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Alex Morris helps investors know when to wait and when to bet on success.
In the modern era, social media has created many new and exciting job opportunities for those with an entrepreneurial spirit. From the science of baker's yeast to trading stocks for personal gain, if you're knowledgeable and committed, going public is just a few clicks away.
That's a lesson Alex Morris learned. Morris currently runs his own website, The Science of Hitting, and a Twitter account where he chats with his 45.5k followers about today's stocks and more. He took the name of his website from the title of a book recommended by Warren Buffett. Written by baseball player Ted Williams, the book's philosophy was to wait for the right strike before swinging.
But Morris wasn't always on track to become a finance professional. In fact, he went to college and considered studying civil engineering. After all, his father was a plumber. he told TheStreet that he feels he belongs next to his father in the family business.
While Morris was in college, he began to suspect that becoming a plumber was out of the question. He had a "slight entrepreneurial bent" and joked that advanced physics classes helped him realize he was out of his cockpit.
Around this time, Morris, with his eyes set on an unknown future, began sharing some of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway ( BRK.A ) articles – Get Berkshire Hathaway Inc. the report . In 2007, he and some of his friends were inspired to start a company similar to StubHub, but for college events. As the company grows, so does its interest in financing. It was a year and a half or two years ago that he decided to change his studies.
Launch hits on social media
After graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in finance, Morris was again uncertain about his future. While he dreamed of working at a hedge fund or investment firm, several interviewers told him the same thing. he needs CFA or MBA to get a good job in this field. He said at the time he felt like he was struggling to figure out how to get to the next level.
Morris got work as a writer for several financial websites such as Find Alpha and Guru Focus while working on his CFA and MBA. And after nearly a decade of writing, he found it very useful for developing his ideas. He can also use his readers as a sounding board for his own ideas, which he has found very useful.
About five years ago, he began tweeting his writing and stock market ideas under a pseudonym. There, he says, he found an interactive community. As the world turned upside down in April 2020 and kept many of us safe online, Morris noticed many writers turning to paid newsletter content. After spending a year building his website, online presence and follower base, Morris was able to quit his job at an investment firm and eventually became his own boss. Today he writes the TSOH Investment Research Service newsletter and has hundreds of paying subscribers.
Social media is essential to this business
Morris is clearly a big fan of using social media to learn about the financial landscape. His face lights up when he talks about how the financial industry has evolved over the years. When he began his journey, the approach was very narrow. You can become an analyst or manage your own fund, but there are no obvious alternatives.
With resources like Twitter and Substack, it's now easy for experts like Morris to chart their course. New generations of traders can take the traditional route and make it their own business, which Morris clearly sees as an exciting prospect. As the industry evolves, technology is a valuable resource for enterprising people looking at the financial world from a different perspective.
Morris is also a big fan of this less-traveled route. You make friends with people,” he happily told TheStreet. "In a sense, they have become your colleagues. If you are interested in a specific job, you can ask people who are professionals in that field."
Morris emphasizes that he likes answering questions very much. Their content is perfect for all types of followers, from budding DIYers to people who have been on Wall Street for a while. He jokes that Twitter allows him to gauge the opinions of people "smarter than me."