John C. Bogle: Wealth and philanthropy

Wealth and philanthropy[edit]

As of February 2017, Bogle has a net worth of $80 million USD according to Business Insider.^[14][15] During his high-earning years at Vanguard he regularly gave half his salary to charity, including Blair Academy and Princeton.^[9]

Awards and honors[edit]

• Named one of the investment industry's four "Giants of the 20th Century" by Fortune magazine in 1999.
• Awarded the Woodrow Wilson Award from Princeton University for "distinguished achievement in the Nation's service" (1999).
• Named one of the "world's 100 most powerful and influential people" by Time magazine in 2004.^[16]
• Institutional Investor's Lifetime Achievement Award (2004).

John C. Bogle: Investment career

Investment career[edit]

After graduating from Princeton in 1951, Jack Bogle narrowed his career options to banking and investments. He managed to land a position at Wellington Fund where he showed great talent that made the manager of the fund, Walter L. Morgan to say that "Bogle knows more about the fund business than we do". Bogle was promoted to an assistant manager position in 1955 where he obtained a broader access to analyze the company and the investment department. Bogle demonstrated initiative and creativity by challenging the Wellington management to change its strategy of concentration on a single fund, and did his best to make his point in creating a new fund. Eventually he succeeded, and the new fund became a turning point in his career. After successfully climbing through the ranks, in 1970 he replaced Walter L. Morgan as chairman of Wellington,^[5] but was later fired for an "extremely unwise" merger that he approved. It was a poor decision that he considers his biggest mistake, stating, "The great thing about that mistake, which was shameful and inexcusable and a reflection of immaturity and confidence beyond what the facts justified, was that I learned a lot."^[6]

In 1974, Bogle founded the Vanguard Company which is now one of the most respected and successful companies in the investment world. In 1999, Fortune magazine named Bogle as "one of the four investment giants of the twentieth century".^[7]

In 1976, influenced by the works of Paul Samuelson, Bogle founded First Index Investment Trust (a precursor to the Vanguard 500 Index Fund) as the first index mutual fund available to the general public. In a 2005 speech, Samuelson ranked "this Bogle invention along with the invention of the wheel, the alphabet, Gutenberg printing".^[8]

Bogle had heart problems in the 1990s and, in 1996, he relinquished his role as Vanguard CEO to John J. Brennan, his handpicked successor and second-in-command whom he had hired in 1982. Bogle had a successful heart transplant in 1996. His subsequent return to Vanguard with the title of senior chairman led to conflict between Bogle and Brennan. Bogle left the company in 1999 and moved to Bogle Financial Markets Research Center, a small research institute not directly connected to Vanguard but on the Vanguard campus.^[9]

Seth Klarman: Wealth and donations

Wealth and donations[edit]

In February 2017, Forbes Magazine listed his personal fortune at US$1.55 billion. In 2015, he was listed as the 15th highest earning hedge fund manager in the world.^[1]

Klarman started The Klarman Family Foundation ($255 million in assets as of 2010) which donates to medical causes, Jewish organizations (such as the American Jewish Committee, Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies and Gann Academy), and Israeli causes. Klarman is the chairman of Facing History and Ourselves which develops classroom programs to combat anti-Semitism and bigotry.^[24] Klarman also is active with the Israel Project, a pro-Israel advocacy group that collects and provides information on Israel for journalists. He donated $4 million to the organization between 2008 and 2010.^[24] He is the key U.S. investor behind The Times of Israel, an online English-language newspaper which reports on Israel, the region and the Jewish world.^[34][35]

In 2013, Klarman donated the lead capital to fund the $61 million building at Cornell University named the Seth ’79 and Beth Klarman Humanities Building, more simply known as Klarman Hall.^[36] A year later, he donated money to Harvard Business School to construct a "conference center/auditorium and performance space," named Klarman Hall. In an official statement he recalled his time at the school as "an important and ongoing role in my life," later noting it an honor "to able to give back to a school that has given us so much."^[37]

