From Green Beret to Hedge Fund CEO: David Walker's Wild Ride into Wall Street

🔥 What happens when a Special Forces veteran applies battlefield strategy to hedge fund investing? 

You get David Walker — ex-Green Beret, West Point grad, MBA from Kellogg, hedge fund founder, and author of Don't Be Stupid: A Green Beret's Guide to Investing. This episode is packed with leadership gems, military-to-Wall Street grit, market insights, and actionable lessons for anyone chasing success with resilience and precision.

🎙 In this Veteran Special, Jessie Ott interviews David about:

• Transitioning from Special Forces to finance
• How military leadership translates to elite investing
• Building Jedburg Advisors and what “staying nimble” means on Wall Street
• The power of mentorship, education, and managing risk like a Green Beret
• The real inflation story, disruptive innovation, and the future of robotics in warfare and industry

👊 This is for entrepreneurs, veterans, investors, and anyone who wants to build a bulletproof mindset.

📚 Get his book: Don’t Be Stupid — all proceeds go to the Green Beret Foundation.

🔗 Connect with David Walker:
📘 Book: Don’t Be Stupid (All proceeds to the Green Beret Foundation)
💼 LinkedIn: David J Walker

 📧 Email: DaveJWalker11@gmail.com

NOW ON YOUTUBE!!! Thank you for Listening! Join us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter!

Host Jessie Ott's Profile on LinkedIn

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to David Walker
• 4:13 David's Journey to the Military
• 7:10 Transitioning from Enlisted to Officer
• 10:02 Life at West Point
• 13:03 Special Forces Training and Operations
• 18:28 Lessons from Military Service
• 21:28 The Importance of Military Experience
• 27:07 Post-Military Career and Education
• 29:44 Advice for Young Veterans
• 30:25 Transitioning from Military to Business
• 31:53 Discovering the Business World
• 33:54 Navigating the Hedge Fund Landscape
• 36:24 Building Resilience in High-Pressure Environments
• 39:18 The Evolution of Investment Strategies
• 41:42 Launching Jedburg Advisors
• 46:33 Resources for Veterans Transitioning to Civilian Life
• 54:23 The Philosophy Behind Jedburg Advisors
• 1:05:12 Navigating Tariffs and Economic Impacts
• 1:08:05 The Future of Robotics in Manufacturing
• 1:10:25 Military Robotics and Warfare Evolution
• 1:13:36 Investing in Technology and Innovation
• 1:17:51 Learning from Mentors and Market Experiences
• 1:21:49 Strategies for Young Investors
• 1:25:06 The Importance of Tax Strategies in Investing
• 1:33:17 Produced by Fedora J Productions
• 1:33:38 Tune in Next Thursday & Have a Great Week!

Transcript

David Walker (00:04)
Senior enlisted guys like really even e6s and e7s coming out of the military are squared away And if we get those guys e5s e6 e7s We we got an advantage. So there's a lot of firms. think capital one does it I did a couple of months at capital one before business school I had time to kill and I was like the third person hired by capital one who had no they looked at my resume like

We don't understand what you do. We don't get it. And then what Capital One did is they made a little group of like three of us are like, Hey, we have this stack of resumes from these folks coming out of the military. can you translate that into English for us? Cause we don't know what nuclear sub guy, nuclear sub guy. go, you want this guy, you know, like I put it in, like, you want to talk to this guy. This is a very competitive program in the Navy top program. Yes. This guy, trust me, this guy's smart.

Jessie Ott (00:42)
Hahaha!

David Walker (00:57)
So they're like, okay, put it in the we want this guy file, you know, so they had us do that translated to English for them. You know, and so now this now and it's really great for the what's great for both ways great for the vets. And it's great for the firms get an advantage you you get a veteran, you know, maybe I'm biased alright but you I think you're going to get a team player hard worker got grit has been beaten down before can take it.

Jessie Ott (01:05)
That's pretty cool.

Mm-hmm.

David Walker (01:30)
and the beautiful thing about you know, working at the very first fund that I was like, it was a multi strategy, I got to see all these different strategies. And I got to slowly kind of see where I fit and what works for my brain. And then I went to an equity long short shop and then I went to a fund of funds and then I went to another equity long short.

kind of see and I developed my own kind of trading strategy which eventually led to like sticky notes like you know don't like I'd watch a guy who was a rock star like maybe have like three years and then blow up right so I'd make a little note to myself like don't write a position down 60 % like punt it even if you think it's the greatest thing in the world and then all these collection of sticky notes became like like bullet points like and then I put together this

Jessie Ott (02:08)
It's okay.

David Walker (02:15)
set of bullet points. was, and somebody said, Hey, why don't you like write a book about that? So each bullet point became a chapter. And that's, know, what you see now in my book, don't be stupid. And that's like the very first rule is like, don't be stupid. It really,

Jessie Ott (02:25)
that's cool.

Hello everybody and welcome to Thursday Thursdays. I am Jessie Ott and I have a great guest today as part of the Veteran Segment, David Walker, ex Green Beret and author of Don't Be Stupid, A Green Beret's Guide to Investing. He currently owns his own hedge fund, Jedburg Advisors, which he just told me has a cool little story behind the name. So I can't wait to dig into that. How are you David?

David Walker (03:24)
Great Jessie, thanks lot for having me, I appreciate it.

Jessie Ott (03:27)
Yeah, of course. so where are you calling from?

David Walker (03:30)
So I'm calling from West Palm Beach, Florida.

Jessie Ott (03:33)
Okay, you're not so far from me. I'm in the Orlando area.

David Walker (03:36)
Nice. Okay, cool. I like Orlando.

Jessie Ott (03:39)
I do too. I really love where we live. It's a small community called Lake Mary.

David Walker (03:45)
I actually know Lake Mary. It's just north of Orlando.

Jessie Ott (03:48)
Yeah.

I

So are you from West Palm Beach?

David Walker (03:53)
this is kind of my COVID house So I was up in New York for seven years. And ⁓ yeah, in the city in Manhattan, and then also in Brooklyn for a little while near the end. And a friend of mine and I started a fund but he was actually he started it he was he was a Goldman he was trading around about 7 billion at Goldman. And it was also at Jenison.

Jessie Ott (03:57)
In the city or?

David Walker (04:13)
And he kept coming to me for about two or three years asking, Dave, want to start a hedge fund. How do you do it? And I said, listen, don't quit your day job. But you know, he kept after me and we kept having dinners and lunches and whatnot. And then he finally said, listen, you're going to do this, aren't you? He said, yes, I am. said, listen, if you're going to ruin your life, I can't let you do it alone. So we both quit our jobs and we started a fund. This was 2019.

And then we opened up an office in Stanford, Connecticut, and I was doing the reverse commute from Manhattan, Brooklyn at the time. And that was terrible. So I moved to Connecticut and that was even worse. then after a little there for about a year, yeah, it was like,

Jessie Ott (04:51)
Yeah, I've heard about that. It's the prices are

so high and-

David Walker (04:56)
Well, it was also just like the social when you're in Manhattan, there's like a lot of do and you have a lot of friends going out at night. And then Stanford is like, they roll up the sidewalks and turn the street lights off. And, know, it's pretty sleepy, pretty sleepy town. So I moved to Florida and then COVID hit and I got locked in. This is where I've been kind of basically since then.

Jessie Ott (05:01)
Yeah.

Did you guys close the Connecticut office then?

David Walker (05:20)
No, he was basically the only one going into the office. So we had one guy in Manhattan, one guy, I was down in Florida, and then we had, and then we had, he lived, you know, like 20 minutes from the office. I think he went in to kind of get away from his wife so he could work quietly and peacefully without, you know, being disrupted. Yeah. So, and then we eventually, that, that firm didn't make it. And so I kind of had my

Jessie Ott (05:37)
Have some separation.

Aww.

David Walker (05:48)
effort, I'll do it myself moment. And then that's when I started, you I owned from Jedburg, a couple years after that.

Jessie Ott (05:55)
Okay, very cool. So did you go into military service after high school?

David Walker (06:01)
I did, I did. So in high school, I had an older brother, he was two years ahead of me, and he graduated and he was going to University of Texas, but he was kind of going his own way, so to speak, and he was kind of working and partying and studying in that order, maybe partying first, working, and I know studying was last for him. I of looked at that and I said, this kid's gonna be in school for 10 years.

Jessie Ott (06:19)
you

David Walker (06:26)
you know, and if that if he makes it and and then my dad would cut him off, you know, then he would pay for something and cut him off. I said my dad and I have a falling out. We got along better than my brother than my dad did. I said, I don't you know, it's I don't want to go halfway through college and just get cut off and not. So so I decided to join the military to get the college fund.

And so, and I was working construction at the time to kind of pay for school for college. And I said, you know, working construction in the heat in Texas in the middle of the summer, the military can't be worse than that. I joined the army. It's 110 in the shade. We weren't even in the shade. We were doing roofing with, and I was using blow torches and welding, welding,

Jessie Ott (07:10)
Ugh.

David Walker (07:11)
I said that and I didn't even have boots. So I'd get these little burns in my feet because I couldn't see the, I couldn't see the hot embers coming off. And my first page, I work boots, but I joined the army at the end of the summer after high school, after working construction and for the college fund, which, you know, it it was okay, but it was nowhere near as good as it is now. And yeah, that's kind of how I got into, into the army. a funny, quick side story. I went and saw the, the, the army recruiter.

And then the Navy recruiter and the Marine recruiter and they were all co located like really next door to each other in some sort of strip mall. And, and then the air force too, which I should have gone to the air force. It's like, it's like, you know, it's like a five star resort anyway, but, the army, the air force, the Marines, was all three year enlistment or, or four year enlistment. And the army at the time had this new two year enlistment. They were the only one doing, only ones doing it. So I said, listen to the military sucks. can just suck up two years.

Jessie Ott (07:53)
hehe

David Walker (08:06)
And that's the only, I laugh at it now, but it's the only reason I joined the army versus the other, cause I tested like very high on the ASVAB in the 95%. So I could have joined any branch and I ended up joining the army because it was the only, they were the only ones that had the two year in the list. So that's.

Jessie Ott (08:22)
How

long did you end up serving for?

David Walker (08:25)
So I joined, so when I joined the army, I joined for the two year enlistment and I was about ready to get my orders to get out because I still had my deferred college for the University of Texas at the Arlington campus, which was in between Dallas and Fort Worth. And then in the process of doing that, and I got, I was kind of an, was an athlete in high school. ran cross country and track and I wrestled for a couple of years. So, you know, it's like Forrest Gump. If you, if you just show up on time, look good and now you're on your, you can run or you're athletic.

you stand out you do well. So I was, you know, as honor grad in AIT honor grad in, basic training. And so I stood out and I got some awards and some of my officers came to me, these lieutenants and said, Hey, you should consider staying in the military and maybe even becoming an officer. I said, well, how do you, how do you do that? This is kind of, I'm going to admit my age was like before the internet or the internet was maybe just the internet was just, it was basic. It was still there, but it was like, you know,

Jessie Ott (09:18)
Right.

