“Murphy’s Law doesn’t mean bad stuff will happen. It means ‘whatever can happen, will happen’ …And that sounded just fine to us.” - Matthew McConaughey as Cooper speaking to his daughter ‘Murph’, Interstellar (2014)
October 18, 2024.
That’s the last time you heard from me before I seemingly vanished. I popped up once in a blue moon - a tweet here or there - just enough to qualify as signs of life, but that was it.
“Welcome to Alpha Loop” went out over the wires that day, I wrote a few words to express my genuine gratitude for spending your most valuable asset reading Hoags - your time.
Elsewhere, the milestone barely got a moment to breathe. It came in quickly and went out faster, as it always does.
It’s been 605 days since you and I connected over shared interests. Far too long of an absence, but like I said, I’ve been jammed!
June 14th, 2026
Today is my 31st birthday - 605 days later.
Today is also the day I can happily say 'I'm back.'
I’ve come bearing more than a few stories to tell, the bumps and bruises to go along with them, and the scars left behind by the brutality of lessons learned the hard way. But that's in the past, what's important is that I'm back to writing full-time. And I couldn’t be happier.
Now that the niceties are out of the way, let’s get into it. We’ve got a lot to cover so let’s recap where we left off.
“Ground Control to Major Tom”
Gray Areas - my last ‘real’ post, and a title I’d come to take far too literally over the next two years. At the time, I was weeks from announcing a markets podcast. I’d already recorded a couple of episodes with guests who were, and still are, by any measure “great gets.” Everything after Gray Areas dissolved before it could materialize. Instead, the most-read piece I’ve ever written was left stranded - drifting like a tin can. I didn’t know it then; life rarely issues a warning before it reroutes everything.
The Process is simple: brainstorm, draft, refine, ship, close up shop, then begin again - bound by a single rule: make the next piece your best piece. Sustain a cadence around that, and I have everything I need to take the fragments of an idea, scatter them like puzzle pieces, and aim to reassemble the picture with surgical precision - until it lands on a reader and lingers long after they’ve closed the tab.
But what happens when the flow that ordinarily surges from my brain, down through the wiring I’ve connected to my hands - the medium I use to arrange those fragments and puzzle pieces in a way that leaves an impact - is suddenly severed? When my brain can no longer reach my hands because the line’s been cut, the fragments stranded, my hands with no way to fit the pieces together across the keys, leaving the keyboard quiet while my mind only grows louder and more cluttered by the day? How does life arrest a Process this simple?
When the cadence broke, discipline was supposed to step in. It didn’t. Writing tomorrow became writing next week, and then time did what time does. It folds, accelerates, blurs, bleeds, erodes. The Process that felt etched in stone starts to feel foreign. Time slips, Life happens.
The institutional voice kept shipping. It always has. The discipline that starts with “Dear Partners...” is older than whatever was breaking inside me, and it kept showing up to work so the connection couldn’t be severed, right? Right.
The personal voice - the one you’re reading right now - was gone with no plans of coming back as it had in the past. I knew exactly what was wrong, too. I’d lost it. Not the muse, not a slow week, not the tidy little block people post about for engagement. The actual wiring, the cadence, the way the fragments are supposed to land, the follow-up that softens a punch without dulling it. Gone without a trace.
You can’t write your way out of that, and it’s the part nobody tells you when you ask for guidance. “Just write through it” is good advice for someone whose voice still answers when the hands call. Mine had stopped answering outside of the automated voice we all know, “We’re sorry, you have reached a number that has been disconnected.”
Every time I forced the Process, I produced another 1,500 competent and lifeless words that I deleted by morning, because they were a stranger doing a poor impression of me. So I stopped trying to write, and I went looking for where the voice had actually gone.
“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.” - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)
That was the story I believed about myself. Read it again, because everything that follows is what happens when you actually try to live a life like the one Ayn Rand described instead of admiring it from a safe distance.
