FROM COLUMBUS TO CHARLOTTESVILLE
and I settled in across from Root. We were still on the ground when he pulled out a deck of cards. “Spades?” he asked the other two folks sitting across the aisle. The trick-taking card game needs four players, but the fellow sitting diagonally to Root hadn’t played much before. “Not a problem, it’s simple to pick up,” Root says. Of course, Root is competitive. He winces when his partner overtrumps a hand they were already winning. “Did you mean to do that?” he asks mildly. That focus and intentionality are evident when you look at his 20-year career in finance. His story starts like a typical “Midwest kid heads to New York City to make it” tale. And his résumé reads like a who’s-who of Wall Street. But today, in a rare twist, Root has traded in his former hedge-fund life with billions under management... to return to his Main Street heritage by helping thousands of individual investors run their own portfolios. The Dassault Falcon 900EX comfortably sat eight...
Root grew up in Columbus, Ohio... which bills itself as the “biggest small town in America” and is one of the few cities in the Midwest that has continued to grow into the 2000s. “I was a big comic book and sports card collector,” Root says. “I would go to shows with a little bit of money and try to trade up. Like, I remember I bought an Incredible Hulk comic where it was the first time that Wolverine is introduced. It was like a $100 comic. And then, I sold it for $200 to another dealer down the way. So I came home with more money and comics.” Of course, this “double your money” trade might have been better as a buy-and-hold investment. A near-pristine Incredible Hulk #180 was sold at auction this January for $8,600. Root’s baseball-card instincts didn’t go quite as well. “They’re not worth that much more now than they were back then, because the market just got flooded. Though I do have a Michael Jordan rookie card... “From there, I knew that I wanted to go into business. So I only applied to places that had undergraduate business schools or good economics programs. That led me to the University of Virginia.” Designed by Thomas Jefferson, the University
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January 2020
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