David Walker (09:22)
dial up servers on AOL. And so I went to the library and I kind of, yeah, exactly. I kind of figured out like, how do I become an officer? And there was green the goal, but I didn't have any, I didn't have any college. It was get out and go ROTC. Then there was this thing called West Point. And I didn't know a whole lot about it. So I was like, well, how do I go to West Point? And that's when I ended up applying to the West Point prep school and then going to West Point and then coming back in the military as an officer.

Jessie Ott (09:25)
Right. You've got mail.

David Walker (09:51)
So that's kind of my route. So I was enlisted for three years, just show I have three years. And then I was an officer for another eight on top of that.

Jessie Ott (09:57)
So what's the school like? How long were you in West Point?

David Walker (10:02)
So I went to the West Point Prep School, that was 10 months, and you compete with like 350 other folks to get a nomination to West Point. And I think they took about 100 of us, if I recall correctly, and about 50 of us made it all the way through. Some people washed out. I'm 50 of the West Point Prepsters, and about, they took, think, 1,400, 1,370, something of that nature, and about 950 graduated. So it's a four-year college, just like any other college.

it's free. You know, like it's like, Hey, it's free college, you at least five years of your life afterwards. whatever freedom is, you know, and so I stayed eight because I wanted to go special forces. And when you do that, you incur more time, you owe more time to the military.

Jessie Ott (10:34)
Right, okay.

wonder why. because you probably, cause they put so much training in you.

David Walker (10:50)
Yeah, it's an enormous amount of training actually, I think it was almost training all in with all the different schools and you know, there's a lot of training that goes in and I before I did that I went to you know, I went to airborne school went to there's a mortar training course. There's a tow missile course. There's all these courses at air assault school. Then I went to Ranger school. So you won't go through all these schools by the time you even get to your unit, you've gone to an enormous amount of training and then you I went to the 82nd and I was

Jessie Ott (10:53)
Yeah.

David Walker (11:17)
platoon leader and a couple of a couple of platoons at the scalp platoon and first the 05 and then I tried out for Ranger battalion and I got accepted into the third Ranger battalion at Fort Benning and I was a platoon leader there for two years and then I tried out for Special Forces I went through a Special Forces assessment and selection and then you go through what's called the Q course which they have different paths depending on which route you go for an officer that had a path and our medics course I would say is one of the top in the world.

Jessie Ott (11:40)
Mm-hmm.

David Walker (11:45)
you our medics, our demo guys, our weapons guys, our communications guys, they go all through separate Q courses. Then we come back together and do a big kind of final exam, so to speak, for about six weeks. And then if you make it, you get your green beret. If you don't, they ask you to go to the back of the room where they quietly escort you out.

Jessie Ott (12:04)
What

do you do after that?

David Walker (12:07)
Well, then I served as a team commander, an ODA commander in fifth group, fifth special forces group. So I led a SFODA, Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha. At the time, there's only three letter designations. I think there were four letter designations. Mine was 593. And so that's a 12 man special forces team. And so I led that on different operations. Most of them were just going and kind of doing training with different counterparties around the globe. So we're trying to kind of...

instill friendships and training and working together. So if and when we need to go to a certain country, we already have the friendships there, we already know the terrain, we already know the area. And so I went to Kazakhstan, went to Kuwait, went to Panama, went to all these places where, you know, we're doing operations with them, with the local military, usually special operations in the local military, and then continue to form those relationships.

Jessie Ott (13:03)
Interesting. I had no idea that that was going on.

David Walker (13:04)
Yeah.

Oh, yeah, we Oh my god, SF. We have I forgot I saw some somewhere. Don't quote me I'm going to make mix it up. But we're in we're in 100 and some odd countries around the globe at any one time doing all kinds of operations. You know, some of them are, you know, more dangerous than others. And some of them are just, you know, operations where we're kind of working together to continue our our friendships with those with those countries, just in case something happens there, we can already

be very familiar with their military, their military leaders, their tactics, and also the train and everything. So yeah, SF groups are all around the globe at any given time. And you don't hear about it. It doesn't make the papers and things of that nature.

Jessie Ott (13:52)
Right. And do all branches do that?

David Walker (13:56)
I think SF does it probably one of the most. I think SEALs do it to some degree. They're in different countries and doing different operations all over the globe and Force Recon may do it as well. So I think the other branches do it to a certain degree as well. Yeah, there's all kinds of operations just going on around the world.

Jessie Ott (14:15)
So, being a Green Beret in order to qualify, it's both book and physical?

David Walker (14:22)
That's correct. Yeah. So yeah, you go through a lot of the assessment for portion is pretty much, I mean, it's very mental, obviously, but if your body breaks down, you know, the stronger your body, your mind doesn't have to be as strong and your feet too. So the two week assessment and selection is very physically grueling. So there's long, long navigation courses. And then you do these,

You do these team events with very difficult tasks. Like one task was called the Pails of Pain. So you have maybe four, you have four hours and you have to move like all these buckets of sand with your rucksack. You can never take your rucksack off. Your rucksack is 65 and your LBE is probably another 25 on top. And you have to move these, these Pails of Sand back and forth between these like couple hundred yards and there's berms in the middle.

Jessie Ott (15:09)
Jeez.

David Walker (15:10)
And another one is called the Sandman where they take two duffel bags and they fill them full of sand and they're about 300, 200 to 400 pounds, something like that ballpark. And then, you you have to move this a couple, you know, dozen kilometers or something. And I do remember another one, was, and you get graded. So there'll be a different person in charge at every time. So a squad of maybe 12 or 14 people will have to move this equipment. And you're judged on your leadership ability, whether you made the time, whether you, you know,

And one of them was there was a Jeep and one of the tires was one of the wheels was completely off. So you can't just push it because it would dig into the sand. And then you had a telephone pole, which is a very heavy and long object. And you had to move the telephone pole and the Jeep and all your equipment. I forgot how many kilometers through on a dirt road. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I remember the trick to this one, the trick to this one was the telephone pole. So the telephone pole

is quite heavy. And if you strapped it on the back of the Jeep, but on an angle, right, and you could have somebody sit on the telephone pole. So one of your guys would sit on the telephone pole and that would bring the Jeep up. That broken wheel would come out of the sand and then you could push it and pull it. I think it was 12 kilometers and you had four hours to get it there. So each day there would be two of these events where a new, you know, you had a number and they would just yell a number and you would all of a sudden have a 10 minute briefing.

And then you were in charge and you were getting graded on this. so I think in my squad in SFAS, had, I think we had 13 people in my squad. I think only two of us made it all the way through where we, and some people got recycled and some people got hurt and some people quit. And some people just didn't make it cause they got graded out. And some people got peered out. can, you do these peer evaluations at the end. if you didn't participate,

Jessie Ott (16:40)
Wow.

David Walker (17:00)
The rest of the team could see like you were just like sandbagging, were just not part of it like a team player. And they would peer you, we had to peer out a guy who I knew pretty well who, you know, just didn't pull his weight, you know. So that...

Jessie Ott (17:15)
Yeah. You wonder

why those people are there because it's not easy training. Like why put yourself through it?

David Walker (17:20)
Yeah, I don't know what I said.

Yeah, and we had some folks too that I don't know maybe they just didn't know what was I remember one guy quit one night because he couldn't you know we listen I was in the Ranger bat and I was in in the 82nd so I was used to kind of all the field operations and you know one night we're out on patrol and I could see a flashlight come on and you know that's that's that's a no-go no flashlights and then after I told he put the flashlight out then the red lens

came out. And even then I was like, No, no, no, no, no flashlight, no red, even the red lands, which is a subdued flashlight. And then the guy got frustrated. And he quit the next morning. I said, What are you couldn't he said, I couldn't see my food when I was trying to eat it. I'm like, Listen, you don't want to see it. It's military food. It's horrible. Anyway, trust me, want to see it. Just take it and drag it up your face and put it in your mouth. Anyway, he quit because he couldn't see his food. I still remember this. That was like 30 years ago. And I still remember to this day. But

Jessie Ott (18:11)
Yeah.

David Walker (18:22)
Anyway, know, guys will, guys will break under certain mental conditions. That's the whole part of the training is to kind of get the mental toughness. And, yeah. So anyway, it was good. It's It's good. It's good training. I think it's great training for life.

Jessie Ott (18:28)
Yeah.

Yeah, I would imagine so. I mean, it's not a surprise that a lot of veterans come back business owners. They're disciplined. They're strict with themselves. They know their limitations. They've been pushed to their limits so they know what they can and they can't do. I will always say this is that

I think that our country should have a year of military service and or agricultural service, some kind of service on a farm to have a better appreciation of food and all the ins and outs of it. or I think really it's that emotional intelligence and just growing up a little bit. And I really needed that.

David Walker (19:21)
Yeah, no, it helped me transition from a boy to a man. It gave me that kick in the ass and that discipline. mean, my dad was pretty strict, but I think it was at the next level, you the military for me. And, you know, on deployments to Kazakhstan, when you're like the, you know, like the one of the senior leaders in the country, senior US leader in the country as an 03, you know, you have a lot of responsibility. And you go in and you brief the ambassador on your way into the country and you just go, all right, good luck. You're on your own out there and do the right thing and represent our country.

you know, or we go to Kuwait or wherever we went, know, Panama and a few other places that, you know, you're representing the United States and you have to do the right thing and be mature and take that responsibility. And so it was a good, it was good for me. And I think it's good for young people in general, know, whether it's mandatory or not is depending on our civilian leadership, but it certainly was good for me.

Jessie Ott (20:13)
Yeah, I'm sure people will

really, really disagree with me on that. just, I just feel, mean, it doesn't have to be like combat service or anything like that.

David Walker (20:23)
Right.

Israel does it for a reason too. It's mandatory and it's because listen, you're a tiny little nation surrounded by a bunch of enemies. know, everyone might have to at some time pick up arms. You know, I think the blessing of a giant nation and a larger population and two giant oceans. So we really don't have that need. But I think you're right. It gives young people, you know, a good skill set.

Jessie Ott (20:36)
Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, even if it's learning survival skills, ⁓ you know, and how to take care of yourself, learning about yourself and your limits and what you can and can't do, I think is very important.

David Walker (20:55)
Mm-hmm.

You learn

how to push your limits, right? You learn that you're capable of a lot more than you probably thought you were. And so, yeah, that was, I think that's a good, and you know, you're to have down days, you're going have really bad days. And, and if you take, if you carry those lessons over into your business life and your business career and whatnot, I think those are valuable lessons, the determination, making a plan, staying with it, having that grit and having that discipline.

Jessie Ott (21:06)
Yeah.

David Walker (21:28)
I think carries carries through so I'm very glad it worked out well for me, you know and lot of other folks too

Jessie Ott (21:33)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. My dad was in Vietnam and my father-in-law was in Vietnam. Dad was in the Army. He was in the Air Force, but my wife's grandfather served for 25 years, I think, in the Navy. ⁓ And then my brother-in-law, who actually lives with us, because we live kind of both between Dallas and Lake Mary. And he was in the Marines.

