Cutting Through the Wall Street Noise: Why I Built Freedom Capital Advisors and What’s Next
Wall Street has turned into a cloudy, cumbersome matrix of pre-packaged products and high-fee mutual funds. That’s not a knock from the outside, it’s the exact business I spent years inside of before I walked away from it. This is the story of why I built Freedom Capital Advisors, and why “old school” fiduciary values, paired with the tools we’re building today, are how I think this business should be run. Our motto has stayed the same since day one: if it’s good for the client, it has to be good for the business.
The Fiduciary Leap
My roots in this business go back to to 1987, but it all changed for me in 2004, when I moved my family from Jacksonville to Orlando to run a small office as a Series 24 licensed principal. I spent years in the traditional brokerage world before I realized the corporate brokerage model didn’t align with what I actually believed about how to treat clients. I went out on my own in 2009 and launched Windermere Financial.
By 2012, it was clear to me which way the industry was heading, not toward commission-driven brokers, but toward true fiduciaries who are legally bound to put clients first. I took the leap in March 2012 and launched Freedom Capital Advisors.
We didn’t have much to start with, less than $6 million in assets when I made the jump. It was a hard few years. We pushed through, and the firm has grown steadily since, built not on advertising or asset-gathering tactics but on a reputation for active portfolio management, disciplined market expertise, and clients who stick around because the results and the relationship hold up.
The “Old School” Blueprint in a Modern Market
A lot of advisors act primarily as salespeople pushing generic funds. We don’t work that way. We actively manage money across the market spectrum, from conservative T-bills and individual bonds to more advanced options strategies. I’ve been jokingly called a “dinosaur” by industry peers for it, and I’ll take that. I favor the same concentrated, value-driven philosophy that guides investors like Warren Buffett and Stanley Druckenmiller.
Wall Street has convinced people they need thousands of ideas, packaged products, and complex annuities designed to pull money out of their pockets. We stay away from private, illiquid deals. If you know what you’re doing, you don’t need thousands of stocks, you need patience, and you need to wait for the right opportunities.
Drawing on research from the Oxford Club’s investment approach, we run a disciplined 20-to-30 stock framework, with a risk-management rule capping individual positions at 3% to 5% unless we’ve made a deliberate, strategic decision to overweight one. That’s a different approach than the industry standard of putting clients into a handful of broad mutual funds and calling it diversification.
Just as important: we invest our clients’ money the same way we invest our own.
Next-Gen Tech Meets Multi-Generational Legacy
I’m 62, and my interest in the markets hasn’t faded, but I’ve also worked to make sure this firm serves clients well beyond me. Finance has always been a family pillar for the McCoys. My brother also brings over 40 years of market experience to the firm, and economics and markets have been dinner-table conversation for as long as I can remember.
That legacy continues with my son, Logan McCoy, a licensed advisor with Freedom Capital Advisors who also happens to build systems and write software. Logan has led a real technology upgrade across our workflow, integrating AI tools and proprietary data models into our day-to-day research and portfolio construction. Combined with decades of hands-on market experience, that lets us build fee-light, custom portfolios that an automated “robo-advisor” simply can’t replicate.
Playmaker Financial: An Education-First Mission for the Next Generation
As the firm has grown, so has our capacity to give back. I believe everyone deserves a fair shot at building wealth, and that belief, driven in large part by both Logan and I’s push to reach younger people, led us to launch Playmaker Financial.
Playmaker Financial is a financial literacy and community outreach program we built for young athletes. To be clear about what it is: it’s not a registered investment advisor, it doesn’t manage assets, and it doesn’t provide personalized investment advice or financial planning. It exists to teach. To help build it, I reconnected with my former high school football teammate and NFL veteran, Jamie Dukes.
Football isn’t what it was 40 years ago when Jamie and I played, it’s gotten a lot more complicated. Wall Street is the same way. Young athletes often have people coming out of the woodwork the moment money shows up. We’ve seen this pattern play out before, and Playmaker Financial exists to speak their language, educate them, and help them recognize the warning signs before it’s too late.
Taking the Message to the Local Community
Beyond our free informational website, Playmaker Financial is growing into a boots-on-the-ground community effort. We’re rolling out free, one-hour financial literacy workshops for local high schools, introducing student-athletes to the basics of money management. We’re also planning regional seminars for top-tier athletic talent, their parents, and their coaches, aimed at laying out the financial realities of professional and collegiate sports so families are better prepared to spot predatory practices.
For our clients, this outreach work is a point of pride. Through their own work with us, whether that’s managing a retirement portfolio or setting up a Uniform Gifts to Minors Act (UGMA) account for a grandchild, they’re supporting a firm that also puts real resources into financial literacy for the next generation.
We started with less than $6 million and a belief that this business could be run differently. That belief hasn’t changed: sound advice, disciplined research, and a genuine interest in our clients’ outcomes.
