Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

GROWING RICH WITH GROWTH STOCKS
Wall Street Journal wrote the following about the Gabelli Growth
Fund on August 3, 1989: “With its solid performance it probably
should be called the Bramwell Fund. Maybe it will be some day.” This
obviously put a strain on the working relationship between Gabelli
and his star manager.
Bramwell ran the fund without any internal support until 1991,
when Gabelli gave her one dedicated analyst. By then, the fund’s assets
had grown to some $300 million. Bramwell invested in a universe
that was almost entirely different from the rest of the Gabelli organization.
By the time her lone analyst left in January 1994, the fund
had grown to $700 million. Gabelli stalled on hiring a replacement,
leaving Bramwell alone once again. “He then mandated that I immediately
move from my office in New York City to his new headquarters
in Rye, which is a one-hour drive from Manhattan,” Bramwell contends.
“Analyst meetings were becoming more important, and they
were held in Manhattan. I told him I couldn’t spend my day riding
back and forth on the highway during trading hours to attend those
meetings and that the fund’s performance would suffer. That didn’t
affect him. The last straw was when I went off to a lunch put on by
one of the companies in my portfolio in February 1994 and came
back to find that he had changed the locks on my office door.”
Bramwell abruptly quit her job on February 10, 1994, and quickly
began laying the foundation for the next phase of her career.
ON HER OWN
It’s not that Bramwell wanted to part ways with Gabelli. As she
puts it, leaving the Gabelli Growth Fund was like abandoning a child.
Besides, she earned a great salary. Her bonus in 1993 alone was
$750,000. “My compensation was open-ended,” she explains. “I got
a percentage of the management fee after expenses. No one expected
it to turn into such a big fund. I was not planning to leave. I even
bought shares of Gabelli Growth in January 1994. I wouldn’t have
done that if I were planning to go.” Nevertheless, she felt there was
no other option, given the lack of support.
“I had always worked for somebody else and decided that if I were
going to do anything, I was going to work for myself,” she insists. “I
wanted to prove I could start up a business and succeed. It was a
mountain I needed to climb.” Her first step was to register her new
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