About Me

 

 

Hello everyone! I want to welcome you all to my blog and to my about me section. I plan on making this blog one of the best resources out there on the Internet for investors of ALL skill levels. Although, I really want to take extra time with the newbies and beginners since only 2 yrs or so ago I was a newbie myself. 

I believe it is important one learns how to do things the right way from the very beginning. Fundamentals DO matter contrary to what you will hear from a lot of traders these days! I wish there were more beginner’s resources out there like this blog will hopefully be, when I started learning how to invest about 2 years ago, but that’s life and the only thing I can do now is try to change the future and make things better and easier for all of you who visit this website so there are better resources available for you to begin your long journey learning how to invest in stocks and trade stocks (there’s a difference between the 2 despite what CNBC and others tell you). 

Hopefully, I can open up your eyes a little bit, enlighten you about the truth about what goes on over on Wall St and behind closed doors in the employees only area of most financial services and brokerage houses and how to protect yourself from the wolves, vultures and parasites out there that occupy a lot of jobs in that sector. The best thing you can do to protect yourself, is to educate yourself! And that means increasing your financial IQ or financial education. Now, let’s meet Jason Burack, so you know you’re not talking to an automated robot if you ever happen to personally speak to him.

I was born in New York in 1982. I’m currently a young looking 27. My family is all from the New York area and I lived there for 2 years after I was born. I am a 3rd generation Russian/Ukranian/German/French mix. The Burack family came over to the US, Ellis Island style, in the late 1800-early 1900s. After living in NY, my dad moved the family for a job opportunity out to Southern California and I grewup in Anaheim Hills for the next 15 yrs.

I played baseball and soccer growing up. I wanted to play football also, but my dad was an orthopaedist and he had played football in hs and he never let me. I did not like soccer that much because it involved too much running. I developed asthma living in California because of the poor air quality. There is lots of smog there and no rain.

I was very good at baseball and had a good shot of becoming a professional baseball player before I blewout my shoulder in high school. My career was a “never was” after that day. I had multiple shoulder surgeries over the next few yrs on my throwing shoulder, but the surgeries never worked completely and I still cannot throw very well.

There will always be a “what if” scenario concerning my baseball career and if I would have been good enough to play 2nd Base for my beloved LA Dodgers. But that is a burden I have to bear for the rest of my life, like the giant surgical scar I have on my right shoulder. 

After I knew my baseball career was over around age 20 or so, due to bad luck (I injured the shoulder severely in a freak collission during a baseball game where I also broke my kneecap and I broke the other kid’s leg) and bad surgeries, I knew I would have to make a life and a career for myself with my brains. My family also decided to move back across the country to the Washington, D.C. area very shortly after my injury for reasons I will not go into. 

While I was a jock up until the injury, I was still also a good student. I made honor roll at all levels of school and throughout my time in high school in California. I even participated in an Academic Pentathalon in junior high school and I medaled in history. That was the only subject I won a medal in (play to your strengths, right? hehehe). I also won an award in 6th grade for my entire elementary school graduation class for most outstanding student (Yes, I still have the award on my wall)! 

I have been blessed with having a very good memory and when I am relaxed, focused and not under too much stress or overhwelmed with information, my memory is very close to photographic. Trust me, it’s definitely an asset when it is harnessed properly and it took me many years to learn how to use it correctly. My friend Christina says I have amazing “cerebral capacity!” 

My favorite subjects growing up in school were history, english (writing papers) and chemistry. I did not like math and some of the sciences a whole lot even though I used to be pretty good at them. Part of the reason I did not like those subjects as much, besides the ridiculous amount of repetition and homework problems, is I believed that the world was not black and white like how a lot of math and science seem to think it is.

I believe the world is mostly grey areas and often times, there is more than one right answer to any given problem. I loved history the most because it came the easiest for me because of my memory and my beliefs about studying the past to learn the mistakes or good things people or governments did and why they did them. I find the ‘why’ part is always a good debate.

I believe wholeheartedly in the famous George Santayana quote historians often refer to that “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I try and live my life by that quote. I am not afraid of making mistakes as long as they are brand new mistakes and I learn from them. When I become afraid of making mistakes, that is not living life to me. I also liked using the information I got from going back through history to extrapolate on it and to try and predict what happens in the future. That is what a lot of good investors do, but I did not know at that time I was going to be an investor nor did I study any business even in college. More on that later. After learning what I’ve learned now about how academia teaches economics and investing incorrectly, that was probably a good thing that my mind and beliefs were not jaded by a professor in college.

