Why I Walked Away From Wall Street After 20 Years

Editor's note: The Wall Street life can be thrilling and highly lucrative... But after 20 years, our colleague Gabe Marshank walked away from it all. In this piece – originally published in the October 26 edition of the Stansberry Digest Masters Series – Gabe explains the ups and downs of his life managing millions on Wall Street... and why he ultimately gave it up.

I spent two decades managing money at some of the biggest hedge funds in the world.

Omega Advisors... Pequot Capital... SAC Capital... Greenlight Capital.

I lived the highs and lows of hedge-fund life. One night, I was watching Rihanna at the famous Robin Hood Foundation gala in New York. The next, I was flying over the oilfields of North Dakota in a rickety, single-engine plane.

I helped generate nine-figure returns on trades – but I had to wake up at 2 a.m. to monitor the markets. I visited factories in Iowa and nightclubs in northeast China. SAC Capital founder Steve Cohen flew me to Las Vegas on his private jet.

But in 2017, I walked away. Not because I had to... but because I wanted to.

Building a Wall Street Career

My Wall Street story started in 1997, when I joined Omega Advisors. I had never taken a finance class before. I had just graduated from Yale University as a political science major.

Lee Cooperman hired me after one of his analysts – my first boss – told him I had potential. (In Lee's words: "See how cheap we can get him.")

For the first 10 years of my Wall Street career, I was learning, building, and scraping. I wore every hat, sat on every call, built every model, and drank from the proverbial fire hose. I directly worked for some of the best investors of all time, and each one taught me something different.

Eventually, I earned my seat at the table. I managed hundreds of millions of dollars in risk, led teams of analysts, and generated serious market-beating returns.

At SAC, I helped deliver the firm's biggest profit in its history at the time on a Texas utility named TXU. We bought it at $25 and rode it into the $70s for a nine-figure profit. Steve used the proceeds to buy the New York Mets.

Later, at Greenlight, I focused on global cyclicals and built contrarian theses with deep research. It meant taking 15 trips to China, flying over the oilfields in North Dakota, and leaving my then-girlfriend (and now wife) on Valentine's Day to attend a solar conference in Dresden, Germany.

I was fully in it. And for a while, it was thrilling. But over the years, something changed...

Every day, I went home with hundreds of millions of dollars in risk. Some weeks, I'd go five straight days without getting a chance to catch my breath.

When your profits and losses swing by millions of dollars every day, you stop thinking in dollars and start thinking in cortisol.

Add in kids, life, and the gnawing realization that my work mostly helped billionaires make more billions, and I'd had enough.

I was winning. But it didn't feel like winning.

I started thinking about life in terms of three words: learn, earn, and return. I had already learned, and I had certainly earned. But what was I returning?

Helping a billionaire buy a baseball team is fun. But it doesn't make the world a better place.

What if I could help 10,000 people make $10,000 instead of helping one billionaire make another $100 million?

That would feel like winning.

So in 2017, I left Wall Street and moved back to Berkeley, California, where the air is clearer and the pace is slower. I wanted space to think. I wanted to be a dad. And I wanted to invest without the noise.

No more 2:30 a.m. alarms to catch European markets. No more earnings calls with the same scripts. And no more trading stress measured in blood pressure spikes.

I still invest. But now, I do it on my terms.

I spend more time reading than reacting... more time teaching than trading... and more time with my kids than with a Bloomberg terminal.

Eventually, I joined Stansberry Research. Not because I missed the action, but because I wanted to share what I learned with individual investors.

Wall Street taught me a lot, but it also hides a lot. Most retail investors don't get access to the tools, the thinking, or the nuance that drives institutional returns.

They're told to invest in index funds, sit still, and accept average results.

But I've seen what's possible when you do the work, look deeper, and tune out the noise. And I want to share that with real people.

Not with fund managers... with people saving for retirement, paying off student loans, or hoping to buy a house – people like my parents.

So that's what I'm doing today: writing, teaching, and researching. I'm trying to help people think like investors, not gamblers.

I still do deep dives, follow contrarian threads, and build models. But these days, I do it with a different goal: not to out-trade Wall Street... but to out-think it.

That's my mission. And if I can help you get closer to financial independence – without the stress – it's all worth it. Alpha is great... but impact is better.

Regards,

Gabe Marshank

Editor's note: During his first five years at our firm, Gabe quietly produced some of our biggest winners with little fanfare or credit. But now, he's stepping out of the shadows for the first time ever... and taking the helm of a new project. Today, he'll reveal the blueprint for finding opportunities that could make you 5, 10, or 25 times your money – plus one idea from his brand-new portfolio that could turn every $10,000 into more than $250,000. But don't delay... This presentation goes offline tomorrow.