WARNING SIGNS: Jordan Lagarto, Short Trader & Hedge Fund Investor
Excerpt from "COVIDsteria: An Oral History of America's Great Reset" - see https://covidsteria.substack.com/p/covidsteria-table-of-contents
Much of the rank-and-file and middle management of Wall Street and corporate America had been under tremendous pressure by their employers to take the nDNA vaccine and were devastated by the Great Die-Off. However, and somewhat miraculously, most senior corporate executives and Wall Street moguls managed to survive and are in perfect health.
After a mass exodus from devastated traditional financial centers, many have chosen to set up shop and create new mini-Wall Streets around the country in cities not so associated with high finance. From these new financial hubs, they finance and speculate on booming energy, natural resource, or infrastructure companies and projects; or they fund the many new manufacturing start-ups that have blossomed since COVID Spring.
I visited Birmingham (Alabama), the "New Wall Street of the South" that was largely untouched by the Great Die-Off, to interview short trader and hedge fund investor Jordan Lagarto who recently set up shop there. I wanted to find out what Wall Street was like before COVID Spring and the Great Reset of the new Administration. I also wanted to know what Wall Street insiders like him had known about the vaccine and when they knew it...
I have always been greedy! Even when I was a child and my parents took me trick-or-treating, I did not want just one piece of candy from my neighbors. I wanted ALL the candy in the neighborhood! And if I did not get all the candy, I would throw a temper tantrum until I at least got a few extra pieces out of everyone!
The problem was that as a small child, I did not yet know how to manage risk – that is, the risk that comes with being greedy for candy because I got cavities! [He laughs.]
A few painful cavities from being greedy for candy is the best lesson you can have in risk management - short of losing a ton of money!
And being greedy by nature while having some painful first-hand risk management experience would serve me well for a career on Wall Street where there are all sorts of creative ways to make money and painful ways to lose it!
On the Street, we had two simple sayings when it comes to making money. The first saying was, “What difference does it make!” Go long or go short - so long as you go home with tons more money than you lose and never get caught doing anything that is so illegal that it is punishable by more than just a fine! Even then, you wanted to make sure that any fine is not bigger than however much money you just made! That was what people on the Street called risk management! [He laughs again.]
The second simple saying on the Street was always, “Wash, rinse, and repeat!” Investing for Wall Street was always the same as operating a washing machine! Sure, you might have a bunch of confusing cycles on a washing machine, and you do need to wash the right set of clothes with the correct cycle. A novice who does not understand how a washing machine works and washes their clothes using the wrong cycle could easily ruin all of their clothes.
But that rarely happened when Wall Street ran a washing machine. We always knew what buttons to push so that our clothes almost always come out nice and clean. That was because when we operate the washing machine, it was always "wash, rinse, and repeat" for us no matter what! [He smiles.]