In starting any business, you run into unexpected roadblocks and challenges, and you learn something from each mistake. Our next guest is the founder of a trading firm who has grown his business twice and learned how to overcome the barriers in his way. We can learn a lot from someone who is ready for the unexpected whether it is good or bad.

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EXCEPTIONAL RESOURCE: Find Out How to Build a Safer & Better Performing Portfolio using this FREE NEW Portfolio Builder Tool

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• About his childhood in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania.
• Rob’s interest in music and sports.
• How his early Rock and Roll career faired and how he went into the financial industry.
• How he got hired at IBM.
• His years at IBM and the lessons it taught him.
• How his fascination for trading started after he began a consulting business.
• The tipping point: when he went full-in to the trading business.
• How he learned about different strategies and tested them.
• When he came upon trend following and what made him stick with it.
• What kind of trend following he started with.
• How a drawdown taught him he needed to differentiate himself from other managers.
• The lessons that his first expansion stage taught him.
• The big event that happened after 2010 that changed everything.
• About MF Global and the meltdown of that firm.
• An overview of the programs that his firm runs.
• How he manages investor expectations with a small team.
• How he outsources operational roles in order to cut costs and remain a one-man shop.

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PLUS: Whenever you're ready... here are 3 ways I can help you in your investment Journey:

1. eBooks that cover key topics that you need to know about

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2. Daily Trend Barometer and Market Score

One of the things I’m really proud of, is the fact that I have managed to published the Trend Barometer and Market Score each day for more than a decade...as these tools are really good at describing the environment for trend following managers as well as giving insights into the general positioning of a trend following strategy! Click Here

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Disclaimer

Welcome to Top Traders Unplugged, where my goal is to give you the clarity, confidence and courage you need to invest with, or invest like one of the top traders in the world. It is the stories you never get to hear, set out as the most honest and transparent account that I can make of what goes on inside the minds of some of the best investors in the world delivered to you via a one-on-one conversation. Today you're listening to episode 51. If this is the first episode you've heard, you might want to go back and listen to all of the earlier conversations. Before we go any further let's find out who is on today's show.

Rob

Hi, my name is Rob Hartman. I'm President of Pacific Capital Advisors, and you are listening to Top Traders Unplugged.

Niels

Thanks for doing that, Rob, and by the way, if you want to read the full transcript of today's episode, just visit the TOPTRADERSUNPLUGGED.COM website where you'll find lots of details about today's guest. Now let's get started with part 1 of my conversation. I hope you will enjoy it.

Rob, thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate your time.

Rob

Thanks for having me.

Niels

Rob, I think it's fair to say that you form part of a unique group of so-called emerging managers. What I mean by unique is the fact that although you, measure by AUM, is perhaps emerging, your firm has in fact been around for more than ten years which most people wouldn't consider emerging at all. I guess that you probably started your trading journey even prior to forming Pacific Capital Advisors, so I look forward to hearing your story to date and to dig into the trading strategies you run. Before we do that, I have a simple question that I try to ask all of my guests in order to appreciate the many different answers you get to this question. It goes something like this: if you meet people for the first time, say in a social function, who don't really know you and don't really know our industry, if they were to ask you what you do, how do you respond? How do you explain what you do?

Rob

Well the cocktail conversation is, I build trading products that can help people reduce risk and add diversification to what they already have in their portfolios. Then I pause, and then they ask more questions, and we take it from there. Very simple.

Niels

Right, absolutely.

Rob

Then there's plenty of questions.

Niels

Of course. Now let's stay with you for awhile longer, tell me your story: how you got into this business in the first place and maybe in order to put some color on it, tell me what you were like as a kid or a young man growing up?

Rob

In school, I was an OK student. The things that I was really interested in I was fanatical about. For some reason, I thought I wanted to be a weatherman. You know, who reads ahead in their textbook? Well, I read my Earth Science book, and I just loved it. Meanwhile, my English grades were maybe not so good. So if I could really get into something I dig in and really enjoy it and pursue it to the Nth degree. Then, as I went through high school music was certainly a love of mine, and I tried to get involved with some bands and "rock and roll" as they say. It was a lot of fun and at one point I though, you know I can do this for a living, I can do this. It's the classic stars-in-the-eyes, and how exciting is that as a kid.

