This is the man who just bought Leopold's fund, Ken Griffin and this video captures exactly the mindset that let Citadel scoop up Situational Awareness's wrecked portfolio (Save this). Griffin keeps a $10 plaque behind his desk stating that if everyone is going to eat, someone has to sell, a blunt reminder that every part of running a firm, hiring, raising capital, winning clients, is fundamentally a sales process. He explains that you're always selling, whether to candidates, vendors, counterparties, or customers and if you're always selling, you're going to hear no constantly. He illustrates just how brutal that rejection can get with two stories from a single rough day in 1994, a year when Citadel was down about 4% and Griffin flew to Switzerland for a critical lunch meeting. His lunch date sat down, realized he had the wrong Griffin, mistook him for someone else entirely, and simply got up and left. Later that same day, a Swiss banker spent 45 minutes with him over a cigar in a beautiful office, only to end the meeting by essentially telling him he'd wasted his talent on the wrong career. Two rejections in one day for the founder of what became one of the most successful hedge funds in history and Griffin's takeaway was that you just have to tolerate it, since you have to become accustomed to constantly marketing your ideas and what you stand for. That mentality is exactly why Citadel could move so decisively to buy Situational Awareness's beaten down stock portfolio after Leopold's fund got hammered in the AI rout, since Griffin has spent three decades building a firm around absorbing rejection and market pain as just the cost of doing business, then capitalizing when others panic. Just like Griffin, Milk Road Pro went shopping during the chaos and bought a bunch of beaten down stocks, if you want to see exactly what we bought, you can join us using the link below for just $1.
