Snack: Tom Hardin

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Tom Hardin (2:14)

So at 28, 29 years old, I'm a junior partner at a hedge fund.

The final place I worked, we were investing with the three-year horizon, sort of these ideas of long Google, bet against Yellow Pages. But we lost money in the first quarter of my second fund, which really shouldn't have mattered because we were investing longer term. My boss walks into my office, closes the door and says, hey, we just lost money in the first quarter. We have to start looking for shorter-term opportunities to make money every month, or we may not survive. And when any goal in any business goes from three years to now, the scoreboard resets every 30 days, the opportunity to start looking for corners to cut certainly increases. And I'd also say, Dan, it was a very ambiguous message. You know, do what it takes. He knows what everybody else is doing. Me as the young analyst, I didn't ask any clarifying questions of my boss, who was my mentor. Hey, are we talking about what everybody else is doing? Or are we going to stay within the legal or ethical guardrail? So I always encourage people today in my talks to ask those clarifying questions. Just don't make assumptions and get lost in this sort of ambiguity of what do we mean here.

SPEAKER_1 (3:24)

Now, when you start to get into this line of thinking, do you, I mean, Wall Street, the movie Wall Street was out by that point. Do you start to feel like Charlie Sheen in this scenario? What's happening?

Tom Hardin (3:39)

A little bit. So just a few months after that meeting, I received a tip from another investor who I knew had worked for this billionaire, Rajaraj Ratnam. I mentioned in the book, he's probably the most famous person later to be charged in these cases. She says, hey, everybody's doing this. Gives me a tip on a private equity company who's going to buy a public company in a few weeks. Here's the date, here's the price, here's the private equity firm. So when I speak at colleges, I say, hey, students, imagine, you know, the answers to the test just fell in your lap. Are you going to look at them or just throw them away? And I didn't make any trades, but I shared it with a friend who was losing money that month. I said, hey, I have something for you that will help you.

Just right there. So people know I've now violated insider trading laws just by sharing this information. And I haven't traded yet. He tells his whole firm, he calls me back, you know, dude, did you buy some? And then I hate to say it, but I was sort of having FOMO, like this guy's going to make millions. I gave the information to the woman that called me is going to make millions. And I'm just going to sit here and watch this. And when somebody crosses a line, there's something called a fraud triangle.