Damien Hoffman: Editor-in-Chief of Wall St. Cheat Sheet Shares His Personal Mantra

I have been following  Wall St Cheat Sheet, a rapidly growing financial media site, for quite some time.  Damien Hoffman and his brother Derek Hoffman have been providing unique and stimulating contents from investment education to exclusive interviews.  The Editor-in-Chief behind WSCS is Damien Hoffman, a full-time trader with a passion in writing.  When you see his works, it won’t take long before you start to see his passion reflected in his writing.  He knows how to write, and he knows how to keep us entertained through writing.

Today I share with you our interview.  You’ll get to read some of his future plans in the works and learn about his personal mantra.  Enjoy.

“Damien, can you tell us more on your background?  We know you have great academic credentials.  We know you have an array of good work experience.  We also know you have a degree in law.  What else can we know about you?  I’d love to know more.”

Well one of the key aspects of how this all got started is my entrepreneurial background.  When I gradated back in 1999, it was at the height of the dot-com boom.  There were many white haired and wealthy Harvard MBAs, VCs, and private equity guys scouting the Duke University campus.  At the time, if young folks knew anything about the “Internet,” they were able to raise capital.

So a couple of us got together and figured we could attack the business-to-business aspect of the jewelry market. We built a business plan and after several presentations, the VC’s signed a check to three 22-year olds who had no significant business management experience running the business.

Our initial goal was to build the business for a few years and sell it to a larger entity.  However, my other friends really enjoyed working for themselves and wanted to grow the business more organically.  Therefore, we shifted gear. I went onto different endeavors with my entrepreneurial spirit while the other two, who are still my good friends, continued running the business.

Long story short, after several different experiences such as law school and clerking for the Florida Supreme Court, I was working with a company doing strategic consulting and blogging about stocks in my spare time.

After a couple years, I had an excellent investment track record as well as a good audience base. Syndicating through Seeking Alpha as an official contributor was certainly a big part of it.  So my brother and I wrote a business plan and consulted successful media guys in this business.  My brother Derek and I decided to pursue building a real financial media company and start our long road towards becoming a recognizable name in this space.

“So who do you consider as your competitors today?”

I don’t necessary think in terms of  “competition” even though there are a few sites that do what we do.  Instead, we decided to take a more collaborative effort in building this business.  One of the keys to is that positive karma works. It is a core part of my belief system.  The more we give to others in positive ways, the more we get positive things back.  This approach does not necessarily lead us to beating out the competitors, but rather raising the level of our site’s popularity into what we consider “different tiers” of popularity in the blogosphere.

It’s definitely a different mindset if you’re not used to the blogosphere. I think there’s room for everybody.  I read hundreds of blogs a week, and I don’t feel the need to be competitive or jealous.  We focus on generating good content because that’s ultimately what brings people back.  After all, we are in the information age.

“Do you have any fun facts about yourself that many do not know? I’ve been surprised by many in the past with this question.”

Well I became a father a few months ago. I find myself outside of work really getting in touch with my roots of being a 5-year old again.  If people I work with were to see me on the floor with my little daughter, they might be very entertained.

Also, my brother and I used to live in the heart of Manhattan next to Ground Zero.

“I bet you’re pretty busy with your blog, your family and everything else.  Are you getting any sleep?”

It depends how you define the word “sleep”. [Laughs] Actually, I have been sleep deprived.  It has been a “two steps forward, one step backward” type of an experience.

My life has been like a light switch. You click ‘up’ and I’m at work.  You click ‘down’ and I’m at home with my wife and my daughter. So that’s pretty much the story of my 24-hrs at the moment.

“According to traffic ranking site Alexa.com, you and your brother Derek are now managing one of the fastest growing financial media sites on the web.  I’ve followed your site since the early stages, witnessing your rapid growth of WSCS in less than six months.  What led you to the launch of WSCS? Has this always been your goal?”

When I first started blogging I don’t think it was my goal.  Investing has always been a hobby I had with my brother and one of our best friends Adam.  We’ve talked about stocks since we were very young.

When I got into junior high, my Grandfather and Uncle Victor started giving me books about Wall Street.  I read everything by Peter Lynch and Warren Buffet.  Investing and stocks were a constant topic of conversation in our family.

Sports and stocks were pretty much all we talked about before college. [Laughs] So when we first started blogging, it was a way for us to express that passion more than anything else.

“You and Derek certainly have some of the best content out there when it comes to the variety and the depth. You also interview some of the most prominent players out there.  What do you enjoy most about your new ‘job’?  What are some of the challenges you face?”

I’ve had some really fun experiences at old jobs. I’ve certainly had some not-so-good ones too. However, this has been the most fun out of all.  My favorite thing to do in the world is to write, and I get to write every day.  I feel really fortunate.

Also, as you know, some of the most popular content at WSCS are the interviews.  I get to call some of the best traders, best analysts, and best writers in the business.  Then I get to sit on the phone with these guys for 45 minutes and ask any questions I want.  If  Joe Schmoe calls up a firm and asks, “Hey, can I speak to Todd Harrison today for an hour so that I can pick his brain?” people will laugh at him! So I consider myself very lucky and humbled that people are willing to take the time talk with me.  The fact that these guys are willing to talk to me and tell me their very secrets of success would have me doing this regardless of my job. It feels great.

“Do you have any criterions for people you choose to interview?”

One of my personal mentors is Todd Harrison, the CEO of Minyanville.  Todd is very involved with things beyond Wall Street, and he cares about things beyond just making money.  I try to find mentors all the time so that I can model myself after what they’re doing.  However, one of Todd’s criterions for working with people at Minyanville is to work with “people who are great at what they do but better at who they are.”   I can’t even tell you enough how much that has impacted the way we work at WSCS. It has become our personal mantra.

Brian Shannon and Mike Bellafiore are other great examples.  There are other traders who are just as good as Brian and Mike, but they are also great guys.  They take the time to help their audience. They are also honest and show their trades to the audience.  That’s rare in this business.  A lot of people will tell you that they’re great traders, but they never show you their great trades.

There are enough people who are great at what they do.  So, I am most interested in the secondary filter we seek for an interview, “are they better at who they are?”  Are they criminals like Dick Fuld, or generous people like Barry Ritholtz and Dylan Ratigan? We keep that in mind all the time when we seek interviewees.

“Lastly, what can we look forward to from Wall St. Cheat Sheet going forward?”

If you’re a reader of our site, you can look forward to being very excited about what’s going to happen in 2010.  By this time next year, though our site is likely to be very similar in its design, our site should be completely unrecognizable as far as the content and resources we’ll be offering.  In fact, just last week we added Market Center to our site for those who want quotes, charts, real-time market stories, and even video from Bloomberg.

We hope our site will be the place people want to go to start the day. Furthermore, we are listening to our readers and we plan to offer them what they want.  If you fill out our feedback form and tell us, “We want this,” you’ll see that on our site.  That is what Web 2.0 is about. It’s a collaborative effort. People who listen to readers and provide what they’re looking for will win over those who force-feed content they think their audiences want.

We don’t just look at the financial media but at the rest of the web for models of success.  It’s very clear to us that providing the audience with what they want in the forms they want is the key to success.  So we’re working our asses off to stay ahead of the curve.