The Kid With the Spreadsheets
~2006–2009
Before the hedge fund, before SeekingAlpha, before any of it — there was an open garage in Kentucky, a friend named Doug Hall, and a spreadsheet that wouldn't stop growing.
The Garage
Summer of 2006 or 2007. Kentucky.
Doug Hall got Glen into financial modeling with Excel. That was the whole thing. One friend, one introduction, and suddenly the engineering brain that had been looking for something to latch onto found it.
Open garage. A single weekend. Deseasonalizing historical financial data across hundreds of companies. Rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. Coca-Cola. Two guys staring at spreadsheets while the Kentucky summer went on without them.
Glen didn't know it at the time, but that weekend was the inflection point. Everything that came after — Seeking Alpha, the hedge fund, Fanniegate, all of it — traces back to a garage and a friend who said, “Let me show you something.”
The SMF Rabbit Hole
Stock Market Functions. A community of Excel obsessives.
After the garage, Glen discovered the SMF (Stock Market Functions) add-in forums — a niche community of people who were building custom Excel functions to pull live market data. Not Bloomberg terminals. Not institutional tools. Just Excel, ingenuity, and an obsessive need to see the numbers.
He went deep. Extracting LIBOR spreads. Scraping Morningstar feeds. Building models from scratch that could ingest real-time data and spit out valuations. This was before fintech made everything easy. If you wanted the data, you had to go get it yourself, and Glen was the kind of person who would spend an entire weekend figuring out how.
The SMF community was small but serious. These were people who thought about spreadsheets the way musicians think about instruments — not as tools, but as extensions of themselves. Glen fit right in.
The Book That Changed Everything
The Intelligent Investor
Then he read The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, and everything clicked.
Margin of safety. Intrinsic value. Mr. Market — the manic-depressive business partner who offers to buy or sell at wildly different prices every day, and whose job it is to serve you, not instruct you.
All those hours in the SMF forums building models suddenly had a framework. Glen wasn't just pulling data anymore. He was looking for the gap between what something was worth and what the market was charging for it. That gap was where the money lived.
Graham gave him the language. The spreadsheets gave him the evidence. The combination was dangerous.
The CNO Tip
2008–2009. The financial crisis. Sam's phone call.
The world was falling apart. Lehman Brothers had just collapsed. Banks were failing. Markets were in freefall. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, Sam gave Glen a tip: CNO Financial Group.
Glen did what he always did. He pulled the data. He built the model. He ran the numbers against Graham's framework. And when the numbers said what they said, he wrote it up and published it on Seeking Alpha.
That article was the first domino. Not because it was perfect — Glen would be the first to admit his early work was rough. But because it was public. Timestamped. Open to criticism. A 20-something putting his analysis out for anyone to read, during the worst financial crisis in 80 years.
Most people were hiding. Glen was publishing.
Key Moments
Four inflection points in three years.
The Garage
Doug Hall's open garage in Kentucky. A single weekend deseasonalizing historical financial data across hundreds of companies. Rotisserie chicken and Coca-Cola. The first spark.
The SMF Forums
The Stock Market Functions add-in for Excel. A community of obsessives building custom functions to pull live market data. LIBOR spreads, Morningstar feeds, models from scratch. Glen found his tribe.
The Book
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Margin of safety. Intrinsic value. Mr. Market. Everything he had been doing with spreadsheets suddenly had a name and a philosophy.
The First Write-Up
Sam gave him the CNO tip during the financial crisis. Glen wrote it up on Seeking Alpha. His first published analysis. The beginning of a public track record.
The People of Act I
Three names. Three contributions. One trajectory.
Doug Hall
The CatalystThe friend who got Glen into financial modeling. One weekend in a Kentucky garage, and the trajectory of Glen's life changed forever.
Sam
The TipGave Glen the CNO Financial Group idea during the 2008-2009 crisis. Glen wrote it up on Seeking Alpha. First published analysis, first real conviction bet.
Benjamin Graham
The FrameworkAuthor of The Intelligent Investor. Never met Glen, obviously. But his book turned raw spreadsheet skill into an investing philosophy that stuck for life.
What Act I Teaches
The thing you're built for doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it shows up as a friend's side project in a garage.
Glen didn't set out to become an investor. He set out to understand a spreadsheet. The investing part happened because he couldn't stop once he started. That's how you know.
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Continue the Story
The Full Story
The complete arc — from Indiana to hedge fund to AI.
Read moreNext ChapterAct II — The Hedge Fund
What happens when you turn spreadsheets into a fund.
Read moreBlogGlen's Blog
Two thousand posts and counting. The public record.
Read morePerformanceTrack Record
The numbers. Public, timestamped, no hiding.
Read moreBookAct As If
Glen's book. Part autobiography, part framework.
Read morePreviousPrologue — Indiana
Before any of this. The people who made him.
Read more