The reality of it was that I concluded just shortly after high school, when I was taking some community college classes and playing in a couple of bands is that I really didn't like starving. I just wasn't really making any money doing it and so you sort of have to cut to the chase and say, am I going to pack my bags and move to New York City, or wherever? At this point I was living in a place called Easton, Pennsylvania (Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton). It's kind of a rustbelt town. It's a college town, but primarily just old industry and so forth. So it didn't appear that... lacking virtuosity in my instrument and not liking being poor, I figured I better figure another way.

It was just incredible. The pitch was so simple. They said your attendance counts, you have to have high attendance, you have to get these kinds of grades, but if you hop these hurdles, we have a lot of people in the industry: IBM and other big names, come in and recruit from us. I though, WOW! That's just the ticket. So I proceeded to take music and move it into the background, which turned out to be wonderful fun because relegating it to be a hobbyist. So I actually got in a relatively successful band with a bunch of older fellas that were... (laugh) older fellas, these guys were like 26... these old guys. I was impressed because one guy was working for GE Finance. Another guy was a VP at a bank. Isn't everybody a VP at a bank? Another guy was a school teacher. So it was a beautiful thing.

Another thing you really don't hear about very much anymore is, one of the reasons that I went with IBM and not a couple of the other offers that I had is because IBM had a reputation of doing a lot of training and that's really what I wanted. I wanted to learn like crazy. I was the prototypical guy that, when someone said jump, I said, how high? I wanted in. At IBM, it was wonderful. I started in the hardware area and final systems test and essentially from tech school going from monkeying around with early microprocessors and... I got my FCC license, and I worked on transmitters and all this other stuff and they sit you down at IBM and it was like boot camp. They said, look your Moms aren't here to help you anymore, and everything that you learned that you think you know, forget it. We're retraining you. I remember us all looking at each other like, what? But they did. The most significant bits on the registers and the processors were reversed, so you spend a few days with your mind being blown and then you just sort of step into it and get trained up in the "IBM" way.

So off we go to work on these gigantic machines. We were working on the mainframes in Kingston, New York and the physical size and the amount of power that they took could power a town these days. They were just fascinating. They were giant. They were complicated. Just to find your way around them, there were these racks of technical manuals that you had to maneuver through. So we'd show up onto the scene, me and these other guys, as young pups and proceeded to learn from some really seasoned very bright guys that had been there for years.

So again, it was a wonderful experience and then the next opportunity crops up, and that was to go to the education department at IBM. When my friend... I specifically remember getting a cup of coffee in the breakroom and saying, "Hey Roger, what are you up to?" And he said, "Hey, there's these openings over in Education, why don't we... let's go over and check it out. That would be great." And I thought wow; those are the guys that taught us. Immediately I kind of got this nervousness in my stomach. Really, stand in front of all these engineers and techs and stuff, they're just going to rip us apart? And I realized, when I get that signal that means I gotta do it. So we went off and went to the Education Department, and I taught the internals of some these big machines. I did that for about a year. Then, again, another opportunity came up to get into software development, and they recruited from within. They took pretty much anybody who was interested and gave them aptitude tests. So I went and did that, passed the test, did some interviews and got invited to essentially go through a whole new series of boot camps in two phases to become a developer in the software factory as it was at the time at IBM. So that was a lot of fun. I learned how to program in the IBM way, which was the only way of designing you know... ask me if I can flowchart, and do pseudo code, and work as a team, and yes I can.

So I then proceeded to be deployed in their operating system development. Maybe some of your listeners that are old enough might know what MVS is. It's their mainframe OS. I worked in that area for one release as it was, plus did some other interesting side projects, and again, just a wonderful experience. I show up as a pup, right? I'm a hardware guy who's been working in education, and I've just been boot camped into software engineering and I show up saying, "What do I do? Where do I go? How high do you need me to jump?"

Again, there was just some brilliant guys. I guess they call them "IBM Fellows." These guys are really old now; they're in their 40s, right (laugh). They're just wonderful teachers. I remember running into any number of problems and I actually looked forward to getting stumped because I would sort of roll into one of their offices and describe the problem and these guys would just light up, and then proceed to go all over the whiteboard and tell me four or five different ways to attack the problem and it was drinking from a firehose from these really brilliant guys.

So I proceeded to look at opportunities out here. I got a job with a company that's now gone: it's Amdahl Corporation, or I think they were absorbed by Mitsubishi... I don't know... too old, don't remember. Then I wound up being at Sun Microsystems, which has now been bought by Oracle. I put in five years there. So the transition was, I think the key transition here is that I went from doing either hardware or presentations in education, or programming, and I found a place where I could kind of do all of it, and I wound up working in data centers where you had to have a mind for the big complex systems. You needed to be willing to see how complicated things interacted, and I just loved it because I felt like there wasn't anything I couldn't figure out and fix if I just had enough time, and I could dig into my background and breakout maybe some dusty tools and get to work. So that really started at Sun Microsystems. I put in a bunch of years there - five years there.

