Dave Collum, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell University, joins Tony Greer of the Morning Navigator to explain how he became so interested in financial markets. Collum talks about his perspective as an academic, and touches on the success that’s he’s had investing as an outsider. Filmed on July 25, 2019 in New York.

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A Chemistry Professor's Financial Awakening (w/Dave Collum)
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Transcript:
For the full transcript visit: https://rvtv.io/2J3Jz24
DREW BESSETTE: Welcome to Real Vision's How I Got My Start in Finance. This week, Dave Collum, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University talks with Tony Greer about his unusual entrance into the world of finance.
DAVE COLLUM: Well, I started as a kid. I was thinking to go into Wall Street and then I got diverted. I was a science guy and I went to the ag school, was going to go into med school and then med school and then ended up going to grad school in Chemistry. But my dad taught me a lot. We had some amazing conversations about stock and I think it was around 1993, all of a sudden, it just kind of clicked that I should pay more attention. I was one of the boomers who started to just realize that I had a decent amount of accumulated wealth and I started getting interested. And we're in the middle of a mania. And so, it looked like that money was just growing on trees. And so, it got interesting. And there was this one guy who started fostered it because he was a traveling salesman for Merck. And he would take all the CEOs of every company visited our tech stocks, and by the time he was done with the cycle, he could tell you stuff about stocks that you really almost shouldn't be knowing about. So, he had some great early tips, made a fortune off them and then started paying attention.
TONY GREER: Wow, that's really, really cool. And then we walked right into the dot-com bubble at the beginning of it so you had a chance to invest and right, potentially make some money there. Although I don't know if that would be your cup of tea.
DAVE COLLUM: Well, it was actually. I was a raging bull. I talked to my dad and said it's transformational. And then somewhere in the ballpark, mid-98 I started to get really creeped out. I had conversations with my father and I said, damn, I'm nervous about these markets and he was noncommittal and then at one point, I said to him, I said, I also fear of missing out. The famous FOMO line. And he stopped me and he goes, that's greedy. And I thought about it and not long after that, I actually liquidated half of my mutual funds and that was in July of '98. And then the market tanked almost to the day, that was just luck. And I said if it comes back, I'm going to get rid of the rest because this is not- so it came back and by mid-99, I was selling everything. And so, I owned Dell, I owned WorldCom, I made seven fold off WorldCom and got out. That was a good one. Pure luck. Dell, MiniMed, Warner-Lambert, there was just some great companies. And one year, I had a 90% year. How do you not get addicted to those kind of returns? But I sold and then all of a sudden, I was the only guy- a few people who was picking up information from the very beginnings of the internet chatting world like I think probably some like Fleckenstein. And so, by mid-99, I'd exited the market 100%. I didn't own a share of anything and I actually bought gold. I bought it through Central Fund of Canada and I do a two years for at the bottom and I kept buying it and buying it and the NASDAQ was going up and the gold was going down and I was white knuckling it pretty good. And then it turned. I also shorted the market at that point and I've only done that twice. I will never do it again probably because I now know how stupid I was. But I made about a 30% on that short to just a dumb beginner's luck.