Price Signals

Finance, Economy, Markets, Life

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Bob Rodriguez: The best advice I ever got

"In the fall of 1974 I was in graduate school at USC taking a portfolio-management investment course. The financial markets were in difficulty, and I didn't understand how securities were being sold at such depressed levels. I had only recently discovered Security Analysis by Graham and Dodd when we had a guest lecturer come in named Charlie Munger, who went on about this idea of value investing. After the class was over, I walked up to Charlie and asked him if there was one thing that I could do that would make me a better investment professional. His answer was, 'Read history, read history, read history.' And so I became a good historian, reading both economic and financial history as well as general history. 

What I learned is that people relate to the crises they have experienced. So when the crisis of 2008 came, it felt like an old friend to me because it had so many similarities to the banking crisis of 1907. Asking Charlie's advice and then reading history allowed me to put those things in context."
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I'm an investment professional and have spent the bulk of my career in the investment management industry. I am a deep value investor, but I also move in and out of asset classes based on my macro outlook (typically 10-20 trades a year). I don't mind holding a big slug of cash even if it earns nothing in hopes of hitting that fat pitch (as I did in 2009). I've been watching our current economic train wreck with a mixture of fascination and dread. The pain is not over and the worst is still to come. Under a reckless Fed that has callously disregarded its duty to supervise the markets, we are slowly but surely heading towards a day of reckoning where we will see the global currency system realign, interest rates in the United States rise sharply, and our standard of living decline measurably.
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