Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

KIRK KAZANJIAN
records. But when I was at Stein Roe, I always felt that signing the
name Roy Papp was too short. So I started using L. Roy Papp to
lengthen it a little. Maybe I’m nuts, but I think it sits better than just
Roy Papp.”
GROWING FUNDS
For the first several years after moving from his home into a fullfledged
office, Papp didn’t list his number in the Yellow Pages. He
had all the business he could handle, overseeing mostly private accounts.
But his clients kept begging him to manage money for friends
with smaller sums than his normal minimum of $500,000. That’s
when he got the idea to start the L. Roy Papp Stock Fund, which debuted
in December 1989. Papp figured it would be a way for local
residents and friends with modest portfolios to tap into his stockpicking
expertise. Two years later, he decided to launch the Papp
America-Abroad fund. “I invented the concept of investing in the
globalization of the world by buying U.S. stocks,” he claims. “I had
an awful job getting the prospectus through the SEC. They were cooperative
and wanted me to do it. The problem was it didn’t fit their
formula. They had a rule that said in order to put the name of a
country on a fund, you must place 65 percent of your investments
in that country. In order to call it global, international, abroad, or
anything that suggests you’re worldwide, you had to have at least 10
percent of your investments in five different countries. I didn’t qualify
under either scenario. After about two months of going back and
forth, they finally allowed me to call it America-Abroad.”
Papp’s fund operation is as down-home and hospitable as he is.
The prospectuses, annual reports, and sales brochures are prepared
in-house on a typewriter or computer. Until recently, they were duplicated
on the company copying machine and stapled by hand. The
firm’s only logo is a 1980 sketch of Papp smoking a pipe that was
drawn by one of his favorite American artists, Leroy Neiman. The
most elaborate artwork you’ll find are pictures of some of Papp’s favorite
paintings, which grace the covers of single-page glossy brochures
put together on daughter Tori’s computer.
Judging from the fund material alone, you might assume Papp
were running these funds from his kitchen table. But there’s something
nice about that in this day of mutual fund behemoths. It almost gives
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