BONUS: Future Standard President & CIO Mike Kelly

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.
This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, an extra special guest. Mike Kelly has an absolutely fascinating career from Omega to Tiger, currently president and Chief Investment Officer at Future Standard. Really about as knowledgeable and individual as you'll find, covering private credit, infrastructures, and the wealth channel, and what the future of what we broadly call alternatives look like. I thought this was fascinating, and I think you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with Mike Kelly. Mike Kelly, welcome to Bloomberg.

**Mike Kelly** (0:52)
Thanks Barry, it's great to be here.

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:54)
So I'm fascinated by both your background and your career path, which is really, really interesting. But let's roll back a little bit. Bachelors at Cornell, MBA from Stanford.
What was the original career plan?

**Mike Kelly** (1:12)
So taking a step back, I grew up on the border of Queens and Long Island. My dad was an NYPD cop in the South Bronx and Queens. Mom raised the five of us kids in a traditional Irish-American household and valued education.
I knew from a pretty early part of my life that I wanted to go into investing.
I'll tell you a little story. So when we turned 13 in my family, you got the big gift. And at the time, I was a nerdy kid. I was into computers. My dad would drop me off at the Queen's Village Public Library, and I would learn how to program on this Apple computer. They had just got the Apple IIe in. And for my 13th birthday, I asked my parents for up to $300. I got $300 of Apple stock was my request.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:06)
Really?

**Mike Kelly** (2:07)
Wow. And the big day came.
They gave me an envelope. I was really excited. I opened it up and it was a savings bond for a local bank. And my parents noted the disappointment of my face and said, you know, Michael was sorry, we don't know how to buy stock.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:25)
And this is like late 80s.

**Mike Kelly** (2:26)
This is 83

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:27)
83 Okay.

**Mike Kelly** (2:28)
So I said then and there, I am going to teach myself how to do this, how to invest in these companies. And I set out, I still have it. I have the notebook over here. I actually brought it with me about stocks and all the things that I would read about investing and investing in the stock market. And so from an early, early part of my life, I wanted to go into investing. And so throughout the years at Cornell, at the time, I did some great internships. One at a boiler room. They made a movie about that. One for Steve Wynn at the Mirage, which was exciting.
And then I studied in Japan, studying the banking system there for one summer. And as I was coming back, the only firm that actually would interview me was Salomon Brothers. And so I wound up fortunately getting a job at Salomon Brothers.

**Barry Ritholtz** (3:26)
What capacity?

**Mike Kelly** (3:27)
Yeah, in the Financial Institutions Banking Group. Okay, so you started as an iBanker there. Started as an iBanker.
Loved Salomon Brothers. Went out going to the 42nd floor of Seven World Trade Center, which is where Michael Lewis wrote the book, Liar's Poker. So I wound up going to the fixed income trading floor for my third year. And really got bit by the bug of markets. I knew I wanted to make the transition from investment banking over to the buy side. So as I headed off to Stanford Business School, that was my mission, was to find my way into the buy side.

**Barry Ritholtz** (4:05)
So there's a sort of urban legend that you kind of cold, cold your way from Salomon Brothers into an internship with hedge fund legend Lee Cooperman at Omega. Is that, first of all, is that a true story? And if it is, walk us through that call.

**Mike Kelly** (4:23)
Right, so I was at Stanford and I knew I wanted to make this transition into the buy side.
And in looking at the careers of what I was looking at, the greatest minds in investing, they all seem to be relegated to this corner of the market of hedge funds and private equity firms. You know, we're talking about the mid-90s here, when people didn't have a lot of understanding of what these firms actually did. But it struck me as an incredibly intense and exciting career path. Many of the people were very young and seemingly making a lot of money doing it, and really working on some dynamic investing strategies. And so I had a directory. It was called the Van Hedge Fund Directory. It was a printed out piece of paper, like from a fax machine, and it had the names and addresses of, at the time, the top 25 hedge funds. So it had, you know, Bruce Covner in there, and Paul Tudor Jones, and George Soros. And so I went through this directory and literally called from a payphone these individuals.