Hello and welcome. I'm Patrick Curtis, your host and Chief Monkey, and this is the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Join me as I talk to some of the community's most successful and inspirational members to gain valuable insight into different career paths and life in general.

Let's get to it.

In this episode, member Bad Axe 85, that's Axe, shares his path from classical musician,

Jiu-Jitsu Fighter and scraping by before eventually landing at a top hedge fund and recently a well-respected

BC. Everyone thought he was crazy. Hear about his winding path and the steps he needed to take

before he had his first big break as well as some of the secret sauce that helped him to repeatedly

defy the odds. Enjoy. All right, Logan, thanks so much for joining the Wall Streetoises podcast.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Patrick. I appreciate what you've done for the community.

So happy to get back in the way I can.

Cool, man. So if you could start just for the quick bio yeah so I probably have one of the least Wall Street

tracked bios out there I was raised on a farm in rural Wisconsin and a beautiful place I moved

overseas when I was 12 my parents wanted me to have more cultural horizons so they sent me to live with my uncle who lived in Madrid, Spain. It was an ex-pad. He's an awesome guy. So I began really my classical music discipline over there. I turned to be a guitarist actually instead of like a finance guy, which is totally totally bonkers. And I look back and I think, oh, my gosh.

But anyway, so I lived in Spain part of the year and then back home on the farm part of the year growing up. So I really had like kind of a bifurcated childhood. I went to undergrad young, didn't go to a target school. I went to a nice liberal arts college called Lawrence. How old were you when you went to undergrad when you say you're young? I was really young.

So I had auditioned as a performance major and I was accepted on 16.

So kind of rising when I was 15 or so.

I played classic music my entire life and it was just something that my family had values in.

So I got admitted when I was 16 and started right after I turned 17.

So I got there that summer and I was I think like the second youngest kid on campus. Was it like piano? What were you playing? I was a classical guitarist. Guitarist. Oh, cool. Interesting. You know, it's just straight track to hedge funds from there. Exactly. Yeah, right? So you're, okay, so you're getting to this liberal arts college like myself. So you have, I assume there's no finance or accounting courses there. No, I didn't, until I did my MBA way later in life, I didn't take a single econ course or finance course or business or like that. It was all composition and then performance arts. Yeah. So tell me, you're kind of, it said when you graduate where you, what was the first couple things out of school? When did you kind of actually even know about finance? You probably didn't even know what finance was in terms of like careers or anything like that. It was just this vague notion. Yeah, it was kind of a vague notion as far as like true institutional finance. But I mean, I love business, but I, you know, essentially I was an entrepreneur then because I tried to be a concert artist, try to be a classic musician. I didn't want to be a teacher. I didn't want to go back and be a professor. I made that decision early. I want to be a performer. And as a classic musician in the States, it's obviously it's brutal. I mean, you know, it's hand to mouth, you're broke as hell.

Totally. And, like, that's what I fell in love with when I was in Spain. When I was a little kid, I pursued that all the way into my 20s. So that's what I followed. You were still in Spain? Yeah, well, I was in Spain part of the year until I went to college. And then when I was in college, I did my study abroad in Milan, Italy.

So I know, you're going to Spanish.

Yeah, I was a Spanish.

Yeah, Al-Castiano. college and then when I was in college I did my study abroad in Milan, Italy. So I'm not,

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