Instead, after I graduated from college with a double major in history and political science from Virginia Tech, I was not entirely sure what I wanted to do with my life career wise. I liked the idea, in theory, of becoming a sports agent since I loved sports but could no longer become a professional athlete. Many other boys and men also share this same dream. We want to be around the professionals in some capacity. So, I headed off to law school. It was a bad idea, but I learned some very valuable lessons about life from my time there. 

Now that I look back on my one semester in law school, I realize I went to law school for all of the wrong reasons. I was passionate about sports, not about the law. I was studying subjects and learning skills I did not like, did not care about and found useless and boring. I still did pretty well though grades wise in my one semester of law school despite all of this stress and negativity, but it was just not for me.

There was too much stress, tuition was too high considering I was teaching myself all of the material reading at home outside of class and I was not passionate about anything I was learning.  Looking back, I am very fortunate I got out when I did. Had I stayed in law school, I would have graduated with almost $200k in debt and limited job opportunities like what a lot of my law school classmates are going to have to face the reality of now that the US economy is a total disaster.

There are lots of lawyers here in the US. Probably too many if you ask me. It would have been very difficult for me to differentiate myself from them because people would have been able to detect that I was not passionate about what I was doing. I remember reading that the US has the most lawyers per capita compared to anywhere else in the world by a very wide margin!

The world does not have nearly as many great investors and I can contribute more to a better world by investing and by teaching people how to invest using stuff they will probably never learn, hear or see in a classroom.

But, I am getting a little ahead of myself in my own story, so I’ll back up and tell you that I was very depressed and my parents and other relatives were very disappointed in me when I came back home after dropping out of law school.

In fact, I think my mother and maybe my father are still disappointed in me and it’s been about 3 yrs now since this happened. I had no idea what I was going to do with myself, I had some bad friends and influences in my life I needed to separate myself from and I needed some time to find myself and find something I was actually passionate about. 

To help expedite this process, I tried exposing myself to a lot of different ideas and parts of America and the world’s cultures I had never seen before. I watched a lot of different movies including some foreign films with subtitles that I never would have watched before this experiment to find myself in an attempt to find something that I was passionate about. I also began reading some books. I thought I could perhaps find the answer/s in one of the books I read.

Little did I know, that the answer to my question about my future and my career path was in this tiny little blue book with a funny cover I saw called The Little Book That Beats The Market by Joel Greenblatt. That’s the first book (I believe) in the Little Book Big Profits Series by Wiley Finance and that’s basically where it all began for me. One tiny, little 100 someting page book I read cover to cover in maybe one night. I was pretty much hooked on investing after that. 

I thought, “This (investing) was something important I needed to learn. Something everyone needed to learn how to do!”

I also had another advantage. I had a friend who was a young and very successful trader who was willing to take some time to help mentor me. He had also just moved back into the area. Let’s call my friend DM.

DM spent quite a bit of time teaching me some things about investing and trading and business. He suggested some additional books for me to read, don’t listen to or watch Jim Cramer, etc.

He was actually my best friend for awhile and we used to hangout almost everyday, go workout at the gym together, etc. al, when I first moved back up here from law school. 

I was going around the job interview circuit interviewing for sales jobs I didn’t like or want. It was no fun. I felt like a round peg being forced into a square hole.

What’s worse is no one cared about my degrees (especially since one of them was history) and I was harassed by interviewers constantly about why I would want to drop out of law school and work a sales job? To be honest, I didn’t really have any good answers for their questions anyways and this was after thinking about things for awhile before and after each interview (I failed on a lot of interviews).

After that, I knew a bachelors degree is fairly irrelevant now since everyone has one. It does not differentiate you at all from any other applicants. 

Then one day after a few months, I got lucky! Well, I thought I did! I was interviewing with a financial services broker/deal for a financial advisor position. I will not name the company, because through my reading and research, I have found out that pretty much every company in the industry selling mutual funds and other financial services products is exactly like this company so no hard feelings directed directly at them.

But, I do have a problem with the industry and Wall St as a whole and how they treat their customers! Anyways, I nailed the interviews and they sponsored me to get all of my licenses. Series 7, Series 66, and Insurance. While I was studying to pass those, they also had mandatory sales meetings for us to attend once a week. 

Let me tell you, those were not fun and the truth I heard in those meetings would later lead me down a path toward taking back my own financial future, liquidating all of my mutual funds and picking out my own investments!

After going “behind the curtain” and seeing the secrets of the industry, I was not happy with my job situation either. I was still going to study and pass my licenses and work for this firm at least for a little while as I figured out what else to do career wise.