David Walker (21:45)
Thank you.

Mm-hmm.

Jessie Ott (22:02)
So we cover almost all the branches.

David Walker (22:05)
That's good, yeah. So I remember it's so funny because I remember working with them. So when I was in Special Forces and even in the Ranger Bat, we did a lot of joint operations with other special operations, NABSOC and ABSOC, the Air Force. I remember I was the liaison to the Air Force Special Operations and I went in, you know, they bring all this stuff with them and I said I looked at their food and their tents and their air conditioning.

units that they brought with them and I was like, man, I joined a long special operations community. So I looked at like ho-hos and ding-dongs and I was like, wow, you know, anyway, yeah, the Air Force, they, do it right. They, they do it right. So.

Jessie Ott (22:43)
Yeah,

I was going to join the Air Force my senior year. was thinking about it because I thought it'd cool to be a pilot, but I ended up getting glasses.

David Walker (22:49)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah. So it's so funny because when I graduated at West Point or near the end of West Point, they rank you, which is really the good thing about West Point is it's a meritocracy for the most part. And you kind of don't get that in the civilian world as much. Yeah, you get rewarded for doing good work, but there's also, you

There's also kind of the who you know aspect in certain careers. But anyway, so at West Point, got ranked pretty high because I did well and I was qualified for aviation. And, I wanted to go, I must have watched the John Wayne movie or something when I was a kid, but I wanted to go special forces and I couldn't do that while going aviation. So I had to go, I went infantry and all the aviators looked at me like I was crazy. Like you have good eyes and you're going, why don't you become a pilot? You know, and so.

ended up later getting my private pilot's license just for fun. yeah, they got to fly back home to the air conditioned tents after they dropped us off in the woods, you know.

Jessie Ott (23:51)
That's good advice for some kid that's thinking about enlisting.

David Walker (23:54)
Yeah,

I never thought a day after the military, I meant to our few of my friends kids and I said, listen, you need to think also, you know, it's good to go maybe a combat arms and whatnot, but maybe new branch detail and switch over to something else that you can apply outside the military. And I never thought a day after and then I got out the military, I'm like, my God, what am going to do now? I'm qualified for nothing. Like literally all I did was drag a weapon around in the woods.

And I tell people my qualifications were bank robber or security guard, know, one's high risk, one's low risk, low reward. So that's why I went to business school afterwards. So I had like no skillset. Whereas if you go logistics, my friends who went to logistics, went to work for a logistics company or, you know, like if work from Walmart, who pays great because they're moving logistics or Amazon, you're right. Or my friends who went, you know,

whatever, medical corps, right? They could go work for these giant hospitals and get paid a lot of money as medical, you know, executive at a hospital or whatever. And I had, I had no skill sets. That's why I went to business school after I got out of the military because I was like, Oh my God, I have to, I have to teach my, I have to learn something about the business world, you know? So it was a good.

Jessie Ott (25:07)
What did,

where did you go?

David Walker (25:10)
So I went to the Kellogg school at, I got an MBA from the Kellogg school at Northwestern University, North of Chicago. Yeah, It's pretty darn expensive and I took out some loans. The GI bill at the time was called the VEEP and it did pay for a little bit, maybe it books ⁓ itself, it was pretty expensive and it took like 10 years to pay it off. But I'm kind of like still.

Jessie Ott (25:16)
yeah.

Yeah, that sucks.

David Walker (25:35)
50-50 of whether it's worth it back then but now with AI and a lot of teaching stuff online you know assume $150,000 of debt now is probably $250,000 for two years I don't know what it is but it's a big it's a big nut and I'm not sure if it's like it took ten years to pay it off let's just put it that way yeah not

Jessie Ott (25:42)
Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's not cheap. My wife

put herself through school and, also during COVID when they waived the GMAT, she's like, I'm gonna, what else am I doing? You know, we couldn't go anywhere or do anything. And so I got a certification in wine and she got an MBA. It was, it was fun.

David Walker (26:05)
Yeah.

love the wine certification. think that least that's good. It's funny because yeah,

because it's just, I just think that, I don't know, I mean there's probably gonna be a point where even...

undergrad is almost gonna be like 50-50, right? Because with all the learning resources that are out there. Well listen, my sister when she went, she went at night and so she kept her day job. I also had two years of no income. So when you add two years of no income plus 150 grand in the whole, it was probably a 500 grand trade, which takes a long time to make that up. If I'm getting a 50k bump, maybe it's a 10-year break even. I don't know. So, but good for your wife and good for you for doing stuff during COVID and

I like the wine certificate.

Jessie Ott (26:58)
It was fun. It was a good time. I mean, it was hard, but you know, I'm sure MBA school is lot harder than my certification.

David Walker (27:00)
Yeah.

I you know a lot of these so I would first of all is like one of the old like top 50 oldest people there so I'm like you know I'm like in my 30s like mid 30s like early 30s and most people they're like 26 or 22 or 24 whatever you know they work for maybe two years and they went no 24 to 26 like average so then and there's kids coming I say kids you know young people coming out of like Goldman and McKenzie and Bain and

and JP Morgan and to them it was like a two year holiday. They were like at the bar every night. I'm like, what are Porter's five, four, like I would, didn't know anything. What is an option? They were like, yeah, yeah, just a call option or put like it's so to them, it was just like, they had just lived it for two years. Now they're going to business school or firms are paying for it. They don't care if they get all B's or C's or F's. Well, they couldn't get F's, they had the pass, is so to me, it was a whole, I didn't know anything.

Jessie Ott (27:51)
Yeah.

David Walker (28:02)
So I had to study every night at the library not like go out and drink with my friends You know so and the and their firms were paying for it and they were still getting their salary So it was quite it was quite a challenge

Jessie Ott (28:10)
Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah,

I guess you should have got a job with one of them.

David Walker (28:18)
Yeah,

and you know, then COVID happened and so I was not COVID, I'm sorry, the dot com crash and so I'm studying trying to get a job and interviewing and no firms are getting jobs and they're getting like three offers and some people got zero offers but I guess I got kind of lucky and it was tough, know, all things being equal but it was tougher for a lot of other people so I never, you know, I never complained.

Jessie Ott (28:38)
Yeah, it's tough for young kids too.

David Walker (28:41)
Yeah, I can feel for them now because like I said with AI and companies cutting back and know, the economy is a little bit challenging right now and so if you're a young kid coming out of school now, I think it's difficult. I've heard it's difficult for them to get jobs so you know, feel them. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (28:53)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and you know, that's why they're staying at home longer. But you know, the cost of living is gone through the roof, not to mention just feeding yourself. So there's a lot of hardship out there for sure.

David Walker (29:05)
Mm-hmm.

crazy.

And homeownership

become more expensive. Let's say if you're kid coming out of school and you're sitting in your parents and saying, stay here. I would say assume a lot of risk. your, if your, if your parents are feeding you and giving you shelter, I would say start something, fail, start something, fail, start something, fail, do that for five years. And in the meantime, you can kind of look for jobs and you never know if something takes off and you get some funding and et cetera, et cetera. Then you can, know,

That's the time to take risk when you don't have a family, you don't have kids, you don't have, you know, you don't have all the responsibilities, you know. Anyway, some advice that I would give.

Jessie Ott (29:44)
Yep.

Yeah, very true. Yeah, for sure. So what made you decide to get out of the army?

David Walker (29:59)
So at the time it was, what year was it? Like the late 90s. And so wasn't a whole lot going on in the late 90s. The Army, all the military was downsizing. They were kind of like encouraging people to get out. you know, and all my, not all my friends, but a lot of friends had gotten out a couple of years before me, because I had the extended time because of the special forces. So most of my friends were getting out in like 96 and 97, and they were going to B-school or getting great jobs.

killing it, right? And like, I was married at the time, and my wife's like, Hey, you're deployed like 260 days out of the year 280 days out of the year. And you know, nothing's going on. And all your friends are making like four times more than you. What are you doing? You know? So I said, Yeah, it kind of makes sense. And so I, you know, I started studying for the GMAT. I did did real well on it. And actually started taught GMAT math classes a few times for other people who were, you know, trying to

for it. did better on the math and English. And then so I got accepted a couple of schools and decided on Kellogg and and then you know, of course, the dot com crash happened in the towers came down and I tried to get back in to fifth group because they were the first some of the first folks going over there. I had gotten injured. I had back injuries and some leg injuries and they were like, hey, don't call us. We'll call you, you know, so they didn't allow me to get right back in.

years later, I was still trying to knock on the door and they were like, okay, you can hand out towels at the Fort Dix, you know, gym if you want, but we're not going to give you an SF team. Like you don't need me for that. Or you can make PowerPoint slides at the Pentagon. I'm like, you don't need me if you anyway. So that's kind of like, you know, why I got out because I was married at the time ended up getting a divorce. So that didn't really, and I couldn't get back in. and so that's kind of like how I ended up getting out and figuring out that, I probably should.

get some skills now that I'm out. Yeah, that's kind of my route to where I ended up now.

Jessie Ott (31:53)
So did those guys at Kellogg School, the ones that were working at JP Morgan and whatnot, that kind of help shape what you did next?

David Walker (32:05)
It kind of helped me see like a different part of the world that I had kind of never seen before. My dad was, he was a consultant and he worked a lot from home. So I never got to see like business world and I never like understood how like the real business world worked. And then, in the summers at West Point, don't like in the summers that you go to like wherever, University of California, Los Angeles during the summers, you're gonna go out and work. You're gonna do internships for like business.

never, at the time it was at Point, you went to the field and you worked, you were in the army. So I never knew what the real business world looked like. So I was kind of in awe that these folks, you know, and, know, working on Wall Street or working for consulting companies or working for General Electric or, you know, these, these really amazing firms. And so I kind of just like learned by asking them questions and, know, watch them and talking to them and whatnot.

And so they kind of they were kind of helpful in that route and I didn't know if I was gonna go into finance Like I ended up going into finance. I got a I took a full-time offer at Eastman chemical company in a new business development group Doing kind of small &A work and business licensing deals and things of that nature but it was kind of middle of no man's land Kingsport, Tennessee and You know, I was divorced like I said at the time I went through a divorce. So that was also kind of like the social dearth

you know, a lot going on. In fact, it was a dry, it was a dry city. So I'd have to drive like 50 miles to like get a beer. ⁓ Now it was was like part of this, what they call like to cities, Kingsport, Johnson City, and I forgot the other one. But I to drive to Johnson City for like you because there was a dry. was a dry city. And so dry county, I think the whole county was dry. So you know, you go to Johnson City and have a beard at a decent restaurant.

Jessie Ott (33:34)
Are you serious?

