The former NFL linebacker joined TheStreet to discuss his financial journey.
Transcript:
CONWAY GITTENS: So you boast an impressive real estate portfolio. So walk us through your financial journey. How did you get started?
BRANDON COPELAND: Yeah so one for me. I was extremely fortunate. We talk about it in the book as well too. I was extremely blessed to play for Coach. His name was Biff Poggi. He’s now the head coach at University of Charlotte UNC Charlotte and he actually ran his own hedge fund and now evolved into a family office in Baltimore. And I ended up asking him for an internship in the Summers. And when I did that was my first time ever seeing Bloomberg terminals and watching CNBC and seeing stock tickers and things like that. And so it walked me into a world of like Wow, you can make money and you can actually be sitting behind a desk and managing and delegating. When I come from a situation where it was put on your uniform and you go into the office to make money, so to speak, and you go to work, you roll up your sleeves. And so for me, that was eye opening. And then over time, I went to the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business, interned on Wall Street UBS for a couple of Summers, also came into the NFL and would still take internships at hedge funds and things of that nature in the offseason. And the goal was to just learn as much as possible. And in 2013 you speak about my investment journey. In 2013, my rookie year, I was with the Baltimore Ravens and the Tennessee Titans, and I was day trading during that season and I was doing extremely well in my account, playing with house money at a certain extent.
And then at the end of the year in December, I decided to take one big swing trade and hoped that the luck I had in the past would just play into this trade and I’d make more money in that time on this one trade than I had made thus far. And what happened was the entire market went down two days later because of geopolitical tensions happening over in Greece. And at that moment in time, the whole trade was wiped out, wiped out. It was a option’s call trade. The majority of it was wiped out. The majority of the value. And that’s when I started saying, hey, I have no control over this. Let me figure out something else that I have more control over. And I don’t want to lose money, but if I lose money, I’d much rather be able to look in the mirror and say, hey, I made all these decisions. I’d still make them again. And I still lost money. And that’s OK. It’s more on me, more in my hands. And so that’s when I started diving into real estate. I was researching it for a couple of years, started doing single family flips in Detroit with the Lions when I was with the Lions. So I would do that on the side. And again, being around some great mentors who showed me multifamily properties, they showed me houses where they were knocking off the roofs and adding a whole second level onto the houses.
And these were all former NFL players, right. It made me feel like I can do this too. They welcomed me into the fold and now we’ve evolved our portfolio to the extent where we’re doing multifamily projects across the country. We’ve got 88. I just went to check on a property in California. We’re doing first beachfront property, multifamily, extremely excited about that. We’re doing land development now. We got acres, hundreds of hundreds of acres with other NFL players where you got companies like Home Depot and Lowe’s trying to bid for their spot on the land and Starbucks and Target and Walmart and all those things. And so it’s just been an incredible maturation. But I’d say double down or double back for your question. I’m just extremely curious about things and I ask a lot of questions and I don’t put limits on myself of what I can and cannot do. And I’ve been extremely blessed to have amazing team and also amazing people around me that will welcome me into the fold to learn. And then I’ve been strong-minded about getting the opportunity to own as much as I possibly can.
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