Awards[edit]

Klarman has been called a "hedge fund Titan,"^[7] and "quiet giant of investing,"^[38] for his slow accumulation of fund capital over his career (in 2008, his hedge fund was the 6th largest in the world) and low profile.^[7] It was reported by Andrew Ross Sorkin, of The New York Times, that "[Klarman] is the most successful and influential investor you have probably never heard of."^[38] His Investopedia entry has him listed as "an enigma in the investing world."^[39]

He is sometimes called "the Warren Buffett of his generation,"^[3] and the "Oracle of Boston."^[5] It has even been speculated that his investment philosophy is so similar to Buffett's that he is considered a dark horse option to assume Berkshire Hathaway in the event of Buffett's death.^[40][41] According to an article by The New York Times,Buffett has publicly praised Klarman's investing,^[38] and it has been reported that Buffett keeps a copy of his book on his bookshelf.^[13]

In 2008, he was inducted into Institutional Investors Alpha's Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame along with David Swensen, Louis Bacon, Steven Cohen, Kenneth Griffin, Paul Tudor Jones, George Soros, Michael Steinhardt, Jack Nash, James Simons, Alfred Jones, Leon Levy, Julian Robertson, and Bruce Kovner.^[4]

Publications and works

Seth Klarman: Investment career

Investment career[edit]

Further information on Seth Klarman's leadership of the Baupost Group: Baupost Group

After graduating from business school in 1982, he founded the Baupost Group with Harvard Professor William Poorvu and partners Howard Stevenson, Jordan Baruch and Isaac Auerbach. The name is an acronym based on the founders' names (the name was decided on before Klarman joined the project).^[7] Poorvu asked Klarman and his associates to manage some money he had raised from the selling of his share in a local television station and the fund was started with US$27 million in start up capital.^[7] His starting salary was $35,000 a year, considered low to alternative job offers,^[15] and he later recalled that the other founders "were taking a big risk on a relatively inexperienced person."^[7] Early on in his investment career, he used to badger Goldman Sachs salesmen with questions regarding their options and thoughts on the markets that they were afraid to pick up the phone if they saw that Baupost was calling.^[7]

In February 2008, Klarman was alerted that a London-based hedge fund, Peloton Partners, were forced to liquidate more than a billion dollars worth of their assets, he decided to open up his fund to new investors subsequently raising $4 billion in capital, mainly from large foundations and Ivy League endowments. He believed that there was serious market opportunity for value investors in the coming months and after the collapse of AIG and Lehman Brothers, he invested heavily in the equity markets, sometimes throwing $100 million into stocks a day. While the market was down due to the aftermath of the crisis he purchased many distressed securities and bonds. By early 2009, after J.P. Morgan Chase acquired Washington Mutual as a part of their deal with the U.S. Treasury, and SallieMae's bonds were returning double digit figures he would see serious returns. Overall, Klarman's bond position appreciated 25%, however, during the financial crisis, his fund returned -7% to -13%. Although many hedge funds faced negative returns and low performance during the crisis and its aftermath, Klarman saw increased equity positions and described it as a "fortuitous time" for the fund's capital gains.^[7] The same year he would go on to buy a minority share in the Boston Red Sox, via a stake in Ed Eskandarian.^[7]

In 2009, Klarman began buying distressed credits in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. He purchased the bonds of CIT Group, a financial holding company based in New York City at 65 cents on the dollar with a yield rate of 15%. After the company went into prepared bankruptcy, as Baupost began lending it money via a loan, Carl Icahn gave a loan of $6 billion to the CIT Group but backed out of the deal a week later. This caused the bonds to speed into prepared bankruptcy and gave the Baupost group securities valued at 80 cents to the dollar for their debt in CIT Group.^[7] Shortly after the CIT deal was finalized, Klarman amassed a stake in a new bio-tech company called FacetBiotech, at an average cost of $9 a share. At the time, FacetBiotech had $17 a share in net cash. Klarman noted that when stocks are spun off of their larger parent companies they become "cheap and ignored."^[7] When Biogen eventually tried a hostile takeover of the company bidding up the price to $14 a share, Abbott Laboratories asked for a $27 per share settlement for acquisition. Klarman's fund finished that year up +27%.^[7]