Since the study materials for the Series 7 and Series 66 were inadequate for me to learn a lot of the topics covered like options, I also began reading a few other investing books and I went to an OIC course when it came into the area.

Eventually, I passed all of my licenses (it took a few extra months more than was planned since I had no business background at the time and I was learning everything from scratch; I also was reading and finishing a lot of investing books when I was not studying the study materials for my licensing exams). I guess you could say I dragged my feet, but it was for a good cause.

Finally, when I passed my last licensing exam I got the good news (sarcasm folks sarcasm)! I was told that if I didn’t give my manager a 300+ phone number list of my friends and family to call up to harass about mutual funds and get a certain number of them to ”invest” in the same mutual funds I had heard these same people say in the sales meetings that they knew were garbage, they were going to fire me in a few weeks anyways! Great company, huh?

I was not going to sell my friends and family “financial products” I knew were garbage. How much longer would those people be my friend if I did that? I’m a man of principle so as soon as I found this out, I quit!

Let’s say my parents and DM were not too thrilled. DM actually chastized me for not sucking it up, but there are more important things in life than money. Unfortunately, DM did not see things that way.

He called me some names and said some things to me that friends don’t say to other friends. I am honestly not sure I’d call him a friend anymore considering I haven’t spoken to him in many months. 

He also told me repeatedly after that that I would never be good at investing and that I should just not even bother trying. He said that I did not have what it takes to be good at it. Well, I bet some of you who already know me can guess what happened next after that and you can also guess what my reaction was to what DM said to me and what it triggered?

For those of you know don’t know the legend (you know I’m kidding right?) of what happened immediately after that, I then basically began a crusade to read, listen to or watch every book, Internet article, video and interview I could find. 

In a year and a half span, I read over 30 investing related books on many topics (they’re listed on my LinkedIn acct). I also searched all over the Internet to find websites and sources that others didn’t. At one point, I was reading 40-50 investing and economic related articles, but I can’t do that kinda pace anymore! I also have approximately 800 websites bookmarked for different types of research. 

This was a job for me to learn all of this stuff because I realized how important it was, plus it was something I was very passionate about. I was determined to prove DM wrong AND to be successful on my own merit! 

About a year later, I was introduced by a mutual friend of ours to Mo Dawoud. I learned by talking to him that he also had a passion for investing similar to mine. We began to discuss investing just about everyday and I began to mentor him on how my philosophy of investing. After a few months, he had absorbed the material very, very well and we started talking about starting our own business. 

We brainstormed over names for the business and he eventually came up with the name Wall St for Main St. The rest, as they say, is history! 

There is a lot of drama, bad stories, adversity and other not so savory things in my past I have had to overcome in my life just to get to this point. I am not proud of some of those things that I did, but I am proud of myself for realizing that my life was not what I wanted and for making drastic changes in my life to accomplish the goals I wanted for myself. This place is not the forum to discuss my past in great detail. I’ll save it for the book about my life when I become rich and famous.

Just know that you are reading the PG version of my life’s story in this article! I’m excited and happy about the progress I’ve made with my business so far, I am very happy to have met a business partner who I trust and can work with well and with my life in general.

I look forward to the future and whatever it will bring me and my business very much! Adversity builds character and triumph over tragedy are how I would describe what I have had to overcome just to get to this point in my life so I am hoping you all will watch me and even join me in taking those next, important steps!  Please respect that I have learned from my mistakes that I made in the past, and in spite of everything I have been through, I am still here and I am finally on the right track!

If you don’t know me for yrs and you would like to learn more about me, just ask! Otherwise, ask my real friends their honest opinion of me and I doubt it will be anything but superlatives! I go by the names of: Jason, J, Dodger, or J Money. Oh, and I am an American Capitalist who actually has morals, is honest and is respectful. Yes, there is such a thing. You just have to look far and wide for us because we are indeed a rare breed!

And one last thing… My goal is to one day be a better investor than Warren Buffett. I set the bar very high. I am sure some of you will laugh at me while you are reading this, but that’s fine… for now! I will spend my whole life if I have to proving you and all of my doubters/detractors wrong. I actually have a few advantages in my favor that Warren Buffett never had, the biggest advantage being the Internet (he still rarely uses it for anything at all) in which I can look up just about anything I need research wise in 5 minutes or less and the other is the fact that I can study his entire career and learn from all of his past, current and future mistakes and successes along with many other great past, present and future investors without having to make the same exact mistakes myself in order to learn from them all… 

And finally, my entrepreneur and social media mentor, Christina Haftman                                , says I am the Gary Vaynerchuk of investing! I think she’s right!