The first two Flashpoint pieces made one argument: markets, and the narratives that shape them, don’t live in black and white. The story you tell yourself; this stock’s a buy, that one’s a sell, this crisis had a villain and a hero - is almost always a flattening of something that actually lived in the gray. The cash that saved the banking system in ‘08 didn’t come from where the textbooks and the politicians said it did. The truth sat in the gray area, where the real story always is.
This Flashpoint, Part 3 , points the same thesis at myself. There was no single decision that broke anything. No villain. No moment I can point to and say there, that’s the mistake. Every choice I made was defensible the day I made it, and most of them I’d make again. So this isn’t a confession, and it isn’t a list of regrets. It’s seven moments, each one reasonable on its own, that stacked into a place I could never have drawn on a map beforehand. The pattern matters more than the specifics. If any of it sounds familiar, that’s the point.
I. The Process
I didn’t come to this from money or a Wall Street name. I built the resume one reluctant, cold intro at a time. Equity research first - learning to take a company apart and find out what it’s actually worth, with a focus on the small and mid-cap names the big shops ignore because the positions don’t move the needle. Then VC, allocating capital and watching founders up close - what makes one of them build something real and another raise a round and disappear. Then COO and Co-PM of a hedged equity product with north of $250mm in AUM, getting the institutional reps most people spend a whole career hoping for.
Every seat showed me the field from different angles, until the conclusion stopped being a question: it was time to build my own.
So I left, and I started Alpha Loop Capital. That wasn’t reckless. It was the most considered decision of my life. I was positioned for it - the reps, the track record, the thesis, and the quiet certainty that the ideas I’d spent years tinkering with had become an edge, one that justified a HF fee schedule. Going all in wasn’t a gamble against the odds. I was doing what I always did, putting all the chips on the table and betting on myself.
II. All-In
I committed my career earnings as GP capital. Dollars I’d earned since I started working, structured into the fund in one way or another. It’s the cleanest version of skin in the game there is: if I’m going to ask other people to bet on me, I’d better be the largest believer in the room.
I’d been betting on myself my whole life. This was just the biggest (and scariest) version of it.
Days after I filed to move forward, Kat and I found out she was pregnant. That’s the inflection point - and not because either thing was wrong. Both were the best news I could have received. It’s because the moment they landed together, the bell couldn’t be un-rung . Every dollar committed. A daughter coming. Two all-in bets on two different tables, settling on the same timeline. From that day forward there was no version of slowing down still available to me. I had structured my life so the only direction left was forward, harder, faster.
III. The Anomaly
Early in the pregnancy, a routine prenatal screen came back flagging a chromosomal condition. Serious, but understood - there’s literature, there are care pathways, there are other people who’ve walked it and can tell you what the road looks like.
The deeper testing said something else. What they found in my daughter’s genome had no precedent. Not rare, not unusual - no precedent, no prior documented case anywhere of a person carrying what she carried and surviving. The kind of finding that gets studied across continents precisely because there is nothing to compare it to.
What that meant, in the only terms that mattered to me, was a question I had to carry every single day: would she be alive tomorrow? Did we make the right decision and risk Kat’s life too? I carried that, all of it, while launching a hedge fund.
Alpha Loop went live on the first trading day of June 2025. Ellie arrived a few months later on September 26th, a month early, straight into the NICU. So the fund’s first months and my daughter’s ‘welcome to earth’ journey ran on the exact same calendar. Markets continued to open in the morning, every morning like they always did, yet I felt like I was stuck in time with no ability to feel the pressure anymore. That’s what I told myself, at least.
Ellie made it. She’s here. As far as medical science and cytogenetics currently knows, she is the only person who has ever survived her genomic sequencing during the pregnancy. That means a baby in my house quietly changed a presumed “certainty” in medicine and science, rewriting lines in a textbook just by breathing. Ellie and Kat’s story, and the science underneath it, deserves its own telling, and it will get one. This isn’t that piece. This is just the part where I tell you what the gray area actually feels like from the inside: no clean answer, no binary, no pause button. Everything, at full speed, all at once.