As of fiscal year 2016, the fund has US$31 billion in assets under management.^[

Seth Klarman: Early life and education

Early life and education[edit]

Seth Andrew Klarman was born on May 21, 1957 in New York City.^[6][2] When he was six he moved to the Mt. Washington area of Baltimore, Maryland near the Pimlico Race Track,^[7] and grew up in a traditional Jewish family.^[8][9][10] His father was a public health economist at Johns Hopkins University and his mother taught high school English.^[11][12] His parents divorced shortly after their moving to Baltimore.^[7]

When he was four years old he redecorated his room to match a retail store putting price tags on all of his belongings and gave an oral presentation to his fifth grade class about the logistics of buying a stock. As he grew older had a variety of small time business ventures including a paper route, a snow cone stand, a snow shoveling business, and sold stamp-coin collections on the weekends.^[6] When he was 10 years old he purchased his first stock, one share of Johnson & Johnson (the stock splitthree-for-one and over time tripled his initial investment). At age 12 he was regularly calling his broker to get stock quotes, his reasoning behind buying a share of Johnson & Johnson was the fact that he has used a lot of band-aids (a product of the company) during his earlier years.^[6]

Klarman attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and was interested in majoring in mathematics but instead chose to pursue economics.^[7] He graduated magna cum laude in economics with a minor in history in 1979.^[13] In the summer of his junior year he interned at the Mutual Shares fund and was introduced to Max Heine and Michael Price. After graduating from college he went back to the company to work for 18 months before deciding to go to business school.^[7] He went on to attend Harvard Business School where he was a Baker Scholar and was classmates with Jeffrey Immelt, Steve Burke, Stephen Mandel, James Long and Jamie Dimon.

Philip Arthur Fisher

Philip Arthur Fisher (September 8, 1907 – March 11, 2004) was an American stock investor best known as the author of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, a guide to investing that has remained in print ever since it was first published in 1958.

Career[edit]

Philip Fisher's career began in 1928 when he dropped out of the newly created Stanford Graduate School of Business(later he would return to be one of only three people ever to teach the investment course)^[1] to work as a securities analyst with the Anglo-London Bank in San Francisco. He switched to a stock exchange firm for a short time before starting his own money management company, Fisher & Co., founded in 1931.^[2][3] He managed the company's affairs until his retirement in 1999 at the age of 91, and is reported to have made his clients extraordinary investment gains.^[4]

Although he began some fifty years before the name Silicon Valley became known, he specialized in innovative companies driven by research and development. He practiced long-term investing, and strove to buy great companies at reasonable prices. He was a very private person, giving few interviews, and was very selective about the clients he took on. He was not well-known to the public until he published his first book in 1958.^[5] At this point Fisher's popularity rose dramatically and propelled him to his now legendary status as a pioneer in the field of growth investing.^[6] Morningstar has called him "one of the great investors of all time".^[3] In Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, Fisher said that the best time to sell a stock was "almost never". His most famous investment was his purchase of Motorola, a company he bought in 1955 when it was a radio manufacturer, and held it until his death.^[7] Phillip is remembered for using and proliferating the "scuttlebutt" or "grape vine" tool, in which he searched fastidiously for information about a company.^[8] When you scuttlebutt, you make more informed decisions due a better basis for analysis and valuation.

In the 2018 Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting, Warren Buffett called Fisher's "Common stocks and uncommon profits" a "very very good book".^[9] He further described how using Fisher's "scuttlebutt" technique continues to be a good way to investing, which is still used by Ted and Todd at Berkshire Hathaway. John Train described Warren Buffett as 85% influenced by Benjamin Graham and 15% by Philip Fisher.^[10][11]

His son Kenneth L. Fisher also founded an investment firm.

