To Climb Onto Another’s Stage
April 15th 2026
Written by Alec Hubbard, CFA
CFA Charterholders have many of the more sophisticated investment analysts in their ranks, but a key part of any analytical practice, whether it be client-facing or research-producing, is winning trust. On April 14, 2026, CFA Society St. Louis heard from former U.S. Army special operations interrogator Eric Maddox at the Hilton Inn in Frontenac, Missouri, who explained how he views empathy as the lynchpin to winning trust.
Maddox began his presentation with a story. In 2003, as a Los Angeles–based intelligence collection officer fluent in Mandarin, he never saw himself being deployed to the Middle East. Three months into the start of the Iraq War, he received orders for Baghdad. Once in Baghdad, he found himself flanked by a team of bearded soldiers and provided a new mission that uniquely required his training as an interrogator and his experience going through Ranger School: work with the Joint Special Operations Command to capture Saddam Hussein.
Maddox illustrated the challenge ahead of him. Prisoners of war do not like to give up their information to an enemy interrogator because it is perceived as their only asset. In part due to that mindset, the cooperation rate of prisoners was 4%. In Maddox’s first interrogation, he experienced why. Even though the Army can provide resources and protection to cooperative prisoners, he explained that prisoners communicated two things consistently:
1) You don’t get me
2) You don’t want to get me
Eric explained that over the course of 19 failed interviews, he came to realize that the conversations he was having were not a puzzle where he could plug in the right argument to get a prisoner to come over to his side. They were a test.
The test wasn’t one of “Can you make the right promises?” or “Do you have integrity?” The test was, “Do you have the ability to seek to understand what it is to be me right now?”
Maddox emphasized that the test must be passed with discovery, a word often used in the financial services industry to describe the process of understanding client needs. He described effective discovery as an exercise of empathy and defined effective discovery as brief, curious, and undertaken with zero assumptions.
He elaborated that most conversations are laden with distractions that psychologists have studied. These distractions stem from our brain only needing 20% of its capacity to listen to a conversation, allowing distractions to creep into the other 80% of our bandwidth. From the least pressing to the most pressing, those distractions are:
1) Immediate non-bias (what’s in the background)
2) Personal non-bias (what’s going on in life)
3) Topic familiarity (what ideas in the conversation need to be elaborated on)
4) Biases (pertinent to the conversation)
5) Agenda (what you are looking to get out of the conversation)
6) What to say next
In his conversations with prisoners, Maddox described 5 and 6 as the big hurdles because prisoners understand interrogators have an agenda and want to hear what they want to hear. He shared that, to break that barrier, he had to learn to do effective discovery, make zero assumptions, and learn to pick up breadcrumbs.
Every conversation is a test, and Eric described passing that test with effective discovery as a process of picking up breadcrumbs. Those can include:
1) Subjective statements
2) Explanatory statements
3) Speculative statements
4) Leads
5) Needs
6) Change of direction
7) Questions
8) Comparisons
9) An eagerness to engage with the present
10) Rejections/challenges
He described people using these kinds of breadcrumbs to test whether or not their conversation partner had the ability to seek to understand what it is to be them right now. Where people tend to interject with their own stories or lived experiences, one can pick up a breadcrumb by following up on those breadcrumbs instead of interjecting one’s own story.
Maddox described that in his 20th interrogation, he simply picked up breadcrumbs. He let the prisoners interject their own ideas and continued to pick up breadcrumbs, and eventually his 20th prisoner provided Maddox with a method to capture his brother’s subcommander in a way that would keep him and his brother protected from the ramifications of being known as the one who gave him up. And the plan worked.
Following the practice of building empathy by picking up breadcrumbs and employing effective discovery, Eric was able to help capture 300 people in an effort that connected him with one of Saddam Hussein’s bodyguards, leading to the most meaningful interrogation of his life—the one that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Just by picking up breadcrumbs.
Eric discussed the moral of the story with the analogy of film. We are all born and live life through our own sets of eyes, and because of that, we feel it’s our movie and we enjoy being the lead. In that movie, we realize the benefit of having supporting characters, and that with kindness and goodness, we can make people want to be supporting characters in our movie. That goal of wanting people to willingly play supporting roles in our story puts us on a stage. Even when people have learned enough etiquette not to be a stage hog, they still want to be on their own stage.
Building trust through empathy is the act of getting on someone else’s stage. Eric described that when people have a problem, they become open to inviting someone onto their stage. Whereas most business actors see that problem and try to explain to the subject that they have the perfect stage for the client to get on, he prescribed an advantage to allowing the subject to bring you onto their stage instead of selling your own. He pointed out two key needs people have: First, they want a life that matters. Second, they never want to leave their stage, period. Because people are interested in their movie and not someone else’s, the key to winning trust is to flip the traditional script of competing in a stage tug-of-war with your competitors and bringing your resources to the subject’s stage.