David Walker (33:54)
Um, it may have changed. They figured out alcohol can make money, but I don't know if it's still the same. But anyway, so when my buddy asked me, my buddy who was trading convertible arbitrage at a hedge fund in Manhattan, he said, Hey, we're looking for someone in the operations group, do you know of anyone? I said, geez Christ, how about me? And I, sent him my resume and he was a big producer for the firm for the hedge fund that he was at. It was like a billion dollar hedge fund. And so he had kind of a little bit of, you know, indirect sway.

So I drove up to Manhattan and I remember like reading what is a hedge fund as I'm driving to Manhattan because I had no idea what a hedge fund was and interviewed for the job and got the role. So I usually hire someone from the sales side like they usually would hire someone to after two years at JP Morgan Morgan Stanley or Goldman to come over to the hedge fund. But they took a chance on me. And like I said I think he was helpful.

And then I, it was like trial by fire. They didn't have a training course. was just like figure it out Walker. And, it was a tough place to work. I will be honest. It was a little bit, it was kind of, it was tough.

Jessie Ott (34:59)
That's a lot to learn because these options and puts and calls, they're not easy to learn.

David Walker (35:05)
Yeah, it was a lot. And was a lot. And then there was is does and things like that and swaps and repose and because we had a we had a convert desk, we had a we had a fixed income desk with a muni desk. We had an equity trading desk. We traded a bunch. It was a multi strap, which is kind of good for my first kind of foray into hedge funds to see all these different strategies. And I was on the operational side. So that so you know, the CEO, and the CEO, he'd be like, walk out here, figure this out, get this done. And he would hand me something.

Jessie Ott (35:24)
Okay, yeah.

David Walker (35:34)
And I would say, you know, Sean, what is a international swaps dealers? And you would say, just figure it out. And I would ask, I remember the girl next to me and I would ask her, and you might have to beep this out, but I would ask, Hey, you, how do you do this? And she would like, fuck you Walker. And she wasn't being mean. She was just like telling me in her own language, Hey, I figured it out. You figure it out.

You know, all right, listen, I've green beret. They're not going to break me. And I would go to the office that it would be still dark out. I would go at like 5:30 in the morning and I would like to leave at 10 o'clock at night. So I never saw my neighborhood. My mom asked me, how's Manhattan? go, I don't know. How's your neighborhood? I don't, I've never seen it in the daytime because I would leave it, you know, and it was, it was so go home, sleep four or five hours, come go back to work. But I figured it out and I got good at operations and learned how to be an operational.

Jessie Ott (36:19)
that's brutal.

David Walker (36:24)
And then eventually got recruited away to be a director of operations. And I did that for a couple of years, then got recruited away to be a chief operation officer at a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. So that was kind of my path of my career in hedge funds. Okay. And I remember like, because I, so we had a guy at my first fund, like I said, it was a tough shop and a few, there was another shop is even worse than that.

Jessie Ott (36:40)
That's pretty awesome.

David Walker (36:49)
But you know, a guy came in and I remember he lasted about six weeks. And I remember one day he was like seven or eight at night. We're just working like normal. And he got out and walked out and he said, Hey, where's that guy going? I don't know. Maybe he's going for a cigarette. He never came back after next day. He didn't come back. The two days later didn't come back three days later. We're like, where is that guy? Finally, I could hear the, the CEO or the president of the firm, like call him.

And then I could hear the conversation because the door was open. was like, yeah, that's he was like, yeah, okay, you quit, but that's not how you're supposed to quit. You're supposed to come in and talk to like the guy just quit. didn't even tell anyone he quit. He just like was so frustrated. He walked out. They basically they broke him. And so I think my green beret training and my grit and like, you're not going to break me. You want to make it a Okay. You want to me, you can't punch me in the face. You're not going to break me. And even if you do punch me face, my nose has been broken three times. could kill us, you know, so I think that's it.

Jessie Ott (37:29)
Right. ⁓

Well, it is

a brutal, it can be very brutal.

David Walker (37:43)
It's, it's, it's tough. Yeah. So hedge funds. Yeah. I had one where I was, yeah. I had one where I was the director of ops and we went through, had like 23 people, 23 to 20. He always stayed under 25. There's a new set of laws that you hire 20 more than 25 people, 20, 20 employees that you're under a different set of laws. So he was smart enough to stay under 25 people, but we had 19 people quit or were fired.

Jessie Ott (37:45)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of pressure.

David Walker (38:12)
out of 23 in a two-year period. So the turnover was super high. I went through five administrative assistants for this gentleman because he kept breaking them, you know, and they would quit or they would, you know, one girl cried for two hours. I had to take her off the trading floor. And so some of these fun shops are really tough. They're kind of like, they don't treat people very well. And the other shops that I was at, a bunch of two super rich guys, super nice, smart guys, the next Buffett and Munger, they treated me very well.

They treated their employees well, they paid very well. it's weird. Some shops are super nice, and some shops are just brutal. But that's that's how it goes.

Jessie Ott (38:50)
Yeah.

Well, I guess that's with anything, but I think I would gather that trading floors are going to be some of the worst, like humanly experiences just because of the nature of the business. There's a lot of pressure. I billion dollar portfolios are not small. I mean, how many people can live with themselves losing $150,000 in a day or whatever amount it might be? That's just tough.

David Walker (39:01)
Thank

Jessie Ott (39:18)
in itself, you know?

David Walker (39:20)
Yeah, yeah, yes. Oh, it's like that. And sometimes there's more sometimes there's a couple million year swings a day, you know, depending on the trader or whatnot.

Jessie Ott (39:22)
Maybe I've seen too many movies.

David Walker (39:30)
So I was able to see and the beautiful thing about you know, working at the very first fund that I was like, it was a multi strategy, I got to see all these different strategies. And I got to slowly kind of see where I fit and what works for my brain. And then I went to an equity long short shop and then I went to a fund of funds and then I went to another equity long short.

kind of see and I developed my own kind of trading strategy which eventually led to like sticky notes like you know don't like I'd watch a guy who was a rock star like maybe have like three years and then blow up right so I'd make a little note to myself like don't write a position down 60 % like punt it even if you think it's the greatest thing in the world and then all these collection of sticky notes became like like bullet points like and then I put together this

Jessie Ott (40:09)
It's okay.

David Walker (40:16)
set of bullet points. was, and somebody said, Hey, why don't you like write a book about that? So each bullet point became a chapter. And that's, know, what you see now in my book, don't be stupid. And that's like the very first rule is like, don't be stupid. It really,

Jessie Ott (40:26)
that's cool.

David Walker (40:29)
you know, so yeah, thanks.

Jessie Ott (40:30)
⁓

Yeah. And you started researching a hedge fund on the way, which is, that's, that's crazy.

David Walker (40:40)
Like I was like, well, that's

why I joined it. I said, I a managed account off to the side, which is like my money and some family money and some friends. And we outperformed him for five years. And then I outperformed and the market and the HFRI equity hedge fund, long short index. Like we did very well. And so I'm like, because I kind of followed my own goofy set of rules, right? And so then people encouraged us to like, hey, do an incubator fund. And then we did that and we did like very well. And then so we, that's what launched the fund.

at the beginning of this year, 2025. And yeah, so that's kind of what set us on our own course. Because you know, I could have gotten another job and actually turned down an offer to be a COO or CFO of a multi-billion dollar shop. you know, just because I'm running my own shop now. And, and I said, Listen, I got experience in the back office, I experienced, you know, how to kind of position these things. And now I have experienced in the front office, you know, doing the actual trading and whatnot. So let's put it all together and

and basically three legs of the stool. So here we are.

Jessie Ott (41:42)
That's pretty cool. So do you have any other partners?

David Walker (41:46)
So I have a guy that I've known for, he was an intern for me. It's so funny because he sent me, I got an email, geez, what year was this? God, I'm trying remember what year is this? 2011 or something like that? 2010, 2011? From this, I don't know how he found me. I don't even know how he got my email because my mom didn't even know my work email. And she doesn't know my work email to this day because I don't like to get spam. So anyway, I get his email from this kid at Yale.

Hey, I'm the first year student in Yale. I'd like to have a summer internship with your firm. This is when we were trading commodity futures. So I kind of jokingly wrote back. We were only up and running for like five months. I said, yeah, we give out free internships all the time. up. so I was kind of being a little sarcastic. And sure enough, this guy shows up. This young guy shows up. I'm here for my free internship. I was like, oh, wow, I got to do something with this guy. So anyway.

I got to know him and I was like, told the partner, you know, the other partner, said, listen, we got to pay this guy. We paid him a thousand bucks a month, you know, for like three months to do some, do some work for us. Anyway, so we became friends. And then when I was at another firm, you know, after he graduated Yale and he was getting a PhD at Columbia in machine learning. Yeah. Smart, smart guy.

And then I said, listen, you want to do some work for us at this other firm? And he did some work for us there. And then we started doing some things together. I said, listen, we did some private investments together. Um, cause I would say, Hey, what do think about this tech company? Cause he's a very smart tech guy. And, and, and we started doing some, some privates together and one worked out very well. It went public and we got a liquidation event and we did, we have like two others now, two or three or four others now. And, um, so he is, is a co portfolio manager of

our first fund, is disruptive innovation. So we're trying to see what the future could look like. What are the companies that are like disrupting the current status quo and some amazing technologies or even consumer discretion or whatever that that are like appealing that are in, like, know, the names AI robotics, self-driving cars, alternative energy, things of that nature, right. And who are going to be the winners and losers in these billion trillion dollar

Jessie Ott (43:46)
Yeah.

David Walker (43:59)
Tams, total addressable markets. And, you know, we're going to place long-term bets on those guys, two to three year bets on those. And so that's the first one. And it's all liquid. It's all liquid equities and options. And we do some privates, but that's off to the side. And it's just me and him. And then the second fun is I met this guy while I was traveling, ex-army guy as well. He was a human guy, human intelligence guy.

And he also did the same thing. He went down this path of like, he made a lot of money as a contractor. Like he was, said, Dave, was not getting taxed. And I was living in Afghanistan, working as a contractor, getting paid pretty good money, spending 3 % of what I was getting paid, saving 97%. And so he did that for five years, saved up a couple of bucks. Started over those five years, had a lot of free time. He would like research how to

you he did some real estate, he did some commodities, he did some future, he did all kinds of things, found what fit for him. And then he has been trading that for a couple years now. I said, Listen, you're trading in your own book anyway, why don't you put it under a fund structure, and we'll put it under as fund number two on the platform. So I built a built that as a platform, and we'll attract some investors after you get it, you get a track record. So he does what's called volatile, they mean regression. And so his thesis is, and it's pretty sound is

volatility, mean reverse, right? So when things freak out, the market freaks out, eventually it's going to come back down to the center. And when things are fantastic, all right, something's going to happen, you know, you don't know when you don't know where you don't know how, but eventually it's going to blow out. And you can bet on those, you can bet on those. And he's slow and steady, but he's like the tortoise that just clips off one to 200 basis points a month. You know, he had a little challenge we all did in kind of the April May timeframe with our with our

Jessie Ott (45:34)
Right.

