I was running trades out of my dorm room at Harvard. There was never a moment where I thought this was unusual. I just wanted to compete.
Winning in markets over the long run requires relentless intellectual honesty. You have to be willing to be wrong, learn from it, and update.
You have to invest in the intellectual capital of the firm. That is your competitive advantage. Everything else can be replicated.
Markets are brutal. They do not care about your feelings. They care about whether your analysis is right.
The 2008 crisis taught us that liquidity management is as important as return generation. Surviving to fight another day matters more than any single trade.
We spend more on technology than most tech companies our size. That is not a cost. That is the business.