To explain why that question matters, I have to tell you what happened to my family going into 2000.
I started investing at sixteen, in 1995, with money I earned myself. I cut lawns and shoveled driveways and washed cars. I worked a golf driving range and a little ski hill that was really one slope with a single lift. I was playing sports and carrying the grades that earned me a full-ride scholarship, and on the side I put every dollar I could scrape together into the market.
A broker my brother used took me on, and before long my whole family was with him. He had all of us in a handful of dot-com companies, most of it bought on margin. The more we borrowed, the more stock we owned, the more we traded, and the more he made. Concentration never came up. Nobody explained what margin does to you on the way down.
For about six months in my late teens I interned at that same firm, so I didn’t just live through this as a client. I saw it from the inside. I heard how the desk talked when no clients were on the phone, and it was a free-for-all. That was my first real look at the business, and it was enough to push me away from it for years.
I don’t blame the broker, not completely. It was a combination of things that blew up on all of us at once. He didn’t know any better. The license exam and the books I read in college teach you plenty, but they don’t fully prepare you for the real thing. That part you learn from the firm you’re with and the people around you. And everyone in that office was doing the same thing, the new people and the ones who’d been there thirty and forty years, top to bottom. It was one of the big Wall Street names you’d recognize, and a firm like that is built first for its own shareholders and its own stock price. The client comes somewhere after that. Almost thirty years later, the big banks and the big Wall Street firms and the big insurers still run the same way.
Then, in the spring of 2000, the market turned, and it turned fast. I lost the high hundreds of thousands I’d spent five years building from nothing. People around me lost millions. Some of them never got it back. I was twenty-one, young enough to recover. Not everyone was.
After college I didn’t go into the industry. Between what I’d seen on the inside and what the crash had just done to the people I loved, I wanted no part of it. I didn’t even know the word fiduciary yet. Nobody was using it, and nobody inside those big institutions was acting like one. They were paid to push product, so they pushed product. Independent firms that answered only to the client existed, but almost no one had heard of them.
Everything I believe about building wealth came out of those few months. How I think about risk, concentration, margin, and what volatility does to people who weren’t ready for it.
And I’ve spent the years since watching people I care about walk into versions of the same trap, in their forties, fifties, and sixties, with far less time to recover than I had at twenty-one. Some never did. I couldn’t keep watching it and stay quiet. That’s why I came back to this work on my own terms, became a fiduciary, went independent from day one, and built BFA Wealth Management in 2015 to be the opposite of the thing that did this to my family. I sit on the other side of the table from all of it, and I answer to the person across from me and no one else.