Editor’s note: This article is a special feature for the Tufts Daily Alumni Newsletter that does not represent the Daily’s standard journalistic practices.
Mark Phillips (LA’06) is the founder and principal of Harvested Financial, a research and advisory firm for options and volatility strategies. He is the general partner at Harvested Digital Asset Management, investing and trading in decentralized finance. Previously Mark was managing director at Group One Trading, responsible for market structure and business intelligence. At the Tufts Daily, he was lead editor of the News section, producer of the supplement “Glocal Economics” and editorialist.
In the spirit of our podcast “My Daily Story,” we’d like to start by asking — what’s your Daily story?
My first semester freshman year, I signed up to write for at least three different publications. I was mostly just looking for something to do. I quickly zeroed in on the Daily because of its energy. They had their own space with a food budget and even paid some of the office workers. Turning out a few dozen pages every day meant that it was always humming down there. I loved the pressure of having to deliver five pieces of news, five days a week. You learned what was going on and who was who.
What’s your favorite memory from your time at the Daily?
When I think of my time at the Daily, the overwhelming impression is a blur of phone calls and blank word documents. The nature of the News department is that you’re always scrambling to put out relevant content that’s happening live. Some of the more interesting developing stories involve the dean of students office, and this time we had good intel about a disciplinary incident. It had always been difficult to get commentary about this type of piece, but we held up the printing that night until we got their quote, which the administration greatly appreciated. The piece was more balanced, and the Dean wasn’t caught flat-footed. After that, the ice thawed significantly.
How about challenges or complications you faced as a student journalist — do any come to mind?
Soon after one of my prouder moments — getting a piece picked up by U-Wire and the New York Times — I also got a taste of the darker side of celebrity. Writing about Boston’s new smoking ban in bars, I quoted a student suggesting that there was broad support for this amongst patrons and workers. The owner of one of Davis Square’s watering holes did not appreciate this and left me a number of voicemail messages expressing his disagreement. While he probably suspected he could bully a student journalist, for the most part, I found sources were overwhelmingly supportive and worked to make themselves available.
How did your time at the Daily and Tufts influence your path post graduation, if at all? Did you end up where you thought you would?
While immediately post graduation many of my friends from the Daily went into some type of journalism or professional writing, I had known for a while that I wanted to be a trader. For the first few years I did much more number crunching than wordsmithing, but as my career progressed beyond day-to-day portfolio management, writing became much more important. Whether it was the summary of a business development effort or analysis of trends in production and opportunity capture, being able to identify and clearly communicate the salient points were exactly the skills I’d begun honing since my time at Tufts. Now as I am writing more for my own business, I never expected to have fallen back into what was a fun hobby to fill the time between classes.
Part of your current job involves writing about financial strategies. In your view, what makes an effective piece of professional writing?
Good professional writing is content that is suited to both the message and the audience. But whether you’re writing a Slack post for your team or publishing an industry white paper, it must have clarity. With the overwhelming amount of content and delivery mechanisms, ambiguity is a death knell. Various audiences will require different levels of detail or sophistication, and effective writing gracefully transitions between evidence to arrive at a point.
If you could tell your college self one thing, what would it be?
Don’t stop tinkering. Whether you’re a software developer with large language models or a journalist who keeps asking questions and writing down answers, hacking at the fringe of your knowledge is what keeps things interesting. Preserve the space and energy to scratch at the itch of the unknown.