David Walker (45:49)
the political situation and whatnot, but he's just clipping off a nice steady, like I said, one to 200 basis points a month. so there's a place for investors that want that nice steady low volatility return. And he's that type of guy that can produce that in his fund. And I like offering different types of funds to give variety. Yeah. Thanks.

Jessie Ott (46:09)
Yeah, that's cool. Yeah.

Yeah, that's, that's really cool. So we, you know, we kind of briefly talked about you getting out of the army when you said, you didn't have any skills at the time because you were, you know, carrying a gun in the woods, but, were there enough resources available to you at that time to help you kind of guide you at all? Or is there?

David Walker (46:33)
Yeah, it's not, it's not, we didn't have LinkedIn back then, you know, this is, I'm dating myself, but we didn't have, internet was like very basic and, you know, there wasn't LinkedIn or Facebook. was, so you'd have to like remember a guy's telephone number, you know, cell phones were like these crazy flippy things and, you know, like how do I contact you? Send somebody an email, email was alive, so you'd send to an email, hey, do you know,

Jessie Ott (46:33)
teams of people that you could talk to.

David Walker (46:57)
Bob, he got out five years earlier. He works at Lehman Brothers. Contact Bob. You know, he's two years ahead of you. so it wasn't even close to what it is today, right? Plus, Miltre didn't have the resources. Miltre kind of figured out, hey, we should really be helpful for soldiers getting out, you know, not just officers, but enlisted guys. So now the library is, and then the transition programs are better. And I had a buddy wrote a book called Transition Something or Other. I forgot the name of the book. I apologize.

Jessie Ott (47:08)
Yeah.

David Walker (47:26)
But there's private resources and there's government resources and military resources, veteran resources that are a lot more robust. And thank God, because I think they're really good now, you know, for folks. And then there's, of course, then there's just the LinkedIn's of the world, the Facebook's of the world. You can find someone in seconds, right? Where you would like, I knew this guy and he works for Lehman Brothers, but I know a guy who knows a guy and make an introduction. might take you a week to get a guy's email and ask him, hey, can we do a call, you know?

Jessie Ott (47:38)
Yeah.

David Walker (47:55)
or I'm going to be in New York, can we stop? Can have a cup of coffee? Tell me what the hell does Lehman Brothers do and can I get a job? And then now a lot of firms like my buddy, he runs the veterans group at Goldman, you know, so like now Goldman has it's been around for a while now. But now there's these veteran groups in these big firms. And some other firms like figured out the secret sauce, like GE has figured it out years ago. They're like, if we get a junior military officer or JMO coming out of the military, and even some of these

Jessie Ott (48:02)
Yeah.

David Walker (48:23)
Senior enlisted guys like really even e6s and e7s coming out of the military are squared away And if we get those guys e5s e6 e7s We we got an advantage. So there's a lot of firms. think capital one does it You know, I was like that I did a I did a couple of months at capital one before business school I had time to kill and I was like the like one of the third I was like the third person hired by capital one who had no they looked at my resume like

We don't understand what you do. We don't get it. And then what Capital One did is they made a little group of like three of us are like, Hey, we have this stack of resumes from these folks coming out of the military. We don't, can you translate that into English for us? Cause we don't know what nuclear sub guy, nuclear sub guy. go, you want this guy, you know, like I put it in, like, you want to talk to this guy. This is a very competitive program in the Navy top program. Yes. This guy, trust me, this guy's smart.

Jessie Ott (49:05)
Hahaha!

David Walker (49:20)
So they're like, okay, put it in the we want this guy file, you know, so they had us do that translated to English for them. You know, and so now this now and it's really great for the what's great for both ways great for the vets. And it's great for the firms get an advantage you you get a veteran, you know, maybe I'm biased alright but you I think you're going to get a team player hard worker got grit has been beaten down before can take it.

Jessie Ott (49:28)
That's pretty cool.

Mm-hmm.

David Walker (49:46)
you know, also like can think on his own. You can give him the mission, not tell him how to get it done. He's going to come back with like, these are the three routes I'm going to go. This is the one I'm going to do unless you guide me differently. These are how I'm going to report to you. These are the KPIs, bomb, bomb, bomb, boom. And I think that's a, like I said, a big advantage for any company.

Jessie Ott (50:06)
Yeah, I 100 % agree with you. And a lot of times, like for you, for example, you got your school education in the military. And so I'm sure other branches have that same.

David Walker (50:18)
Yeah, you do.

Jessie Ott (50:22)
you know, service or type of education.

David Walker (50:26)
They do. mean, you know, there's a lot of leadership training in the military at all levels, which is great. You know, it's so amazing to see, you know, when you go out to and do something, there's leaders two levels below that can immediately take charge and accomplish the mission and do a great job. you know, I think it's a real blessing that we have such a great military that we have and that that military leaders go out at all levels and permeate our civilian civilian workforce.

whether they go to the FBI or police force, I have a friend who's a detective, you know, or they just go into industry at all levels. And you just have this reliable soul in general, you know, that, you know, you can count on to do the right thing, you know, message to Garcia, right? Get it done. And so a lot of all the, all the branches have a lot of that. That is probably the number one training you get in the military is leadership training, which can cross over into anything. It may not be specific.

Yeah. Yeah. ⁓

Jessie Ott (51:30)
Yeah, no, definitely. Because

that's not Todd in the real world.

David Walker (51:36)
I think, yeah, I think you have to learn it through. think a lot of people, I think you got to learn it through like sports. think people who've played team sports kind of get that where they, or they're captain of a sport team or something like that. Yeah. think a lot of it is not taught. And it's so funny because I dated someone who had never years ago, who had never, uh, she'd always worked for herself and she had never been on a team or never played team sports. Never like the sports that she played were all individual and she never thought holistically about.

Jessie Ott (51:36)
It really isn't.

David Walker (52:03)
you how do I do a little self sacrifice maybe for the greater good? You know, and I, you're right. I don't think it is taught. It's uncertain. You know, you kind of have to go out and seek it through extracurricular activities. Anyway. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (52:14)
Yeah. Maybe

some companies do like GE. mean, that company, that company has, you know, been a pretty good company. ⁓

David Walker (52:18)
They have a great training program.

Yeah, I friends who went through

the training program. It's pretty solid.

Jessie Ott (52:28)
Yeah. So that's, that's good. But when you think about all the, you know, the businesses, the mom and pops and the smaller businesses, there's none of that. So yeah, a hundred percent agreed when you're coming from the military, your levels up in most, in most circumstances. Right? Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's pretty cool. Whether they carry a gun or not, they still get the leadership.

David Walker (52:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I had... go ahead.

Jessie Ott (52:53)
which is so important. And it is so

lacking in my opinion.

David Walker (53:00)
Yeah, I think so. I had a friend who got out, he ended up getting back in. He was, I think, got out as an E4, got hired by a trucking company, and was immediately put in charge of a kind of a whole group of trucks. And he was out working with some of them. And they said, he asked, I think he asked the supervisor, like, why did you hire me? know, he said, well, we knew you could read a map.

This was before, you know, GPS and everything. And he said, we knew you, would figure out any problems and just work your way through it. So the combination of those two, he got the role, know, a leadership role in the trucking and the logistics company. anyway, he ended up coming back to the military, but he probably would be president of the company by now. And he was just an E4 at time, you know, so very, again, squared away, you know, you had a lot of good, good, and I was, was, look, I was pretty lucky.

units that I was in, know, that we, you had to try out for them. had to, so we were, it was very selective. And when a person wasn't carrying their weight in the units that I was in, it didn't take, you know, four months of counseling. It was one day and they were gone, you know? And so everybody kept, you know, very, very tight, very squared away. So I was, I was very fortunate.

Jessie Ott (54:14)
that's great. That's awesome. So do you want to talk a little bit about your fund now and the name and where it kind of came from?

David Walker (54:23)
So Jedburg Advisors, you know, it's a hedge fund and I'm not allowed to technically talk about the funds in terms of like the I'm not like the market. I'm not marketing the funds. So just a disclaimer that out there. That's SEC regulations. Well, let's say, hey, this is our returns and you know, this is where you sign up. It's for credit investors only. But I named the fund after the Jedburg teams of World War Two kind of pay homage to them.

And these were these small teams that were like three man teams. I think it was a Brit, a person, a military operator, special operations, and then a US and might have been an Aussie in there every once in a while. Anyway, they trained in Jedburgh, Scotland, and that's where they got their name. The Jedburgh team, they were tossed in a parachute in behind enemy lines, and they would do harassment and interdiction.

sabotage blow up railroads or bridges or things of that nature or lot of reconnaissance missions and things of that nature, they kind of like gave the enemy a hard time the access powers a hard time behind enemy lines. And they would just like they were quiet fast and they would move quickly. And so I just wanted to pay homage to those those teams. And I worked for so yeah, I worked for

Jessie Ott (55:32)
That is cool. Do they

still have those, that team?

David Walker (55:36)
No, a

lot of times after the war, the units get disbanded. They kind of downsize. The military goes from like 4 million to 400k, or the army and whatnot. But you can still find information about them online. then the OSS and all our lineage. It's really, I'm so impressed by

Jessie Ott (55:43)
Yeah.

David Walker (56:02)
you know, the operators that came out of, you know, World War II in Vietnam and, and, and then my brothers in arms who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I have, I still have some friends that are, that are in, you know, they've been in a long time. They're kind of getting, they're kind of getting up there. They have a couple of stars on their shoulders and they're running, JSOC and, know, ABSOC and, and all these special operations units at the high, at the high levels. And, I have so much admiration, for them cause they

They've spent their entire careers, you know in in the military and the special operations some go back and forth between conventional military Maybe they go to the second for a little then back to Rangers and they go to you know took a couple of my friends with the Delta then they went back to you know Whiteside, know SF and and like I said, I have so much admiration for them and I hope someday when these guys finally get out whatnot they'll join my board of advisors, but Anyway, so that's what we got our name

Jessie Ott (56:30)
Yeah.

You

David Walker (56:56)
And also the way we kind of think about investing. We want to stay nimble. And I've always thought about liquidity as an advantage and being nimble as an advantage. you you learn the principles of war, the nine principles of war, which have held through ancient times. If you go study, you know, you know, Philip the Macedonian, Alexander the Great and Caesar and Napoleon and, you know, and all these, you know,

patent and you realize these principles and they teach you these principles at West Point and other military schools. They've held up throughout time and one of them is maneuvering. It's the ability to move quickly and if you're illiquid, it's tough, right? So if you're a private equity investor or you invest in real estate, you invest in real estate and the government says, hey, we're putting a trash dump down the road. There goes your single-family housing. The valuation goes where a crack house moves across the street.

Jessie Ott (57:45)
Yeah.

David Walker (57:48)
or they put a nuclear power plant that has a problem and all of a there's a leak. Four miles down the road, you're like, great, my value, it's illiquid, you can't just punch a button and get out. Private equity is kind of the same way. Something goes wrong, you have a down round or it just goes to a lot of these private equity investors, investments go to zero. They have one Google and they say that's all they talk about for the next 20 years and they forget to tell you about the 90 that went to zero. But we are able to punch a button and get out quickly.