Then I guess the other important point is IT... you're on the expense side of the ledger. You're not... there's certainly companies that generate revenue with this sort of stuff, but generally, back in the old days, IT was an expense and with the business roller coaster, when things went into a trough and they looked at places to cut or outsource or what have you, IT usually came up on the block to some degree. So in the Valley things continued to evolve and go up and down, and I found that I got outsourced. Much of what was happening was not necessarily of my choosing. I was either part of a company that got bought by another company, and you know what happens then, then they figure out how to merge departments and so on and so forth. So there was just sort of... it became sort of chaotic, and I realized that really I needed to get a grip on basically setting my own direction.

So after having worked with some really wonderful people - very good managers and executives in the IT industry I found that I had a wonderful network here in the Valley, so I proceeded to decide and go ahead and consult because I was getting calls from them, and rather than becoming a full-time regular employee and letting the chips fall where they may and then getting either laid off or outsourced and what have you, why don't I just go ahead and be a consultant, leverage my network, and then have these guys invite me in to work on a variety of projects and various messy problems which are a lot of fun.

Niels

At what stage did your curiosity for trading come in, in this part of your career?

Rob

Niels

Sure. Was there any one particular person that you kind of discovered and thought, I want to find out what he is doing, what's making him successful, or how did you get the first source of information that related to trading?

Rob

Well back then all you had to do is look at your inbox and if you ever sent an email to somebody about trading, you immediately started getting emailed by everybody that had a great idea on how you ought to put your money at risk (laugh). So I think there was a friend of mine that was working for another guy that was doing a trading newsletter. You sort of had one guy with a fundanmentals methodology and another guy with a technical methodology, and they all chatted it up in this emailed newsletter. Being curious I said, well, this seminar that one of the guys was putting on looked a little expensive, but as usual there were the testimonials of how it worked and what you would learn and so forth, so I said, "I'll give it a try."

In attending that seminar, the first one, obediently, you'll laugh at this, I learned how to do swing charts with pencil and graph paper and the idea was that it was this gan-based swing chart trading. Theoretically there was a reasonable stable set of rules that would allow you to go through the trading process systematically. The reality is, I found out was that it was mostly that way except for when I wasn't making money and then he'd tell me that I forgot about something. So that's kind of how I got started with... go off to a seminar, kind of check it out, and then I started asking questions and that's when things... the wheels really came off from listening to other people. The guy would say something like, "well if this happens and that happens, then you do this, and that's a 60% change you're going to have a winning trade," and I raised my hand, "how do you get 60%?" Then they got this funny look in their eye and they're hoping I'd leave the room and I just kept asking questions like that and I realized, oh my gosh, these guys, they're winging it. In the process the real pivotal bit was I said, "why can't you just test this stuff?" And that's when I found out about trade station. Then I just completely abandoned really listening to any of these other guys and said, well, I can do some programming. I just need some data and this platform and like many of the other campaigns I've done in sports and otherwise, it's just a matter of time and effort and I should be able to figure this out, and that's how it started.

Niels

How long did you keep working both sort of testing and your systems or ideas and consulting to the big IT companies in the Valley? Or in another way, when did you decide to go full in?

Rob

So we had the heart-to-heart talk of how do we manage all of this? Something's gotta give. So I wanted to have my own business. Consulting was one thing, but I really wanted to have my own business. I also had this belief that I didn't want to be tethered to just the Bay area here, because I was consulting in high tech. So when you took the parameters and you lined things up you said well, if the future is that I can generate some income with our existing assets trading, and that can give us location independence, financial independence and so forth, that goes into the potentially good for the future column. Then I looked at my consulting at Apple and so forth and said well, I can go back and get another one of those jobs I suppose anytime. I need to just take a break so that I can just really sort of run to ground what can be done with this trading stuff. So as my wife will say now, "you know you took that break from consulting, and I thought it was just going to be a break." As it turns out, it turned out to be a career move.

So that was when I stopped trying to do everything all at once. I did continue to competitively windsurf race, but I really filled all of my other time, obviously other than family and obligations like that, with my brain and my hands and my eyes sort of buried into trying to understand what strategies work and didn't work and how to move the whole thing forward.

