John Arnold: preference

Transcript context

…But an interesting feature of your career is, you walked away from all of this more or less at the top of your performance. If you’re so wrapped up in it, what’s your own model of yourself for how you could both walk away from it and be so wrapped up in it? Part of it was, I started to become less wrapped up in it. I started in energy trading at age 21 and did it for 17 years. The first 14 years of that — that was the eating, sleeping, breathing it. Then years 15 and 16, I started to feel that the end is coming at some point. By year 17, I didn’t enjoy the game anymore. I could feel like if your drive, if your passion isn’t there, that you weren’t going to be successful. That was part of the reason for stepping away. It coincided with a time when I’d gotten married. I had kids, started to get more love over for family and the spouse. The markets had changed. The shale revolution had come in, and you had a market that was, by its nature, extremely volatile. That go-to one that was bouncing around marginal cost to produce as the natural gas became oversupplied, so the opportunity was very different. Then I was starting to spend an hour or two in the afternoons with our foundation work, and that started to suck some of my energy out. I started to become more interested in those questions rather than in energy trading. Part of my career and part of the success, I think, was that the business plan I developed was to be an inch wide and a mile deep in this. It was, find this niche and try to be best in the world at it. Don’t expand the focus. It was North American Gas and Power. At some point, LNG started to become relevant and put a small team in Europe, but mostly for information flow for the North American Gas and Power group. There were numerous opportunities to get into oil, to get into metals, or agriculture. Or start trading energy equities, for instance. Every time I considered it, but, stick with the niche and just focus here. I think the upside was, if we were successful with that, if that plan worked, and we were best in the world, it was going to be enormously profitable. The downside is that the intellectual curiosity starts to sag. You’re just going in — After 17 years, but not in year 13.…

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