Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast.

Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks, invest in your life.

Hello, the Smart Money Tree Podcast listeners.

Welcome to this week's show.

My name's Kirk Chisholm and I'll be your host.

So today I'm joined with Ben Frazier.

How you doing today, Ben?

Doing well.

Thanks for having me on, Kurt. Great. Well, glad to have you on. So we brought Ben on, a really interesting guy,

and I think given what's going on the markets, he's a timely guest. So, Ben, tell us a little

about your background. I'm a chief investment officer at Aspen Funds, and been at Aspen for

about six years. My background prior to that was actually in banking.

So I was a commercial banker and underwriter for many years before I kind of jumped into

the private equity side of things, which is what Aspen does. So we do a lot of private equity

investing in real estate mostly, but have also done a lot of oil and gas, and a little bit in venture as

well. And we raise pretty much all of our money, kind of our invest, our personal cash and all our

deals. So kind of like a family office, but then raise money from credited investors as well

and tell the deals that we do. So that's a little bit about what we do.

So how did you get involved in this space? You know, it helps when my father started the company Asper Funds.

And so that was kind of a natural segue to work with them.

Never really planned on it was kind of making, making a career in banking, but ultimately

didn't want to, you know, go there for the long haul and saw people that were there for 20,

...