Wayne P. Weddington

Mr. Wayne Weddington is a private-equity investor of middle-market companies, agnostic to industry, but focused upon value creation, and less-than-institutional opportunities (transactions with "hair"). Mr Weddington has closed, divested or advised on a range of transactions totaling over $4 billion over the span of his investment banking and investment career. Some years ago, Mr Weddington took 'hiatus' from private equity and investment banking to eventually become a Senior Trader for Caxton Associates (at the time the largest hedge fund in the world), the journey of which he documented in his memoir "Do it Yourself Hedge Funds."

The intent of DIYHF was to de-mystify the performance of hedge funds and to explain, in simple terms, precisely what it is that hedge funds do.... and to promulgate that hedge funds' techniques are available to anyone or everyone with a retail brokerage account (available for as little as $100 with Charles Schwab) and a mobile phone or computer. Indeed, there has since been an explosion of publicly available, democratised, hedge-fund-like opportunities including powerful Reddit groups (WallStreetBets on Reddit brought down and demolished big hedge funds, for example, by the brutal GameStop short squeeze. Enjoyable to watch) and aggressive online trading platforms such as Robinhood (controversial for creating an addictive casino of the markets while purchasing order flow... but clearly disruptive) provide (seemingly) commission-free trading.

So, the little guy is not so little anymore. With the supercomputer the average trader carries in his pocket (the iPhone or the Android PDA), he has availed himself to unlimited information (the documented knowledge of mankind since inception) as well as actionable real time information that can put him on the same footing as the big boys. The latest wave of democratisation is the availability of "pre IPO investments" to the average investor.