Introduction to this blog

"Caution: This could happen to you too!"
That was the caption my son Matt and his college roommate's put under the copy of my old drivers license they had hung on their fridge. I thought it was pretty funny so I figured that it might be a good introduction. Of course, the "this" they are referring to is the 30 years of living, marriage, parenthood and entrepreneurship that have taken place since 1978....of which I am pretty darn happy about!( yuze yutes don't know nuthin)



“I’m a better investor because I am a businessman ………..and a better businessman because I am an investor” Warren Buffett

I am an entrepreneur and businessman. I have spent the majority of my career as a mortgage banker and founder of Union Trust Mortgage Corporation of Peabody Massachusetts.
I started my first real business when I was 20 and became fascinated with learning how to deal with all of the issues and challenges I had encountered. I immediately switched my major to business that fall. One of my first professors had us picking stocks as a model for teaching finance. Borrowing a page from Peter Lynch, (actually he had not written his books yet) I invested in what I knew. At that time, I knew pretty well some of the products of a company called Warner Communications. The stock did fantastic and I was hooked.
In spite of being the world’s greatest value investor, Warren Buffett has stories of years spent reading charts and handicapping horse races when he was a kid. I spent my very early years following “Stocks in the News” on what was then called the Financial News Network (CNBC). Also as a kid, I would spend much of my free time trying to find profitable betting systems at the greyhound track. I quit the dog track when I was around 20 after playing only three races one evening, “hitting” all three and breaking even.
Warren says that for him, it all came together like Paul on the road to Damascus when he read Ben Grahams book ‘The Intelligent Investor’.
For my part, I was an immediate convert to value investing when I read Roger Lowenstein’s book on Buffett, ‘The Making of an American Capitalist’. I believe I was 33 at the time and although I had long before stopped following what is now called momentum investing, I did not have a framework that gave me much confidence in investing in public companies. Yet here was Buffett operating so successfully in a fashion very similar to the way I was raised….. (Six kids, parochial schools, college, dentists and a wonderful home life all on a machinist income and a woman who could find 20 dollars worth of value for every dollar that came in the house.)

I am now forty seven and transitioning to full time value investing. I have been doing the work for years now whenever I could make the time. I thoroughly enjoy the process of ‘buying dollar bills for fifty cents’ and ‘finding nuggets of gold as I walk along the river banks’. I hope you will find some of my posts useful. I have spent countless hours studying the writings and teachings of men I consider to be master craftsman; Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Seth Klarman, Peter Lynch and Joel Greenblatt. I am not any where near as smart as any of the above, but they tell me if I have average intelligence, the right temperament and discipline I will do OK. So far so good…..
Cheers