Hi, I'm Michael Batnick. We are going to be talking about Josh's post, I did everything I was supposed to do.

So Josh, you wrote this fictional piece about a story that's actually playing out all over the country in the financial services industry.

This piece is called, I did everything I was supposed to do and it tells the story of Dave was that his name?

Yeah. And Dave did everything he was supposed to do. He went to the right college, went to the right companies, but the industry is collapsing.

The walls are caving in around him, and now he's shut out of luck.

Why did you write this?

So it's based on a true conversation I had a few weeks ago that's been bothering me ever since

The character Dave is an amalgam of a lot of people on Wall Street that have found themselves on the wrong side of some of the biggest trends in asset management.

And so the character Dave in my post is a guy that for the last 25 years since college,

played by the rules, worked at big mutual funds, did a lot of analysis,

was picking stocks, was trying to beat the market, and the post was inspired by this conversation I had with a PM who was basically put in this position where they had to cut people from the organization.

So Fats been getting cut for years now.

This has been going on very surreptitiously, it doesn't make big headlines, but a lot of like big

asset management firms that are not named Vanguard or Black Rock are seeing every month money leave.

It doesn't even matter how the performance of the fund is.

It's not even a judgment on this is a good fund, It's a bad fund. They're just shrinking in dollars and when you shrink in dollars

The management fees are also shrinking and the parent company is gonna pay for less So I know of a lot of personal stories like this.

Well, you know what?

I mean, this could have been you.

If you weren't like an artist and you were more of a math person

and you went down that route and did like the CFA and the PM stuff like this could have been you.

Well so that's one of the things that's most, I don't want to say shocking, but that's one of the things that I guess is like most scary to people is that it's not like they're saying

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