Charlie Munger: Investment philosophy

Investment philosophy[edit]

"Elementary, worldly wisdom"[edit]

In multiple speeches, and in the book Poor Charlie's Almanack, Munger has introduced the concept of "elementary, worldly wisdom" as it relates to business and finance. Munger's worldly wisdom consists of a set of mental models framed as a latticework to help solve critical business problems.^[3]

Munger, along with Buffett, is one of the main inspirations behind the book Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger. Author Peter Bevelin explained his key learnings from both Munger and Buffett in a 2007 interview: "How to think about businesses and investing, how to behave in life, the importance of ethics and honesty, how to approach problems but foremost how to reduce the chance of meeting problems." Bevelin stated that previously, he "was lacking the Munger ability to un-learn my own best-loved ideas".^[10]

Munger states that high ethical standards are integral to his philosophy; at the 2009 Wesco Financial Corporation annual meeting he said, "Good businesses are ethical businesses. A business model that relies on trickery is doomed to fail."^[11] During an interview and Q&A session at Harvard-Westlake School on January 19, 2010, Munger referred to American philosopher Charles Frankel in his discussion on the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the philosophy of responsibility. Munger explained that Frankel believed:

...the system is responsible in proportion to the degree that the people who make the decisions bear the consequences. So to Charlie Frankel, you don’t create a loan system where all the people who make the loans promptly dump them on somebody else through lies and twaddle, and they don’t bear the responsibility when the loans are good or bad. To Frankel, that is amoral, that is an irresponsible system.^[12]

Munger is critical of cryptocurrencies, referring to Bitcoin as "poison".^[13] In early 2018 he likened bitcoin to "harvested baby brains" in an interview with Yahoo Finance.^[14]

Lollapalooza effect[edit]

Munger uses the term "Lollapalooza effect" for multiple biases, tendencies or mental models acting at the same time in the same direction. With the Lollapalooza effect, itself a mental model, the result is often extreme, due to the confluence of the mental models, biases or tendencies acting together, greatly increasing the likelihood of acting irrationally.^[15]

During a talk at Harvard in 1995 entitled The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Munger mentions Tupperware parties and open outcry auctions, where he explained "three, four, five of these things work together and it turns human brains into mush,"^[16][17] meaning that normal people will be highly likely to succumb to the multiple irrational tendencies acting in the same direction. In the Tupperware party, you have reciprocation, consistency and commitment tendency, and social proof. (The hostess gave the party and the tendency is to reciprocate; you say you like certain products during the party so purchasing would be consistent with views you've committed to; other people are buying, which is the social proof.) In the open outcry auction, there is social proof of others bidding, reciprocation tendency, commitment to buying the item, and deprivation super-reaction syndrome, i.e. sense of loss. The latter is an individual's sense of loss of what he believe should be or is his. These biases often occur at either conscious or subconscious level, and in both microeconomic and macroeconomic scale.

Charlie Munger: Investment career

Investment career[edit]

He moved with his family to California, where he joined the law firm Wright & Garrett (later Musick, Peeler & Garrett). In 1962 he founded and worked as a real estate attorney at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP.^[3] He then gave up the practice of law to concentrate on managing investments and later partnered with Otis Booth in real estate development. He then partnered with Jack Wheeler to form Wheeler, Munger, and Company, an investment firm with a seat on the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. He wound up Wheeler, Munger, and Co. in 1976, after losses of 32% in 1973 and 31% in 1974.^[3]

Although Munger is better known for his association with Buffett, he ran an investment partnership of his own from 1962 to 1975. According to Buffett's essay, "The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville", published in 1984, Munger's investment partnership generated compound annual returns of 19.8% during the 1962–75 period compared to a 5.0% annual appreciation rate for the Dow.^[6]

