That being said, students at Cal might be a bit of an upgrade over Riverside.

Of the couple dozen people I’ve mentioned this blog to, I’ve found two who already knew of it. Both of these guys are university students and have been inspired to broaden their networks more personally, albeit online, by this. They both began with Tucker’s reading list just as I did.

Having just finished The Tipping Point (you knew my vocabulary was too familiar, didn’t you?), I can’t think of another way of utilizing the Law of the Few any better if you’re beginning with little to no bank. This is where the market will be; Rudius fans just have more foresight than the rest of the crowd.

The middleman question is interesting though. I’m not sure I’d call it that.

What kind of confuses me, Ryan, is that you talked about the ‘middleman’ becoming obsolete thanks to the internet (in an article I can’t find right now). All these careers you describe here, now seem to put you in exactly that position (excluding maybe the finance thing) of not really adding value, creating anything needed, but only manage other people’s works.

Did I get anything wrong here?

You sound really ambitious. If its that easy I mean wouldnt it make sense for everyone to just start their own hedgefund and makes millions of dollars. Unfortunately, you live in a candy coated bubble wrapped Los Angeles world. If it were that easy I’m sure you could call Goldman Sachs up and they will GIVE you a job. While it is TECHNICALLY possible to be a money manager without a college degree, to do it at a successful level, you need a college degree, years of training in the field, and an advanced degree. But if you want to skip all that, you should probably go read about 200 text books in financial accounting, futures, options, other synthetic derivatives, technical indicators, and a whole other mess of shit.

What advantage does a major brokerage have that you don’t? Are you serious. Are you serious. This completely proves you…are an idiot. I can’t even start with how dumb of a comment you have made. I think you should spend a day at an investment banking office and see if you really understand anything. Can you conceptualize an income statement and form a thesis about it? Can you formulate a theory about the economy based on weekly economic indicators and how entrenched the subprime mortgage crisis is? Not even the best people on Wall Street do all of this. The fact remains that a company’s (like google) stock price fluctuates not whether or not they launch a pretty new blog hosting site and you think lots of poeple will got to the site because its so “kewl” but rather on based on much greater forces that of a scope greater than you can image. Its not so easy as getting “personalized” tips for your blogger friends. And to say college is obsolete? Go through four years of a legitimate college and tell me if you think differently

Trust me kid, stick to your internet journal

That’s not to say that you’re not onto something. As a current law student, I could see someone using the internet to research cases that support their side and forming a winning argument. Someone with reasonable intelligence and enough determination should be able to pull it off without the benefit of classes and professors.

The thing is though, a bar license holds a lot of clout these days. Without one, you just won’t be taken as seriously. You mention finance, which I don’t know much about, but don’t brokers or other professional investors usually need to have some sort of license before the average person will trust them with their money?

I just find it hard to believe that traditional education will become obsolete any time soon. I think there will always be some fields that require it, especially the sciences, which are becoming so specialized that you almost need to go on to grad school in biology, chem etc.