Niels

On that note, when did you sort of finalize the first version of your trading strategy enough to kind of say, right, this is it, and I'm going to now follow whatever output I get from these strategies?

Rob

Niels

Rob

Yeah, that's correct.

Niels

Before we get into the actual trading strategies, because I think that probably... my next question probably more is about the business and the business goals that you have, as I understand them, and also the fact that you don't really see yourself competing with the big CTAs, at least not on their terms. So tell me about when you started the business. Were these goals things that you knew from the beginning or is that something that has evolved, and what do you mean by the goals that you've set for yourself?

Rob

So as I proceeded through my early trend following days I made some money when other people didn't. I attracted... well obviously I had friends and family money initially, then introducing brokers began to introduce more money, and within a fairly short period of time, I guess I would say, let's just say I got lucky and I had about eight million dollars under management, which was wonderful. I felt wonderful about that, and I was making... you know this is the classic, I had made plenty of money from my early investors, and then for the folks that got on the program a little bit later on, you know, cue the drawdown music - the trend following drawdown ensued... so this is a key bit, then I realized if I'm going to go into a 15% or 20% drawdown and I only have about an eighteen month track record at this point, I've essentially established that I have the same vulnerabilities in my style of trading that the big guys do. So why would you invest with Hartman, as a one man shop, when you can put your money somewhere else with significantly less business risk. So I sort of mapped that out, and I thought, wow, the forecast, now that I'm in this drawdown might not be so good... were you going to ask something?

Niels

I was just curious, what kind of trend following did you start out with, because trend following is different things to different people? Since you have sort of gone away from that pure style at least now-a-days, maybe you can share what you were doing initially without giving too much of the secret sauce away?

Rob

I will tell you there's nothing... there's only so many ways you can make money in the markets right. It's not too tough. I had a couple of different breakout lookback periods. I don't remember specifically what they were, but it wound up that the average holding was only about 30 days, and I guess what was one of the tricks... I had this belief, and I still believe it, if you get a position on, you stuck your neck out, give it some time to work. So I really had some interesting ways I thought, that I invoked my trailing stops to exit. So it was a long short and flat. There wasn't a reversal. I was trying to mitigate exposure and balance that with the rest of the P&L. So I can't say that it was particularly magical. I certainly learned that you can probably make money in the long run with trend following with a variety of settings. The question is can you manage your client base and stay in business as you work through the drawdowns.

Niels

Rob

You're constantly hammering away, and I think of mechanical trading and systematic trading as just a wonderful way to do as much worrying as you can as soon as possible. I had been switching... as I went into the drawdown I'm rolling parameters around, trying different things, filtering things, and changing the sort of hypothetically with plenty of hindsight, changing my portfolio and I sort of came up with this conclusion that there's really no way... the only way that I would have really escaped something like this was to just have been lucky: to have had a different market, to have had a slightly bigger position in one place and to me, that was another major conclusion. I thought wow, I just feel like I'm... I've got to get more skill involved with this and maybe take out... if I would have survived through that drawdown, the fact remained in my mind; I was just lucky. So everything we've talked about plus that really made me, I guess we're segueing into the next phase, which is, I said, "wow, what is it that I know how to do? What is it that's truly unique? What is it that has some marquee value that would get me back on the ground, investors in the door and sort of mush this whole business down the way? So while I was still trading the trend following stuff I went back into my bag of tricks- back into the tool bag, and began to work on the intra-day program... the techniques that then became the Vanguard program which still trades now.

Niels

Rob

That's correct. I guess...

Niels

Perhaps share what people liked about the changes that you did.

Rob

Well, there's a certain amount of heartbreak associated with ending a program. So my Diverse One and Diverse Two programs, you know, telling the brokers and people that were still involved with it, it's like I need to make a major change and here's what I've got going. Here's the way I'm trading it with my money, and this is the way forward. So we make that... leap that chasm from one program to the other and obviously not everybody comes along, but I had my core group of folks that, bless their hearts, they say look whatever it is that you're going to do we want to be involved.

So that's how I shifted in those days, from being incredibly dogmatic about taking every possible signal and adhering to it 100%. The bottom line is, there're simple techniques, and it's just the market, and my job is to unite capital through my techniques with these markets. Hopefully, we have positive P&L, and these are my calls. So that sort of awakened me to some things. Those were sort of the major shifts into I think the timeframe wanted me to pause at.