Munger was previously the chairman of Wesco Financial Corporation, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway. It began as a savings and loan association, but eventually grew to control Precision Steel Corp., CORT Furniture Leasing, Kansas Bankers Surety Company, and other ventures. Wesco Financial also held a concentrated equity portfolio of over US$1.5 billion in companies such as Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods, US Bancorp, and Goldman Sachs. Munger believes that holding a concentrated number of stocks, that he knows extremely well, will in the long term produce superior returns.^[7]

Wesco is based in Pasadena, California, Munger's adopted hometown. Pasadena was also the site of the company's annual shareholders' meeting, which were typically held on the Wednesday or Thursday after the more famous Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Munger's meetings were nearly as legendary in the investment community as those he co-hosts with Buffett in Omaha. Such meetings were often perfunctory, but Munger interacted with the other Wesco shareholders at considerable length, sometimes speculating about what Benjamin Franklin would do in a given situation.^[8] Meeting notes have been posted on the Futile Finance? website, but no updates exist beyond 2011.^[9]

Charlie Munger: Early life and education

Early life and education[edit]

Munger was born in Omaha, Nebraska. As a teenager he worked at Buffett & Son, a grocery store owned by Warren Buffett's grandfather.^[2]

After enrolling in the University of Michigan, where he studied mathematics, he never returned to Omaha except to visit.^[3]In early 1943, a few days after his 19th birthday, he dropped out of college to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps, where he became Second Lieutenant. He continued his studies in meteorology^[4] at Caltech in Pasadena, California, the town he was to make his home.^[3]

Through the GI Bill he took a number of advanced courses through several universities; without an undergraduate degree, he entered Harvard Law School and graduated magna cum laude with a J.D. in 1948. At Harvard he was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.^[4][5]

In college and the Army he developed "an important skill": card playing. “What you have to learn is to fold early when the odds are against you, or if you have a big edge, back it heavily because you don't get a big edge often. Opportunity comes, but it doesn't come often, so seize it when it does come.”

Charlie Munger

"Charles Munger" redirects here. For the American politician, mayor of Orlando, see Charles Henry Munger.

Charles Thomas Munger (born January 1, 1924) is an American investor, businessman and philanthropist. He is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett; Buffett has described Munger as his partner. Munger served as chairman of Wesco Financial Corporation from 1984 through 2011. He is also chairman of the Daily Journal Corporation, based in Los Angeles, California, and a director of Costco Wholesale Corporation

Benjamin Graham: Legacy

Legacy[edit]

Graham is considered the "father of value investing,"^[1] and his two books, Security Analysis (1934) with David Dodd, and The Intelligent Investor (1949) defined his investment philosophy, and especially what it means to be a value investor. His ideals regarding investor psychology, minimal debt, buy-and-hold investing, fundamental analysis, concentrated diversification, buying within the margin of safety, activist investing, and contrarian mindsets went on to be utilized by those influenced by him. Arguably, his most famous student was Warren Buffett, who as of January 2018, was the third wealthiest person in the world.^[19] According to Buffett, Graham used to say that he wished every day to do something foolish, something creative, and something generous.^[20] And Buffett noted, Graham excelled most at the last.^[21]

While many value investors have been influenced by Graham, his most notable investing disciples include Charles Brandes, as well as those noted above: Schloss, Kahn, Klarman, and Ackman.^[22][23]

Alongside his revolutionary work in investment finance, Graham also made significant contributions to economic theory. Most notably, he devised a new basis for both U.S. and global currency.^[24]

Benjamin Graham: Personal life

Personal life[edit]

According to The Snowball, after his son's death, Graham had an affair with the deceased's girlfriend Marie Louise "Malou" Amingues (who was several years older than his son^[17]) and used to travel to France frequently to visit her. He later separated from his wife, Estey, after she refused his offer to split their residence six months each year between New York and France. Amingues was content to live with Graham without marriage.^[18]

On September 21, 1976, Graham died in Aix-en-Provence, France, at the age of 82.