CodyWillard.com

Who is Cody?

Living in NYC for the last fourteen years, I’m the son of a small business veterinarian and high school English teacher who are both still in Ruidoso NM along with much of my family.  My first job was literally cleaning crap for a dollar an hour, cleaning cages, walking the dogs, and holding the animals for exams when I was six years old. In the years since, I’ve been a busboy, a mini golf clerk, a civil engineer runner, a walk-on hoopster on a Top 25 NCAA team and a registered real estate appraiser…and that was before I had even graduated from the University of New Mexico with a degree in economics.

My first job in NYC after I came out here on a one-way ticket to, as I’d told my parents, “Become a Wall Street Rock Star” was at the first Starbucks in NYC, back in 1996, as a barista.  I then kept hounding the 73-year old author of a book I’d picked up at the bookstore called “Confessions of a Stockbroker” til he gave me a job stapling papers and answering the phone. A year later, I’d become his first partner in his 40-plus year career, but I walked away from the offer and went to Lithuania to write the great American novel and see what was almost the birth of capitalism in a new country.  I finished the novel, but after 93 rejection letters, I took a job as an analyst at a company that creates tech companies.

A year of riding the wave to the top of and the bottom of the dot com bubble, I left to become the head of wholesale services at a telecom company.  A few months into that job, I personally advised the CEO to shut down my division and lay me off because the telecom bubble was deflating all around us.  A week after that I was running from the collapse of the World Trade Center as it came down on top of me and my apartment in Battery Park City.  Without a home and a job, I founded a tech stock newsletter and website and got a break when Jim Cramer wrote on his blog on TheStreet.com that they were looking for writers.  After they took over my newsletter, and with Jim’s guidance, I started a tech hedge fund, which is just a collection of people’s money that I tried to make into more money.

Having been lucky enough to literally launch the hedge fund just 10 days before the stock market bottomed in October 2002, I was also lucky enough to have bought Apple at $7 per share back in March 2003 just weeks before they launched the original iPod, and also to have bought Google the day it came public.  Jim also helped me get exposure by putting me on his CNBC TV show a couple of times, which led to me doing more CNBC appearances, especially on Larry Kudlow’s show.  Along the way, I wrote monthly opinion columns for the Financial Times and became a professor of Revolutionomics at Seton Hall.  I also began to do TV appearances on other stations, and eventually was offered a job as an anchor on the then-about-to-be-launched Fox Business Network.

After closing down my hedge fund literally three weeks before the market topped, I anchored 528 business talk shows out of the Waldorf-Astoria’s Bull & Bear bar, during which we saw the stock market crash 60% and the trillion dollar bailouts of Wall Street, the car companies, and nationalization of almost the entire mortgage industry when the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Nowadays, I write TradingWithCody.com and am the CEO of WallStreetAllStars.com, am the author of the Revolution Investing subscription newsletter published by Marketwatch.com, which also publishes my blog, The Cody Word, and I also play shows and release singles with my rap/rock/folk band, The Muddy Souls.