Niels

Rob

Niels

Rob

Wow, first while you're quoting that I could feel my adrenaline go up with the moon mission. That's incredible. As far as MF Global goes how do you survive that? First, your heart has to go out to all the people that lost their jobs because of that. It's heartbreaking. I know people who aren't in the business now. It's true trauma, real trauma. Talk about adrenaline and fear and terror. That Monday was truly awful. Let me back up. You brought up a really important point. My belief is, I say this to people and I mumble it to myself, it's going to be a lot harder than... whatever it is your doing it's probably going to be a lot hard than you thought and take longer. It's wonderful to be optimistic, but be ready for it to just be a lot tougher and by the way that, hopefully, will make it fun.

I've really worked hard to make sure that whatever business I built I kept the being an IT guy I'm really into outsourcing things and having agreements with trusted partners and so forth. It gives you the ability to scale up. I've scaled up radically. When I had the 45 million under management I had leveraged technology and good people, and for not too much money really rapidly scaled my business up and of course my experience says you may be passing people on the way back down if things don't go right, so the beauty of the setup is that I can scale things down very quickly too.

So the challenge is I really kind of had flat returns going into the MF Global D-day. Unfortunately, I had 95% of my clients cleared at MF Global, and of course this isn't where I directed them. This is where my clients were; a lot of the IBs were affiliated with it, so it's this giant source of, through a variety of people it was the primary clearing firm. So that Monday, when everything went to zero as it were. There were whispers; there was talk of what was about to happen. Certainly I was set up for trades that Monday. I've had this happen before where I go into a weekend, and I go: things just aren't right, and I think I'm going to hold off on my trades. This is one of the beauties in being intra-day is we had no positions going into Monday. So essentially I just kind of had one eye on the TV, and I saw some strange messages and I said, wow, something's gone wrong and sure enough there goes... essentially there goes the business. So MF Global happens and essentially overnight I'm out of business because I was actually doing execution through them as well. So that was very traumatic, and I had all of my clearing done over there, so what's the lesson with that? A couple of lessons: the cheapest isn't always the best, and no matter how easy it is for you to do it, divide up your assets across multiple clearing firms. How's that for wonderful hindsight bit?

So the rest of this plays out. We go into December, and there's... it's horrible for so many people. We start to hear that maybe we're going to get 25%, 30%, of our money back into another brokerage through a bulk transfer. So there's these sort of incremental bits of hope that appear and sure enough, we begin to start getting some money back, but now the challenge for me is we need people to get their money back and I need to get back to trading for people. So even after that trauma I'm still faced with the problems I had before MF Global happened, which is I had flat returns, I was getting some redemptions.

So the way I describe it to people now is I was sort of going door-to-door with my investors, of course it's by phone call and so forth and you essentially have these people who have really been burned by MF Global, and they feel burned by the entire industry and you're essentially crouching down trying to talk them to come out from under their bed saying managed futures is wonderful, things will work out, I think we're still friends, you need diversification, so if this made sense before then we need to get going. Only a small subset of folks really kind of... well let's put it this way, if I had fabulous returns, maybe people would come out, dust themselves off and get going, but for flat returns it was very slow going. So that's the MF Global implosion part of the story.

Niels

Sure, sure. Essentially, you pick yourself up, and you over the next three, four years you launch a couple of new programs so just give me a quick overview of the programs that you run today, just a very quick one before we jump to the next topic.

Rob

Sure. Well Vanguard... what I did is I made a shift with Vanguard away from it being intra-day only and stock indices. With the flat returns being what they were, and ongoing research, basically I started looking up timeframe, and as compared to the intra-day timeframe, I saw relatively stable opportunities in multi-day holding periods. So after much hand wringing and consternation and so forth, again to reuse that analogy, I sort of gathered myself up, talked to my clients, and then made the leap across the chasm to go... That really is where the marquee value was, was the intra-day trading with Vanguard, but I went ahead and made the transition to a multi-day holding period. Then I also added some interest rates - actually a 10 year note and a long bond 30 year, so a 10 and a 30. I came up with a matter where I'm trading some S&Ps only from the indices standpoint and then the 10 and the 30, and the contribution to P&L is generally over the long term about half and half: half from the stock indices. So it's sort of turned into a multi-day holding period financial program - U.S. financial program if we were to really simplify it.