Jessie Ott (57:58)
Right. Yeah.

You

David Walker (58:18)
And so we can maneuver and we can, I think nimbleness maneuver is a competitive advantage. Smaller funds can do that. And so we're a small fund, very small. And I think it's an advantage to be able to do that. so we've taken that lineage from our training, from our heritage and the way we think about the world.

And if the market's telling us something is wrong, I am not smarter than the market. The market is millions of participants buying and selling stocks and bonds and options. And let's say there's a million people buying and selling Apple. You know, all the buyers and all the sellers are going to eventually come to a market price. That's how a market price is found out. That's price discovery. And so if it's going against you for a long period of time, the market's trying to tell you that you're wrong, and you may want to reconsider.

that investment you may want to punch out and come back in another day. that's, that's kind of where we got our name. And that's kind of our philosophy. I can talk high level philosophy of kind of how we see the world.

Jessie Ott (59:15)
Yeah.

That's really cool. I've never heard of that term nimble in the investment world ever.

David Walker (59:26)
Yeah,

yeah, it's funny. I say stay nimble, my friends, you know, it kind of comes from that Doseki guy, know, stays to 13, my friends, I say stay nimble, my friends. You know, the market is right. It's kind of there's getting a little bit, it's, know, you look at the Buffett indicator right now, it's overheated. It's two times GDP. So Buffett looks at market cap divided by GDP. It's two standard deviations right now.

I up to miss a product and that's why he's been like 30 some odd percent cash, 35 % cash for a year, year and a half now, because he knows something's happening or going to happen and we can just react quicker. He's so huge. He cannot react very quick. It would take weeks to get out of a stock, big stocks. We can get out and I can push a button, get out in 10 seconds. but something, the market is very frothy and so

Jessie Ott (1:00:03)
Yeah.

He can't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

David Walker (1:00:19)
We want to be nimble. We want to be able to react quickly to a downturn, which may or may not be happening. Who knows?

Jessie Ott (1:00:26)
Well, I would say, you know, this year has been tough. You know, I can only really speak about the beverage industry. ⁓ There are some winners out there. The RTDs are winning with the tariff conversation. know, lending is a little bit harder. The interest rates finally went down. But on our podcast, I've been following the seven key indicators of a recession.

David Walker (1:00:32)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jessie Ott (1:00:51)
And in Q1, we hit one and that was lower consumer spending. And then I forget what the second thing was in Q2. So you're seeing step by step by step. Now with the tariff conversation kind of coming to an end, we're not talking about it. The market's not emotional about it. Hopefully there's some stability there. And there's a lot of good feeling about 26.

David Walker (1:00:54)
Mm-hmm.

Jessie Ott (1:01:19)
So hopefully we can just keep trucking. If we can get the interest rates down a little bit. Eggs aren't $8 for 12.

I mean,

David Walker (1:01:31)
Terrible.

Jessie Ott (1:01:31)
what did I, what did I buy the other day? And it was like $8. I think like, I think egg whites, I get egg whites and now it's, it's like eight or $9 for, for egg whites. I don't know, like what? You know?

David Walker (1:01:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So the company

releases its inflation data and I hate it. I got to be honest. PCE is a little bit more accurate. CPI is terrible because it doesn't include energy or food. Like what do we need to survive on this planet? Let me think. Food, water, energy. It doesn't include energy and food. It's such a worthless number. And so I do my own. And so you mentioned eggs. I do it on a few of them. One of them is Cafe Bustelo. I kind of really like that. Shameless.

Jessie Ott (1:02:02)
Yeah.

David Walker (1:02:15)
I'm not plugging it because I don't own it. ⁓ I remember when I was here, was six years ago, was $12.95 for the big family size. Now it's like $23. So almost 2x or 1x or whatever, 1x, you know, 100 % gain. they, know, if they're saying it's 3%, you know, after six years, you compound three over six years, that should be around, you know, 20%,

Jessie Ott (1:02:17)
it

Wow.

David Walker (1:02:41)
increase or 20 30 % somewhere in that ballpark and and not 100 % so I don't think those numbers are very accurate and and you you can go on different sites where they measure like hamburgers and you know Coca-Cola and bottle of water and Cafe Bustelo so you're right inflation is is much higher than they think it's a pipe dream that they think they're get it down to that fake two it's not even a fake three it's more like a it's like a real six or eight and

Jessie Ott (1:03:09)
Yep. I

don't see prices coming down too much either. Hope! There's hope, but it's really hard because, uh, like I have an example, like your Cafe Bustelo. So our dog had a certain type of food and it was $52 for the big bag. And it's 105 now. We don't get her that food anymore. She ended up being allergic to it, but, uh, that's a hundred percent.

David Walker (1:03:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:03:38)
That is, and the excuse was COVID. Well, we're not COVID anymore.

David Walker (1:03:44)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:03:45)
So these companies are really soccin' it to the consumers.

David Walker (1:03:49)
They are, they are. mean, 6 % is a bit more accurate in my opinion. So 6 % over six years is like 41, 42 % overall increase over six years. So it's, you know, they don't tell you what is over six years or 10 years. They say, oh, here it is year by year. You got to do the math on your own. You know, 1.0, whatever compounded to the end is, you know, the real nut. And you're right. It's, it's, it's.

It's pretty brutal. So and then here's the thing. So so one thing that's going in favor GDP is You know, got to look at ISM right now It's still below 50 ISM manufacturers like 49 is some change if that increases over 50 That's going to be kind of a good sign for the market and the Fed is cutting rates, which is a good sign for the market So so you have some good things that are happening. You have bad things that are happening with inflation and unemployment They're going in, you know, if you look at the employment numbers after they do the revisions

The economy hasn't had a job, a true job in two years. So you have these two forces working against each other. So it's hard to say, are we going into a recession or not? So you hope that we can DPR way out of it. You know, I'm, listen, that's why I got to stay nimble because I can't make these. I can't make the guess. You know, if you had seven indicators that are flashing red, hey, that's great. I'm going to sell everything and go short. Right. But you don't get that. So you have to be very nimble. At least I have to be nimble.

Jessie Ott (1:04:56)
Yeah.

Right.

David Walker (1:05:12)
You can do whatever you guys want, but yeah, so it's difficult. You have different signs that are pointing in different directions.

Jessie Ott (1:05:15)
Well...

from an investor standpoint in the investment world, how do you view these tariffs and is there some any white papers that have been done on what kind of jobs or what kind of American goods could be made based on these tariffs?

David Walker (1:05:23)
Yes.

the probably are I don't think I've read them. And look, this is a whole new ground to me, because I haven't seen this kind of tariffs. They might have been small ones before. And so I had to understand it quickly. I, to be honest, I did not kind of get what was going on quickly. I didn't know if it was truly going to hurt the economy, all the economists were screaming that it was. And I think

Jessie Ott (1:05:52)
Yeah.

David Walker (1:06:02)
they're like economists, they're so like a lot of them are just wrong on such a consistent basis for the last 20 years. What's an economist? It's like a, what's a gold miner? What's a gold miner? A guy who stands by a hole in the ground, a liar who stands by a hole in the ground, right? That's a gold miner. So economists, a of these economists were, you know, I don't know. Yeah. And so, but then again, you look at it, maybe they weren't really real. They were just bargaining chips. They were just, he was playing the Atlas, I don't know.

Jessie Ott (1:06:08)
It's like the weather.

David Walker (1:06:32)
and I'm apolitical and I don't follow it.

Jessie Ott (1:06:34)
Yeah,

I'm not trying to get political. just was trying to get, because of course we all want more American jobs. Of course we want to supply more things in our country. But at the same time, mean, we're a global, everything is global. You think of all these small, you know, I think about these small companies that sell shoes or sell clothing that get them made and

David Walker (1:06:41)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:06:59)
XYZ and they have a whole factory and they have a whole thing and they have the designs. I mean, how do you prevent that from happening? Is that really fair?

David Walker (1:07:06)
Well, you're

not going to The hardest thing is you're not going to beat the cost of labor. Listen, I've been to China and they got a billion people. I remember walking in Tiananmen Square. is, geez, how many years ago? 20 years ago. And I'm looking down this road. goes down and then up. And I see three dozen people with brooms sweeping the road. In America, we'd have one guy on a street sweeper machine. Now they could do that in China. They could build a street sweeper machine. The problem is you're going to put

Jessie Ott (1:07:14)
Yeah.

David Walker (1:07:36)
two dozen minus one person out of a job, or there's probably a hundred people I didn't even see over the hill. So you can put a hundred people out of a job and it would be cheaper just to give out a hundred people brooms. So you look at a billion people, you're not, you're never going to beat that cost of labor, which even, you know, now that the swept shops have hopefully all gone away, I'm not so sure, but now they're getting better conditions and whatnot. But one thing that could be disruptive and I studied disruptive innovation is robotics. Not just, you know, so robotics plus AI.

Jessie Ott (1:07:54)
Hopefully, yeah.

David Walker (1:08:05)
could eventually lead to a shift in manufacturing to countries that embrace robots and AI. Now, will the fixed cost be high for the robots at first? Yes, but you amortize that over the life of the robot. It might be cheaper, you know, and I will tell you, here's my guess, and I'm just guessing, but I will tell you, go back and look at the speeches of presidents after they, the last five of them, I don't care, after they,

had some sort of military operation. Look at Trump after the bombs went into Iran. Look at Obama after they hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden. Look at Bush after whatever. What is the third sentence? It's in the top three sentences, and I might be wrong. In the top three sentences, what do they say? No American military were killed in this operation. They always talk about the loss of American life. They are judged. If American...

serviceman got a hangnail while they were hunting Osama bin Laden. Even though they killed him, they killed 20 of his, whatever, members of his clan, if one American broke a finger, that's all the press would talk about. one pilot got shot down on its way back, so every Clinton said the same thing, go back and look at the speeches. You can find them. It's in the top first five sentences. I think it's in the first three sentences.

no American military work. So why is Dave Walker think this is important? I think this is important because who is going to be the biggest purchaser of robots in the world, United States military? Are they going to replace 90 % of the frontline soldiers with a robot who is going to be cheaper, who's 10 times stronger, who's never going to rest, who's not going to be out of shape, who never needs to be fed, only needs to be recharged?

Jessie Ott (1:09:27)
Yeah.

David Walker (1:09:55)
who's not going to complain to his congressman, who's not going to have, it's going to be 10X better. And the US is going to buy these robots, probably from Tesla, let's be honest, Optimus. Those are the best ones out there right now. It's one about a Chinese one, but if the Chinese owned your army's robots, it's got robot versus robot. And the US army is going to buy 400,000 of these. They're going to buy the maintenance contracts. That's why Tesla's Optimus is a trillion dollar.

Jessie Ott (1:10:11)
Yeah, that won't be good. But China's gonna have them. We're... Ooh, that's scary.

