I’m an optimist by nature. My family and friends, especially my wife, Kate, like to tease me about it. But that outlook has shaped how I think about both life and investing: with patience, curiosity, and a long view.
My passion for investing began early, thanks to my grandmother, Gloria, who sparked my interest as a teenager. From then on, I devoured every investment book I could find. I vividly remember the impact The Intelligent Investor had on me, and by high school, I’d rush home to watch market coverage instead of sports highlights. What I was really discovering, though I couldn't have named it then, was that markets were a window into something larger: how people make decisions under uncertainty, and why those decisions, in aggregate, shape the world.
After graduating from the University of Kentucky, I served four years as an Air Force Officer. It didn't take long to learn that in dynamic environments, plans rarely survive contact with reality, but the planning process still matters. It sharpens judgment, reveals assumptions, and prepares you to adapt when conditions change. When my service commitment ended, Kate and I returned to Kentucky to build a life with deeper roots. I spent several years in the bourbon industry before finally accepting what had been obvious for some time: I was going to spend my life studying markets. After learning the business at a regional firm, I founded Vermillion Private Wealth in 2020. I wanted to build a practice on my terms.
Outside of finance, I read constantly, write regularly, play tennis when I can, listen to a mix of jazz and classical music (you might enjoy my curated playlist), and learn daily from my daughter, who has an uncanny ability to remind me how little control any of us really have.
Underneath all of this is a deep respect for individual liberty; for people making informed choices about their own lives, capital, and futures. That respect shapes how I advise clients, how I structure incentives, and how I think about responsibility over long time horizons.
How I Think About the Work
F.A. HayekThat respect has a history, one that shapes how I think about markets, capital, and advice.
It has three main sources:
Austrian economics takes seriously what most of modern finance has forgotten: that prices emerge from countless individual decisions under genuine uncertainty and that markets are not machines to be tuned but living orders to be understood.
Popperian epistemology provides the discipline of intellectual humility: the insistence that knowledge advances through the survival of conjectures under serious criticism, and that every apparent certainty be examined for the assumption on which it rests.
Classical liberal thought grounds my view that capital is not an abstraction but the sedimented judgment of individual choices over time, and that wealth management, done well, is stewardship on behalf of those choices and the people who made them.
What this means in practice is less dramatic than it sounds. It means building portfolios for resilience across regimes rather than performance within one. It means treating forecasts with the caution they deserve. It means writing essays, because writing is how I test whether my thinking survives criticism. And it means telling clients the truth about uncertainty: that no one knows what will happen next, that this has always been the case, and that the task is not to pretend otherwise but to plan and invest in ways that remain intelligent regardless.
Karl PopperAnchored in principles.
Positive-sum relationships
In game theory, a positive-sum outcome is one where value is created rather than transferred and where all parties are better off, not merely less worse off.
At Vermillion Private Wealth, I structure relationships so that trust compounds over time. My success is inseparable from my clients’ success.
Epistemic Humility
Physicist Richard Feynman warned, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Markets punish self-deception ruthlessly. I work hard to question my own assumptions, expose blind spots, and revise beliefs when reality disagrees
Act with fairness, & justice
Justice is one of the four Stoic cardinal virtues and is paramount to living a well-lived life (and to operating a successful business).
That means acting fairly when it’s easy and when it’s inconvenient.
Robustness over precision
Turn-by-turn directions are great unless going to the wrong destination. The future is uncertain and forecasts fail. But direction still matters.
My goal isn’t to be perfectly right at every step; it’s to stay oriented toward resilience, adaptability, and durable outcomes over time. Directional correctness beats false precision every time.
Help clients own the upside
While uncertainty is real, so is progress. Human ingenuity, innovation, and adaptation have a long track record of reshaping constraints into opportunities.
My job isn’t to deny risk. It’s to understand it well enough that clients can participate in the upside without being destroyed by the downside.
My broader writing lives at jamesvermillion.com: essays on classical liberal thought, emergent order, the knowledge problem, and the moral foundations of a free society, along with occasional fiction and poetry. The work there is one part of the same intellectual project that shapes how I approach wealth management; readers of Venture & Gain often find that the personal essays fill in the broader tradition the investment writing draws from.
All testimonials have been provided by current clients. No client was compensated for providing these testimonials. Vermillion Private Wealth gained each clients permission to publish their testimonial. Outcomes are personal and specific for each client and one client’s results do not guarantee identical outcomes in the future for another client. The testimonials shown have been selected from among all client feedback.