As a senior vice president at Wachovia and then Morgan Stanley during the dark months of the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis, Derek Peterson watched as colleagues lost their jobs and life savings and wondered if he was next. At the time, he was managing approximately $120 million in client assets, but was growing disenchanted with what he saw as a US stock market driven by high-frequency trading and algorithms rather than fundamentals. He started looking for other opportunities, and soon stumbled on some of the first legal medical marijuana dispensaries that had opened in the San Francisco Bay Area. “I started looking at this through a finance guy’s eyes and saw that maybe there was something going on here,” he said. He soon discovered that dispensaries were bringing in sales of more than $4,000 per square foot, a rate higher than any US retailer but Apple Inc , and more than 12 times the average $325 per square foot among all companies in the sector. “You had places the size of Starbucks bringing in $15 million a year, which is absurd,” Peterson said. He quit his day job at Morgan Stanley in late 2010, and in 2012 became chief executive officer and president of Terra Tech Corp, which is now a $247 million company that cultivates medical marijuana and whose shares trade on the over-the-counter market, making it one of the few publicly traded pot stocks. Peterson is not alone in the jump from Wall Street to weed. Ten years after the start of the financial crisis, what was once the province of shady stoners and drug cartels is now a thriving industry, with recreational marijuana legal in states ranging from California to Massachusetts. (Map: http://tmsnrt.rs/2AFalvZ) Powering the expansion of the industry are former Wall Street executives like Peterson that hail from such staid firms as BlackRock Inc , Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Prudential Financial Inc, all of whom say that they might not have ever left traditional finance if not for the lingering damage of the 2008 crisis. There are few reliable numbers on how many former Wall Street professionals who now work in the cannabis industry, though those in the sector say that they expect the migration to accelerate as revenue growth continues to attract talent. Companies in the US marijuana market posted revenues of approximately $6 billion in 2017, a 500 percent increase from the roughly $1 billion in 2011, according to estimates from Marijuana Business Daily, a trade publication. Approximately 250,000 people work in the sector, and both jobs and revenues are expected to double or triple over the next four years, the publication estimates. “The financial crisis and the stagnation of many industries in the US in its aftermath have led many people to consider this a viable career,” said Chris Walsh, editorial vice president at Marijuana Business Daily. Lingering Fears Of Washington Despite the growth prospects, many financial professionals are still too leery of federal law, which considers marijuana an illegal drug, to take a job in the industry until there are clear signals from Washington or a change in the makeup of government, said Ruth Epstein, a partner at San Francisco-based BGP Advisors, a business advisory firm that focuses on companies in the cannabis sector. Published in Daily Times, March 21th 2018.