In keeping with what you've mentioned briefly, I guess we would say going forward is that my belief is that I need to have multiple... I never wanted to be in a situation where I just was a one horse shop. I needed to have multiple products, and they needed to be fundamentally different. So clearly, I had really drawn a nice circle around the U.S. financial markets with Vanguard in particular and then Agilis as well. So I went, for the lack of a better term, anti-financials in the most diversifying markets I could think of, which were the ag markets: ags and softs. So that's how I got into building the Terra program which is grains, meats and I trade sugar in there right now which grows out of the ground, but it's a soft. So diversification - people can build portfolios with the products I've got, or they can go ahead and add it to an existing portfolio where they feel like they need a little more exposure in the return stream that I offer with my products.

Niels

Sure, great, now let's jump to sort of the nitty gritty of things. The next topic I normally talk about is a little bit about the organization. I know you already alluded to and that is still the case that you run your firm on your own, but being from the IT sector and so on and so forth, I have a feeling that you might still rely on not just systems, but also outsourcing, where these things make sense. My question is actually a slightly different one, that is, even though you and I and many people do know that in a systematic world you can do a lot without having a big team, how do you try and bridge the gap of what many investors requirements are in terms of organizational infrastructure and the way you've organized yourself? What does that conversation sound like when you are having that?

Rob

Well, in the current environment I start by expressing the simplicity in my operation as it is. I'm not actually placing orders from my laptop from here in the office or something. Intra-day, when I was doing that, you really had to have eyes on and all the networks just point to point you had to have everything operating 100% all the time, with my attendance or back in the day let's say I had a group of trusted folks at a desk that really understood everything that I was doing. They had my code at their shop. They had eyes on if anything went sideways I'd get a call, and I could intervene. So, anyway in the current environment I basically just submit orders once per day.

What's the single point of failure? Clearly it's me. I have to be around currently to put those orders together. It would be a simple matter, I suppose at this point to get the team that I use over at R.J. O'Brien to run my processes and grab those orders and put them in place all in one stop, but I'm not ready to do that at this point. So how do I get people to move forward? Well, there are certainly a large number of people who just say look, it's a no go. You're a one man shop. But for those people who understand what it is I'm doing, to rationalize the risk that if I just went off the radar for a day or two, I have rules in place where my wife, or the guys at the desk, they know where all my clients accounts are and they can flatten all the positions until I show up in wherever... Saskatchewan. So here's the thing, this needs to be organic. I remember back in the early days going to an MFA conference and again, I'm sort of like a puppy dog, "alright, who do I talk to, how do I raise money, and I'm just go, go, go, go and let's just figure this whole thing out."

These guys just said you know; you've got to have an office. They sort of described, and you have to have somebody answering the phones, and this and that, and boy I looked at the expense of that, and I looked at what needed to be done, and I thought, why would someone want me, as a beginning manager without a lot of assets to be increasing the burn rate for my business by doing something like that. I was indignant. So, as we said, I tried to make the adjustments to outsource, like I said. I've got a wonderful desk with these guys who do operations for me, and they ask to be treated like they're my employees, I love that, oh really?

Niels

When you say operations are you talking about client accounting, clearings, making sure everything reconciles, settles?

Rob

Niels

Yeah, absolutely. But it's certainly an issue that I would say probably 90% of the thousands of CTAs we see registered, they will be struggling as well to keep up the institutional infrastructure that some investors clearly require. But now-a-days I certainly think that there is a case for working smart, and, as you've done, align yourself with good people and good outsourced solutions. I think that makes sense, and it seems to me that if I read you correctly, it seems to me that you want to put the numbers out, keep plugging away, and have a very organic growth from here, if I'm reading you correctly.

Rob

You're right on the money. If we're delivering a message to people, again, this is a campaign and if you want to be in this business for a long time, take that long view. First the guys that need to have all the boxes checked, the institutional guys, I hate to break it to you, they're not going to be able to check all those boxes. But there is a huge number of people out there who still appreciate what it is we do and they understand the risks associated with it, and they won't bet huge with you but they'll get involved and so through that partnership of them being good clients and you really being focused every day to make money for them and do all the right stuff, you're going to generate revenue and then you can begin to incrementally and as you say organically grow your business and then the remainder of those boxes that need to be checked, you will be able to get them checked in due course if you take care.

Niels

This is sort of a spur of the moment. Let me try if I can formulate this correctly, so it makes sense. So I have two young kids. I guess in particular my daughter Amalie she had a phase a few years ago where she loved Hannah Montana. So we often had to sit down and watch her movie in which there's a song called "The Climb", and what this song is all about is really that we all strive to get to the top of something or the end of a quest, but that the real joy and satisfaction that we get should not come from reaching that top but it should come from the climb to...

Ending

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