punching up, no insights or analysis. I’ve done enough of all of that.
I just want to say thank you to everyone in the ETF industry that I’ve worked with for so long. I want to say thank you to the people who organize these conferences, the people who organize the events, and especially to the people who picked up all those tabs at the bar.
I just want to say thank you to the Long Term People playing Long Term Games in the ETF Industry.
Longer Term People
Bakstack post is like Christmas morning.
Thank you for sharing your story, it explains very well the beautiful quote at the start of your post, which resonates with what I want to achieve a lot! Thank you!