David Walker (1:10:25)
TAM total addressable market. That doesn't even include Tesla's energy. And that Tesla's I'm already pitching a stock to you already Tesla's self driving robot taxi, they just released the model two today, which is under 40k, you're gonna buy this car if you want to buy it, you're gonna it's gonna drop you off at work, you're push a button, it's gonna go out and make revenue for you, it'll pay for itself in 123 years, like

Anyway, so back to the robots. I think the US military is going to be one of the biggest purchasers of robots and drones in the next one, two, three, five years across the globe. And you're going to see the, we still have servicemen and women? Of course, but will they be in Las Vegas in a room piloting these things with joysticks, going home at night and eating their Kentucky fried chicken and not being on the front lines? Yeah. So then when we have a military operations,

Jessie Ott (1:10:57)
Wow.

David Walker (1:11:16)
the commander in chief can get up and say, we just had an operation in insert name of country here that we don't like. We killed some insert name of bad guy we don't like. And guess what? 30 drones were killed, not one serviceman was killed. And the press will not be able to slam whoever that president is, because that's what they do. They're like, hey, you killed a serviceman going after a bad guy, shame on you. And so imagine the president's leverage. the downside is we're going to be involved in 50 different

conflicts around the globe because you can just throw robots at the conflict. You know what saying? that's, you know, there's gonna be, I think there's gonna be more wars because of these robots, or against robot.

Jessie Ott (1:11:53)
Yeah, for sure. I mean,

look at what Putin is doing. Starting to threaten Finland?

David Walker (1:11:58)
Right.

flying these drones over Poland like it's getting out of hand and you know what? They're trying to this because here's what happens. These brush fire wars roll over and become world wars. They just do go back to Look at World War I, look at World War II. You pray that this can come to an end for both sides. They're losing 7,000 combined a week supposedly. know, thank God they don't have robots doing it. They would be doing it forever. know? So anyway.

Jessie Ott (1:12:04)
It's out of hand.

It's happening.

Wow,

that's a whole new-

That's a different war.

David Walker (1:12:31)
whole yeah it's a whole new type of warfare. mean luckily this usually there's a great book called America's First Battles and it talks about how America gets its nose bloodied in every first battle we enter into Pearl Harbor, bang, punch to the face. What did we learn? Don't group all your carriers and your ships together, spread them out. Task Force Smith in Korea, bang, punch the face. So America learns all these lessons. Now we got to see the Ukraine

slash Russian war where now it's all drones and we were taken all our military leaders are going, my God, it's not the infantry. It's not the artillery. It's the drunk, like they're learning without getting punched in the face themselves, which is fantastic. You know, the old saying old generals fight the last war, but now the old generals get to look at the, you know, so that's what we always get our nose bloodied. Then we figure it out and then we are successful. But now we're watching other people get their nose bloodied and hopefully our, our, our leaders are.

taking copious notes about using new technology, drones, robots, et cetera, in warfare.

Jessie Ott (1:13:36)
Yeah.

Yeah, no, it's fascinating to me because I've never had a conversation about any of this.

David Walker (1:13:42)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:13:44)
And I mean, if there's somebody that's going to know it's, it's you. I didn't know Tesla made robots.

David Walker (1:13:48)
Well, that's how we try to win. Well, all the

optimists I've seen it at one of their showrooms. It wasn't a functioning one, but you can, mean, it's, it's, it's, it's amazing. And now it has dexterity with its fingers that it can do. It can pick up an egg and it can do Rubik's cube and, and, they're trying to make it more, you know, user friendly and look more like humans and whatnot. And listen, they're going to be in healthcare, you know, like elder care, right? So all these baby boomers, 10,000 a day are retiring and you know,

people are taking, helping her, like I go visit my mom and she's not, she's in her eighties and she's doing fine. But eventually I'm not going to be able to be there 24 seven. So we either have to hire a nurse or we hire a robot that's doing, or a combination of maybe the nurse comes, you know, there's going to be combinations that fit in that work together. And so robots on construction sites, robots on in nursing homes, robots, you know, doing all kinds of these dangerous tasks.

know, or difficult task or just tasks that require someone to be there all day and all night. Yeah, they're going to be a big part of our world. so, and then you combine it with AI where they can think and reason. It's quite impressive. mean, the disruptive curve right now is happening a lot faster and it has a larger impact.

in terms of the size of the impact it's going to have to the economy. So that's what we invest in.

Jessie Ott (1:15:11)
Wow. That's interesting. I guess I'll have to watch out for that. Not that I'm going to read a military budget or anything, but I'm sure like Navy times or somebody will talk about it.

David Walker (1:15:21)
think they will. I think they'll do the same procurement methods that they do. They'll experiment. They'll test out some things. They'll have them working alongside soldiers. And it's not going to happen overnight. It's a slow, you'll see the progress, you know, where it's like, all right, this robot will just carry the load now. Okay, now it's like a dum-dum. It just carries the load. You know, now it'll be like, it'll be carrying water and ammunition. it'll be a slow progress. Listen, saw, talked about innovation, right? So I saw a photo, had two photos, two black and white photos next to each other.

Jessie Ott (1:15:28)
Yeah. Yeah.

David Walker (1:15:49)
It was a parade in New York City in 1900. Every vehicle in the parade was a horse drawn carriage except one, which was an automobile, those newfangled automobiles. The next photo was in 1913, same parade, 13 years later. Every vehicle in the parade was an automobile, model T4, except one horse drawn carriage. In 13 years, complete flip.

And so that's technology right there happening. So that's how we try to think about investing. Like what are the new technologies that are changing our lives? Not just robots, but it could be, you know, something online, a software, you know, you're using the software program Riverside. It's changed your life. It's made it easier, better, faster. You think you talk about it. It wasn't here. I remember sitting on a trading desk in 2004 and a guy took off his shoe. This was a very smart guy, right? I was like, wow, that guy's a smart trader. And he took off his shoe and he held it to his head.

And he was making fun of people using cell phones. Look, I'm using a cell phone. Cause a cell phone at the time was a slice of a shoe. Everybody, remember this so badly. He's slapping his leg, everyone's laughing. And I didn't have a cell phone in 2004. They were like newfangled and they were expensive and they were gigantic. And he made fun of people using these new things called cell phones. Here we are. I wonder if that guy's still making fun. Like I wish I wouldn't have put in so much credence into that. I wish I had been more, you know,

Jessie Ott (1:16:48)
Yeah!

Yeah.

David Walker (1:17:10)
Right now I'm an early adopter. I'm not an innovator. Like you look at the S curve of innovation for any new technology, but thank God I'm not with my peer groups who are like late adopter or late majority. Some people are late majority. Some people are early majority. I'm still an early adopter. where you take new technology kind of pretty quick. You know, that holds through to blockchain and Bitcoin and other.

ETH and Solana, things like that. Like the technology is amazing and the tokenization of real world assets. It's absolutely amazing what's happening right now. We can talk about technology until we're blue in the face and I don't want to waste too much of your time.

Jessie Ott (1:17:48)
Well, do you want to talk about any mentors or any resources?

David Walker (1:17:52)
Yeah, so for me, my mentors were I was fortunate like to say to work for two sets of billionaires, you know, not at the same time, and work for other also very talented PMs. And the two sets of billionaires that I worked for like, were amazing. I mean, they didn't really take me under my wing and say, Dave, let me show you this. But I just got to look at why watch them and listen and pay attention. And like I said, the second set was like these super smart guys, like a literally the next Buffett and Munger like they've doing great and their fund is going to be like the next 4050 years just gonna

And I kind of like saw how they thought about the world and how they think about things. So they were kind of mentors for me. And then my other mentors, kind of like had to kind of go out and get my mentors, you know? And ⁓ I kind of did that by just like asking people like, I didn't really say, Hey, can you be my mentor? I was more to just like, Hey, can I ask, can I pick your brain for a little bit? are willing to do it. And some people you can like cold ping on like LinkedIn. And then believe it or not, my mentors are in books.

Jessie Ott (1:18:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

David Walker (1:18:49)
you know, like, you know, I read as many books as I could, or even just articles or watch podcasts on, you know, watching like, you know, my buddy worked for Paul Tudor Jones. So I read a lot about, you know, Paul Tudor Jones and watch them on podcasts or give interviews and like how he thinks about it. And Paulson and Soros and, you know, Drew Conmiller and all these famous, you know, Jim Simons and all these famous

investors that have just crushed it and done very well. They've beaten the SP 500 consistently. You know, they don't beat every single year. They just on average beat over over time. They'll have a down year. And they'll talk about I love when they talk about like what they got wrong, you know, and like how they got their faces ripped off and what they learned from it how they quickly old when they were like, it's so hard to sell a stock when it's down 20%, you're like, oh, it's just so painful. And because it locks in the pain. That's what it makes it even more real.

Jessie Ott (1:19:39)
It is painful.

David Walker (1:19:44)
But when you would, I like get this weird sense of like, okay, thank God I've done it. And now I can just like get through the pain and get over it where some people just hold on, hold on, hold on. Now it's down 50, now it's down. And they get their face and ripped off. And the last guy I worked for, he, we did a private, it went up 10 X, it went public. I punted, I punted that week, nine, 85 % of the stock and held on for like the 15%. Then I ended up putting the whole thing cause it was drifting.

Jessie Ott (1:19:44)
Yeah.

David Walker (1:20:12)
He held and held and held and went down 85%. It went down 100%. He turned a 10 X return into like a negative, negative, like it's close to zero. It's like 16 cents now. It's basically zero. Like, I don't think you should do that. you should. But you don't want to be wrong. sell a down stock, you are wrong. The market's like, ha ha, you're wrong. Just take the pain, get out, live to fight another day. You know, maneuver.

Jessie Ott (1:20:30)
Yeah.

Yeah.

David Walker (1:20:40)
So anyway.

Jessie Ott (1:20:41)
Yeah, I did that with Dogecoin. I bought right at the wrong time. And I'm just hanging on for dear life, hoping it goes back up and I'll just sell it.

David Walker (1:20:44)
Yeah.

Yeah. Listen, for most investors,

say buying, if you look at the end of the day, I mentor some of my friends' kids who are like in their 20s. say, listen, you should have your, and they want to trade, they want to do Robinhood and do all that. And you know, it's like dopamine hits. said, listen, at the end of the day, you should have 90 % of your money in the SP 500 because they're young. They can, they don't need to do a bond stock split. 26 year old just.

And then you should have 10 % in what I call your dope folio. It's like your portfolio, but it gives you your dopamine high. And if you can, if your dope folio outperforms your portfolio, meaning the SP 500, just buy SPY or VOO or whatever the ETF is, eight basis points and fees. And if your dope folio outperforms your portfolio, then you can move it from, you know, for five years in a row, then you can move it from 10 % to 20%. You go another five years. And then when you get to a point where you're consistently outperforming, okay, you got something.

you know, because it's very hard to consistently outperform, you know, the SMP 500.

Jessie Ott (1:21:49)
Yeah.

