Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

GROWING RICH WITH GROWTH STOCKS
This passion for investing is like fire in the belly. Either you have it
or you don’t. I also say there are three essential ingredients one must
have to be a success in this industry. I call them the three I’s: Integrity,
Intelligence, and Intensity. A person either does or does not have
them.”
Does he think most people in the investment field have the three
I’s? “In a majority of cases, yes, at least in the investment advisory
field,” he replies. “I think integrity is of foremost importance, because
people are trusting us with their money. There are few things people
have a higher regard for in this life than their money. People must
trust their investment manager. It’s not always easy to figure out if
your manager has integrity. Even if you spend time with him or her,
you can occasionally be snowed. Going back to the three I’s, a wise
person once said if someone doesn’t have the first one (integrity), but
has the other two (intelligence and intensity), regardless of the profession,
that person can do enormous damage. The problem I see in the
investment business is there’s too much superficiality out there. A lot
of people have this casino mentality. Instead of viewing what they
own as little pieces of businesses, they view the stock market as a
series of trends. They rely on chart patterns or are driven by momentum,
instead of looking at the underlying companies.”
OFF TO HARVARD
During his first year at Harvard, Yacktman decided to get a summer
job in the investment field so he’d have something to put on his resumé.
Not knowing whom to contact, he went down the list of investment
advisers in the Boston Yellow Pages. “I didn’t hit pay dirt, to
say the least,” he says. “Then I found a posting on the bulletin board
from the Keystone Funds. I got a job there as an analyst. My partner
and I were assigned to cover uranium. We made a lot of money for
the firm with a company called Utah Construction and Mining, which
was bought by General Electric several years later. It was a big miner
of uranium. We studied the whole business at a time when utilities
were just starting to build nuclear plants. Nobody on Wall Street was
following this area. I guess we were ahead of our time.” This job allowed
Yacktman to get through the doors of some major brokerage
firms and companies. “We talked with many analysts and corporate
executives,” he says. “I got to meet a lot of people.”
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