IV. No Ledger
Stack it up. A daughter arriving early with a condition no baby has ever survived. Kat carrying her own health through a brutal pregnancy. A fund that needed capital raised, investment theses articulated, capital deployed, operations run, and a founder present for every hour of it. And the only tool I had ever been handed for fear was the same one I’d used for everything: work harder.
So I worked harder. More all-nighters last fall than I’d ever admit to in a doctor’s office, ‘Grinding it out’ was the only language I was fluent in. Whether it was being scared, nervous, overwhelmed, or any other similar emotions, I worked. When I couldn’t fix the thing that plagued me at that moment, I worked more. It looked like discipline from the outside, but from the inside it was a man running the same same playbook expecting a different result. I think they’ve got a word for that… Oh, right, insanity.
The night we finally got word that Ellie was going to be okay, I sat down to play Xbox knowing I didn’t need to look far to understand that I was in shock. As if that wasn’t jarring enough, I had two hours of relief. Two hours. Then I found out that my best friend since childhood had been diagnosed with stage-four cancer.
That is the gray area in its purest form, and it’s where the title of this piece begins. There is no ledger where that nets out. You don’t get to book the gain and close the day on it. The board just resets, working in ways that make you question why it’s all happening. And while you question, you’re standing there holding relief in one hand and grief in the other. And the market opens once again in the morning with no regard for what you’re carrying.
V. The Body Keeps the Score
Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score (2014) - whose title is the entire thesis of this moment, and which I understand now in a way I would rather not. My body broke before my mind would let me admit anything was wrong. Everything I refused to feel, everything I worked through instead of sitting with, my body had been quietly filing away the whole time, keeping the count I wouldn’t keep myself. Eventually it called the debt. It stopped cooperating. It made the fear physical in a way I could no longer out-work or outrun, and it forced a stop I would never have chosen on my own.
While my body was waving every red flag it had: I tried to work, you thought this time was different?
I couldn’t keep my own head straight, so I reached for the one thing that had ever made the fear quieter. There was nothing productive to grind toward. I did it anyway. That’s not meant to be braggadocios, that’s a man reconciling that he had built an identity out of being useful that he no longer knew how to be a person who needed help. I could not sit still inside my own emergency.
VI. The Floor
“Why do we fall, sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.” - Michael Caine as Alfred in The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
January is where it bottomed out. I’m not going to litigate the personal details in public - some of them stay mine, and some of them belong to the people I love. What I’ll say is that the part of my life that had nothing to do with spreadsheets fractured, and it fractured at the precise moment I had the least left to give it.
And here’s the honest piece most founders will never put in writing. I didn’t launch this fund off a war chest. I launched it on a strategic partner’s timeline - take the allocation now or lose it - which meant going live earlier and leaner than the plan called for. There was no clean window to go raise into that. Walking into allocator meetings as the most depleted version of myself would have been the worst trade I could make. So I sat in the gray area:
A real fund, a real thesis, a real track record, and a founder carrying all of it with no protection on the position. No bid. No hedge.
Yet, I kept going. Not because I had a clever move left, and not because I was strong. Because I have never once known how to quit. A lifetime of grinding through things I had no business surviving wired exactly one instinct into me: get up. So I got up the way I’d gotten up every other time: no plan, no cushion, on the only fuel I had left, which was a flat refusal to be the guy who stopped. You can’t beat me if I won’t give up. That isn’t a Nike ad or a motivational poster, it’s the single most load-bearing fact about me and January proved it under conditions I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I needed to find a way through, and I did. It took a while, but I found one again and it led me right here.
VII. J-Curve
This is where the redemption arc is supposed to land. Where I tell you I came out the other side, learned the lesson, and now everything’s better. I’m not on the other side. I’m in it . And that isn’t a hedge, it’s the entire point. Almost every story you’ve ever been handed about hardship was written after the rescue, by someone safe enough to make the suffering tidy. The bookend was already nailed in place. That’s not the story most people actually get to tell, and it isn’t the one I’m telling.