Eric described the outcome of this metaphor as a potential client inviting the financial professional onto their stage and allowing them to be the director.
He concluded by encouraging the audience to try making that attentive difference. Maddox’s story concluded that it changed the U.S. Army’s interrogation cooperation rates from 4% to 65%, and he illustrated its potential to make meaningful differences in how financial professionals conduct and win business.
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A Tale of Two Cryptocurrencies
March 24th 2026
Written by Alec Hubbard, CFA
On March 24th, 2026, CFA Society St. Louis heard from Matt Hougan, the Global Head of Research for Bitwise Asset Management and author of the CFA Research Foundation’s first piece on cryptocurrencies. Hougan provided CFA Society St. Louis an overview of the cryptocurrency market and shared how he thinks about the asset class.
First, he highlighted the disconnect between the usage of cryptocurrency and its valuation. Stablecoin usage is incredibly high, with more value being processed on stablecoin trading networks than on Visa’s network. Additionally, assets such as stocks, ETFs, and other funds are increasingly being tokenized, with some asset managers, including BlackRock, looking into tokenizing more ETFs. These increases are fueled by a regulatory environment Matt painted as favorable by stating the United States’ SEC and OCC being pro-crypto and on the backs of bipartisan cryptocurrency legislation passing Congress.
Yet the price of cryptocurrencies in 2026 is largely down 40–50% (at the time of the presentation). Matt exclaimed that this was the first time in his experience where the fundamentals of cryptocurrencies looked good while the sentiment around them was low. He explained this discrepancy by describing the different investors in the industry. The first type of investors are retail investors, who fueled the market for the first 15 years of its existence. The second type are institutions like family offices, central banks, and sovereign wealth funds. Hougan described the institutional inflow into cryptocurrencies as enormous but pointed out that the cryptocurrency markets are still young enough that, unlike stocks or bonds, the majority of participants are still retail investors. Those retail investors are used to four-year performance cycles in cryptocurrency prices, which historically existed in the market for various reasons, including FTX’s failure in 2022 and the largest cryptocurrency custodian failing in 2014. Matt proposed that retail investors, with this historical pattern in mind, sold to get out of the way of the next four-year cycle.
Hougan then proposed that he felt we were near the bottom of that process and made a bullish case for cryptocurrencies based on the increasing use of stablecoins putting U.S. financial rails in the pockets of cell phones across the entire world. He explained that this service was very valuable in the Global South, where banking services can be corrupt and costly, and in regions with less stable currencies. He explained that while the cost of transacting in stablecoins is a fraction of a penny per transaction, each of those transactions pays that small fee to a blockchain network. Most of those payments currently go to the Ethereum network. The increased transaction volume and increase in other assets being tokenized represent a growth driver for currencies like Ethereum that facilitate these transactions.
In contrast, Hougan described Bitcoin as more comparable to gold—a store of value. He likened that store of value to a service and articulated that, in the same way Microsoft Office becomes more valuable as more people want to use the service, Bitcoin’s value should increase as more people want to use its service of securely storing value. He described Bitcoin as optimized for the service of storing value due to an unsophisticated base code optimized for security. Having made his case for the comparison to gold, Matt described a way one could project Bitcoin’s value by estimating the growth of the global gold market and estimating how much value is stored in Bitcoin relative to gold and the potential growth rate of that ratio.
Hougan likened the different drivers of value behind different cryptocurrencies to another easier-to-understand example: AI. When AI originally captured the market, AI company prices were largely determined by the sector they were in. It was only over time that the fundamentals and use cases of each company explained the prices more than the sector they were in. Matt argued that, in the same way, he expected cryptocurrency values and performance to become more distinct as the industry matured. He concluded by arguing for a measured approach: diversification between cryptocurrencies and considering weighing them by capitalization, like prominent equity indexes.
Matt addressed risks that exist in the crypto markets, elaborating on the potential for narrative breaks around cryptocurrencies or quantum computing disturbing cryptographic security, but ultimately expressed the risk to cryptocurrencies as similar to those experienced by more traditional methods of finance.
Finally, Matt reminded the room that asset holders in the world are becoming younger and richer. He argued that as younger investors, fueled by wealth transfer, increasingly invest, they are likely to adopt cryptocurrencies, something they have grown up with and are largely comfortable with, in a similar phenomenon that facilitated the growth of ETFs as an investment vehicle.
Members Win Awards
Investment award recipients in U.S. health care
The Investor Intelligence Network has for the first time named investment award recipients in U.S. health care. Ten awards in a variety of categories were given to chief investment officers or those in related titles. We are pleased to report that two of our Society's own won awards. They are David Erickson, CFA, CIO of Ascension Investment Management, who won an award for Socially Responsible Investing and Anthony Waskiewicz, CFA, CIO of Mercy (St. Louis), who won an award for CIO of the Year. We congratulate these members and wish them continuing success in the future.
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