The Person Managing Your Portfolio

I was born and raised in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where I graduated from Oak Grove High School. I grew up watching the men in my family run their own businesses. My dad ran an insurance agency, and once I was old enough to understand it, he talked with me about how difficult certain seasons of business ownership could be. I saw that side of it. I also saw what ownership gave him: his time was his. He was present for every stage of my life, from sports to hobbies to the ordinary moments that only matter because someone shows up for them. That combination of responsibility, pressure, and presence left an impact on me that I do not expect to outgrow.

For whatever reason, people have often opened up to me. Friends, strangers, people I had known for years, and people I had just met have trusted me with things that clearly weighed on them. More than a few have told me they felt they could be honest with me. I do not offer that as a credential. I share it because Caldric is personal work. Money is rarely just money. It is tied to family, pressure, control, fear, opportunity, and the life someone is trying to protect or build.

My first-hand education in markets did not begin with the stock market. It began with crypto. In 2015, I bought a small amount of bitcoin mostly out of curiosity. I was not some child prodigy who immediately saw what bitcoin could become. It was simply interesting, Coinbase existed, and I was old enough to buy some. By 2017, at twenty-two, I was deep in the crypto market, reading about blockchains, protocols, tokens, layer-one networks, and the way attention, utility, speculation, and market value could all collide. By the end of 2018, I was out of college with the business administration degree from William Carey University, working professionally and passively investing in traditional markets through my employer's 403(b), but crypto still had most of my attention.

That world taught investing lessons faster and more violently than a broad index fund ever could have. I lived through several cycles where prices rose quickly, collapsed quickly, and made the behavioral side of investing impossible to ignore. I watched positions run to highs I never expected, and when they turned, I did what felt natural and worked terribly: I tried to trade harder and win back what I had already given up. I met my wife in February 2020 and married her that November. Some of those crypto gains helped us pay off debt, which I am grateful for. But the gains I watched disappear taught me more than the gains I kept.

In the moment, no one knows perfectly where the highs and lows are. Those only look obvious afterward. My mistakes did not happen because I was not paying attention. They happened because attention is not the same thing as rules. Without a systematic way to evaluate exposure, reduce risk, and re-enter when evidence improves, you end up guessing under pressure. Willpower alone does not make those guesses reliable.

That experience eventually led me to the kind of systematic, signal-based process Caldric uses today. I came across rules-based market frameworks through years of reading, researching, and trying to understand why my own behavior broke down when the stakes felt high. The lesson was not that a process can remove risk or identify every top and bottom. It cannot. The lesson was that exposure decisions should be tied to evidence before emotion takes over.

In 2023, my dad passed away unexpectedly and tragically. There is no clean sentence that can make that smaller than it was. I lost him at twenty-eight, and if I live to be an old man, I will eventually live more of my life without him than I was able to live with him. What followed for my family made the value of organized, trustworthy financial guidance real in a way no textbook could. I do not know that I would be building Caldric if I had not lost my dad. It is a large part of what led me here.

The final catalyst was a friend saying, ‘I wish you could just manage my money for me.’ I took that seriously because I had already been doing the work for myself. I read constantly, mostly biographies and autobiographies of business builders and history, and I try to stay disciplined in the small daily things, training and eating well among them. Business classes, podcasts about people who build things, e-commerce work, personal investing, family experience, and that conversation all pointed in the same direction. If one person has a real problem and would trust you to solve it, there are usually more people with that same problem who would extend the same trust.

Caldric Capital is not about building a business just to build one. South Mississippi is home, not a market I entered, and I looked for an independent, fee-only adviser close by running the kind of systematic, research-driven process I wanted to see. I could not find one. I also knew that if I joined someone else's firm, the quality of the experience would never fully rest on my shoulders. Caldric is the choice to start from zero with full responsibility for the process, the client experience, and the outcomes I can actually control.

The firm is now the formal version of work that had already become personal to me: a Mississippi-registered, fee-only investment advisory firm, based in Seminary, built around a defined process, direct accountability, and no commission-driven product sales. I passed the Series 65, the Uniform Investment Adviser Law examination required to act as an investment adviser representative, because that was the appropriate path for the kind of firm I wanted to build.

My family is at the center of why I do this. In July 2026 we are expecting our first child, a son. Becoming a father has made my dad's example unmistakable to me: being present, and being responsible for the people who count on you, is now mine to carry. Building Caldric is part of how I take that seriously, for my own family and for the families who trust me with theirs.