There’s a mechanism at the center of Interstellar that I’ve been circling this whole time without naming. Cooper enters a black hole and comes out standing outside of time itself, behind the bookshelf of Murph’s childhood bedroom, with only one option: send a message back in time. Morse code, tapped into the fabric of spacetime, using nothing more than the hands on a watch. For most of her life, Murph thinks it’s a ghost rattling the shelf and it was - her Dad. Cooper spent his life reaching backward through time to put her exactly where she needed to be.
I spent 605 days certain that no signal was getting out, not from me, at least. The whole time I had it backwards. The signal was coming in. The version of Tom Hogan writing this sentence is the one, who, on my 31st birthday, was sending the message backward through time these past few years. A message sent into the gravity of all the hardship, telling the man on the floor where he needed to go. He couldn’t read it while it was happening, and you never can while it’s happening, but it landed anyway. It carried me here, which is exactly where I needed to end up: building again, hands back on something real, nowhere near finished and finally pointed the right way.
“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” - Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in Fight Club (1999)
To launch, you have to shed mass. That’s the physics, not the metaphor. You can’t climb out of a gravity well still carrying everything you brought down into it. The version of me who could hold that weight forever - the one who mistook a clenched grip for strength and would have stood under the load until his knees finally folded - he doesn’t make this climb with me. I left him on the floor on purpose. Grieving him would be a mistake, because he’s the fuel.
I want to be honest about the cost, because the callouses didn’t come free, and I don’t fully trust it yet. I was, and still am, genuinely afraid the stress aged me in ways that won’t show for years to come, but they’ll show in ways I worry about. Maybe it’s because I’m a Dad now or maybe it’s because I realized I’m not bulletproof. Whatever the reason, all I know now is that I came through it, and more than that, I proved to myself that I could come through it.
Since the premise of this piece is that I’m telling you the truth, here’s the rest of it:
I still wonder what that year wrote into me that I’ll only get to read further down the road. The worry hasn’t lifted, but I’ve decided to carry it rather than pretend it dissolved.
Crazier yet: I’d do it all again no questions asked. Who I am today, after the fact, is a guy who understands that he’s fallible and better for it.
The way I used to win had a ceiling, and I’d already pressed my head flat against it. Grind always, rest never. That was the operating system I’d run for as long as I can remember - and I was quietly proud of, the one I had mistaken for a personality. It works beautifully right up until it stops, and when that music does stop? It’s a bitch. The tank had been sitting empty far longer than I ever let myself say out loud, longer than I’d have confessed to the people closest to me - and the detail I keep coming back to in the dark is that I knew. Of course I knew. Somewhere in the back of my skull I always knew the needle was pinned on empty, and I kept my foot down anyway. Lifting off felt like losing and I’d built an entire self around the refusal to lose. The floor was the only thing with enough force to finally make me stop. The old code had to be knocked out of me to make room for a version that can actually carry what I’m about to build. The heights I’m climbing toward now will not yield to the man who got me this far. They’re reserved for the one the collapse made.
“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.” - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)
The fire didn’t go out. That’s the whole story. It scattered into a thousand documents - but it never went out. The fire is what’s left when everything else has burned off. It isn’t ambition, and it isn’t hustle, and it isn’t the performance of grinding for an audience. It’s the thing underneath all of it, the part that looks at something broken and physically cannot keep its hands off the wrench.
I’m not Galt, and I’m not Atlas. I’m just stubborn in a way the odds never figured into their math and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Ellie Hogan already flipped the script on medical science, so why should her old man let the odds get the last word?
I intend to build the world I want out in the open: the fund, the products, the research, the wreckage and the rebuilds because the honesty was the only part that was ever worth anything.
You’re welcome to watch. You’re welcome to help. You’re welcome to bet against it. Whatever suits you, but I’m betting the house on me again.
Whatever can happen will happen. It did, all of it, at once. But I’m still standing, still climbing, wired back into my own hands at last, I’ll tell you the same thing the first epigraph at the top of this page said about the odds being stacked against us:
“That sounds just fine to me.”