Christopher Patenaude

I was hanging on every word… It was a beautiful spring day in Palo Alto in 1996. My Modern Portfolio Theory professor – Nobel laureate Bill Sharpe – was explaining the “illusion of stock picking skill” and the idea that stock pickers as a group lose big to the stock market as a whole. I remember closing my eyes and taking it all in. Was it possible that a several hundred billion dollar industry was just harming investors? That the whole thing was built on an illusion? Even a lie? I was just entranced. (It turns out I caught a brief glimpse of my true calling that day, but it would be another 17 years before I actually took concrete steps to become a financial advisor.) But then the class ended, and I went back to the business of graduating from Stanford Business School. I headed back to consulting for a couple years, and then co-founded a dot com. But in 2003, I ended up in awkward position. An awkward position that ultimately lead me to my true calling. I had accepted the position of Publisher & Chief Marketing Officer at The Motley Fool, the personal finance website. I loved the people, and rocked the job. But something was wrong. You see, one of my responsibilities was to convince millions of investors that we had superior stock picking skills. There was just one problem with this – I didn’t believe it. Beliefs are a funny thing. I came to believe back in 1996 that stock picking skills are an illusion, and that belief had just stuck. And I couldn’t unstick it. I eventually left The Fool with mixed feelings. I was proud of our commercial success, and my role in that. But I also felt like I had betrayed my beliefs. It wasn’t a good feeling. I tried jobs in other industries, but something kept pulling me back to investing and personal finance. And then it finally hit me. I knew what I was meant to do, and I set out to form my financial advisory firm, Clark Asset Management, LLC. Now I get to help people directly, and do it in a way that’s 100% consistent with my beliefs. I get to leverage a career’s worth of skills in financial planning and analysis, problem solving and client communication. And I get to do my part to help transform an often shady industry into a helping profession. It’s awesome. …if you’d like to learn more, I encourage you to download one of my complimentary guides or schedule a complimentary phone consultation.