Axon: A Blast from the Past

I don’t normally watch John Oliver, but caught it last night. The topic was tasers and the main company in the industry is Axon.

In my 20’s I was a money hungry little shit. After watcihng Boiler Room once, I decided to become a stockbroker. So, I moved to South Florida, obviously. Sun, fun, girls, no state taxes… what would be better. That was August 2001.

The funny or not so funny part is that was not too far from the truth. My friend Kasra told me about this movie, I watched it, and then I called about 20 brokerage firms who had job listings on hotjobs or monster jobs (back then right?) and convinced a few to interview us. We only took one interview in Pompano Beach, FL (north of FTL) cancelled the others and a week later we moved down.

A few years later we had landed at different firms but were both pitching investors Taser International, which rebranded as Axon ($AXON) in 2017. But this was like 2003 and at the time we were building positions because Taser was the hot new stock. My business partner and our team had nearly 100,000 shares of the stock, which today would be worth over $100 million. That’s more than 1,000x growth…

Guess what? I don’t own a damn share. Neither does anyone I worked with. I write these to myself to keep my mind on the prize with stocks that my family owns. I’ve been right too many fucking times on a macro level and have had too much money left on the table NOT TO keep reminding myself.

The point is that there will be new companies that produce 100x and 1000x or more and the investment will be blatantly obvious to you at the time. The hard part is buying and sitting on your hands.