Well, you got to pay attention to it. ⁓ I had this app that I did and it got pretty good. Like you could do your personal finance. mean, your like your dopamine, your dope fund or whatever, and then your 401k type funds. But you could pick, you know, I want a fund for women or I want a pure

David Walker (1:21:52)
hard.

Jessie Ott (1:22:11)
you know, energy, solar energy or whatever the case may be. And I did really well. And what I liked about it is that you're buying micro shares. So every week I'd put in X amount of dollars to each fund. So you would be buying the stock at the, at the, all along and have, have ownership of it along all these different time periods.

David Walker (1:22:21)
Yeah, yeah,

That's great.

Great.

That's so So dollar cost averaging, you're talking about dollar cost averaging. And if you have cash flow, you know, where you're making an income, whatever it is, and you just dollar cost average, whether it's every week or every month, that is the greatest strategy because you're buying lows and highs. But when you buy lows, you're buying disproportionately more and you're averaging that cost out. So you're actually buying more shares, you actually want it to go low. DC, you know, dollar cost averaging DCA is a smart thing for especially for younger people. And it's just a very good way to kind of go about

you know, preparing for your future for when you retire. And you know, once I tell like my friends who are like 25 years old, said, listen, when are going to retire? said, 65. I said, great, have 40 years. What's the stock market do? It does about an average of 9.6, 9.9, depending if dividends are reinvested. Last five years done like 12. I said, all right, if you compound $1,

Jessie Ott (1:23:13)
Yeah.

David Walker (1:23:33)
at nine let's call it 10 over 45 or 40 years do you know what that that dollar comes out to it comes out to about 45 it grows 45 x when you compound it then i might be off it might be 50 x so when you buy yourself a hundred dollar pair of air jordans i'm not sure if air jordans are that cheap they're probably more expensive you're stealing you're stealing make sure you look in the mirror and you're stealing 44 500 from yourself

Jessie Ott (1:23:55)
Probably not.

David Walker (1:24:02)
If it's a thousand bucks, you're stealing $45,000 from your future self. So maybe you want to defer that or maybe you want to buy a cheaper pair. Maybe it's an $80 pair. And so, you know what saying? Cause every dollar you DCA at a young age and it compounds at 9.6 or 9.9, 10 % call it, that's a lot of capital. And one of the best books you can read is a book called The Richest Man in Babylon. And it's like 96 pages. probably read it on the...

sitting doing a big number two, apologize. But um, it's a quick read. But the bottom line is, he just saying pay yourself first 10 % every month, but out of your gross without even thinking about it, then you got to pay the government your taxes and you got to pay rent and food. And you do that and you slap it into 90 % S &P 500 fund and 10 % of your portfolio, you know, maybe 8 % and 2 % Bitcoin or whatever you want to do, you know, so don't get your face ripped off and you do that consistently.

just like you said, dollar cost averaging, will do very well over time.

Jessie Ott (1:25:06)
Yeah, I miss it. We ended up rolling both of our accounts. I think she had E-Trade or something, but into our fun together because we're at the point where we wanted to grow. There's much money together. And so we handed it over to our CFPs, but I want to get back to that because I really enjoyed it. It was rewarding.

David Walker (1:25:12)
Mm-hmm.

And one thing I would encourage you to,

and one thing I would encourage you, you or other listeners, et cetera, is like, one thing I learned from the billionaires is try to figure out every tax advantage you can figure out, whatever it might be. When you invest, do your 401k first and then do your other. If you haven't maxed that out, then don't do the other stuff. Like, and find, like you're a business owner, so there's, is there another one you can start through your business that's on top of your 401, like really max out. Cause any,

Jessie Ott (1:25:39)
Yep.

David Walker (1:25:55)
that you don't pay that the government a penny saves a penny earned so if you're paying if you're paying ten dollars less that's ten dollars a return or whatever it might you know any penny you don't pay the government is a return look at it through that lens you're like wow that that can be meaningful that's free money if you can figure out how to do it whether it might be starting your own business or whatever it might be so that's that's very important yeah taxes yeah

Jessie Ott (1:26:05)
Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. My wife works for an accountant, a CPA firm. Yeah, I do. She does all my taxes. I definitely didn't do my own taxes. I don't have time to learn all that crap. Yeah. Especially, I guess, if you're trading. Is there anything else that we haven't covered that you want to talk about?

David Walker (1:26:28)
good. You have an advantage.

Yeah.

is this big.

I usually hold up a copy of my book, but I forgot to bring it with me. But listen, my book is kind of like, you know, it's for someone's dope folio. You know, it's, but it's just these, listen, these aren't rule nothing. don't think one rule in there is something I thought of off my head. This is rules that I've learned from 21 years of getting beaten down by the market, combined with like reading other people, you know, lessons from like the Buffets of the world and the, you know, the Soros' and the

Paul Tudor Jones of the world. very first rule is don't be stupid. Like really don't get over your skis and be dumb. I would say like read books, you know, and my book, the proceeds are going to the Green Beret Foundation. I used to on the board. It helps Greenberry families and Gold Star families. It's a great charity. So I'm not making any money on it. That's why pimping my book. It feels great. ⁓ And I would just say, listen for anybody out there, just keep, keep learning, you know, and you look at

Jessie Ott (1:27:33)
Yeah.

David Walker (1:27:39)
Building your net worth, know, look at Buffett's net worth. His net worth really didn't take off until he was in his 50s. That's when it compounded like crazy. I mean, he made good money, don't get me wrong, but the curve went like that And so you're always learning and you're always reading and you're always studying and you're always trying to figure out, you know, to do it. And it's a never-ending process and have fun at it. I know I enjoy it. And the beautiful part about what I'm doing is I can do it into my 90s if God

Jessie Ott (1:27:48)
Yeah.

David Walker (1:28:08)
or whoever's up there lets me live that long. that's, that's the wisdom. Yeah, exactly. And I don't like, who am I? What's my name?

Jessie Ott (1:28:11)
And your brain functions.

My wife's grandfather, her father's father, he created a method that he was trading into his 90s. But he had a cap on how much money he could trade. But he said it took him 10 years to learn his method.

David Walker (1:28:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you got to find what's right for you. Like my buddy who does all mean regression through futures. That that's his thing. And I have a commodities guy, he only does I got a buddy who just does oil. That's it. He's an oil guy, oil, oil futures and oil producers, developers and drillers, like he is an oil guy. And he does some other energy, but like he doesn't touch technology or stocks or consumer discretionary or convertible arbitrage. So find what works for you and

Jessie Ott (1:28:55)
Yeah.

David Walker (1:28:58)
Become like you said become an expert in that area awesome and you will competitive advantage Awesome

Jessie Ott (1:29:01)
Yeah.

Yeah. Well,

this has been really enlightening. It kind of brings back my old world of trading and, I worked, one of my first jobs, I worked at a trading desk. I was in, I think I was in marketing. I can't remember. it was a memorable job, I guess. ⁓ it wasn't for me. And then I tried to do trading again later and,

David Walker (1:29:19)
Hey.

Jessie Ott (1:29:25)
I didn't care for the guy that was running the trading floor. walked out on him. I'm like, nobody's talking to me. I'm not taking this. So bye. Yeah. And it was just so disrespectful. He's from New Jersey, some hotshot from New Jersey living in Dallas. I'm like, peace out. You know, and yeah, it's just not for me.

David Walker (1:29:42)
Yeah.

And I would

tell people to stay away from flipping and day trading and the more you trade, it's like this weird, like I've read a study somewhere that there's an inverse correlation between the more you trade and the worse your returns on a weight, the more return. that's a, that's a direct correlation. The more you trade, the worse your returns. So I, if I would say pick something that you don't have to flip your flip, your trading around all the time. And I like,

Jessie Ott (1:30:09)
Yeah.

David Walker (1:30:10)
slap my hand every once in a while and say stay out like right now I'm not doing anything I've been looked at the book it's great you know to be able to do other things and and and stay away from over trading over trading will kill a portfolio they really will yeah yeah

Jessie Ott (1:30:23)
Yeah. Well, and then there's fees and all that,

but, you know, there are people that make a living just trading one or two stocks.

David Walker (1:30:31)
Yeah. yeah. And pair trading. Yep. Yep. You can pair trade to certain things that are like maybe inversely correlated or correlated or and you know, some people do that and they do very well. know, people trade the cube.

Jessie Ott (1:30:33)
They just know everything about those two stocks.

Yeah. I did

currency trading for a couple of years and that was interesting.

David Walker (1:30:51)
Mm-hmm.

that's difficult. found, listen, some people get that and that's a more powerful. I've had it. never really got into that because you have to understand macro in a very strong sense. And be very good at it. Yeah, but that's a very

Jessie Ott (1:31:05)
Yeah. It

is definitely economies and interrelational. And people usually only trade one or two of those.

David Walker (1:31:15)
Yeah. Yeah. That's another area. Yeah. That's a great point. You know, you can be a master of all trades or you can just be very focused. You know, I give an example of Michael Jordan playing baseball. I I'm wrong. He was, he was okay. But if he didn't buy the bus for that AA team, he would have never, he would have went down even lower, but you put him in, like he was an expert at what he did basketball. So if you figure out your niche and your place in this world and focus on that, you will crush it.

You will do well. Awesome. Awesome.

Jessie Ott (1:31:46)
Yep. Yep, I agree.

Yeah. Sweet. Well, how do people get in touch with you?

David Walker (1:31:54)
DaveJWalker11 at gmail.com. don't know if I should put it or LinkedIn. David Walker 1. David J Walker 1. guess I'm the first David J Walker. If they want to just kind of... David J Walker 1 at LinkedIn. I'll put my my Gmail in the chat. I'm not sure if you're editing this later and you're gonna put stuff up. If they want to chat about like investing books.

Jessie Ott (1:31:59)
Yeah, LinkedIn maybe.

You're a jaywalker.

Yeah, can put your

email in the recap.

David Walker (1:32:22)
Okay, great. Yeah, and if you if you'd be so kind as to maybe throw a photo of my book or put that up or whatever, whatever you want to do. Like I said, it's all going to charity. And it's just my 21 years of sitting on a trading floor listening and talking and figuring it out to what works and doesn't work. And I think it crosses many different things like, you know, don't be stupid. And you know, don't take a like, like, if you look at down draw math, don't take a long large down draw, the math doesn't work out anyway.

I think it was helpful for me to put it on paper.

Jessie Ott (1:32:52)
Paper. Yeah. Well, I'll have to get it. It sounds interesting. Of course. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate your time and best of luck to you.

David Walker (1:32:57)
Thank you so much. Thank you, Jessie, again, so much.

Thanks. too. Cheers. Talk to you later.

Jessie Ott (1:33:07)
And,

and, and your book. Okay. All right. Take care. Bye.

David Walker (1:33:09)
Thank you.

Thanks,

bye now.

Jessie Ott (1:33:14)
Man, I feel like we could talk forever.

David Walker (1:33:16)
I know.