YouSaid · the spoken record

Bob Robotti

lines on the record: 112
first: 2024-06-23
most recent: 2024-06-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Belly Rain, he even buffet became well known around that time as value investing stocks really substantially outperform. And so therefore, I happened to walk in. And then at Tweety, who was there? Well, when Graham Newman closed up shop next door neighbor was Tweety Brown. And so Tom Knapp walked next door and then Walter Schloss next walked next door. And they were in the office when I was there. And Anderson was recruited from Charlie Munger to come in to run Tweety because Chris was too young to run it at the time. So John Spears had just started working there. So, you know, all these people were at, and they sat around a trading desk. And it said in office or someplace. And I knew what Tweedy owned, what they bought, why they owned it. And then one of the retired partners was a guy named Joe Riley, who was originally Tweety Brown. And Riley, Riley was in every day. That's where the auditor sat with him. And at 6.30, we talk about investing him. So I saw what Tweedy did. I saw with the young.”
2024-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH046: A New Golden Age w/ Bob Robotti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today, in certain ways, had come incorrect. And therefore, it was, as I say, the starting gun for value investing. So Tweety became an overnight success after being in business for decades because what they did and how they did it was something.”
2024-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH046: A New Golden Age w/ Bob Robotti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Neighborhoods in New York. And so this is 1975, right? New York City is about ready to go bankrupt. There's been an urban flight out of New York businesses and individuals. So therefore, it was a tough time. And I would go to very tough neighborhoods. So that was the one part of the practice. But the other part of the practice was there are all these investment advisors that were the clients of Custer Police. And one of them was Tweedy Brown. And so that's what it was. For four years that I was there, I worked on the audit of Tweety for two, three, four months of the year. And so that was a formative experience at a formative time, right? Because as I mentioned, the timing of that could not have been more opportune for me. It's 1975. So you have 73, 74, the market correction market 50%, one decision stocks, right? Didn't matter what price you paid for them, you bought them, you owned them because you absolutely always make money at them, potentially arrived to where we are.”
2024-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH046: A New Golden Age w/ Bob Robotti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's what happened. So now what I get the job for them, I also realize accounting is the profession that there's a right answer and a wrong answer. It's not like, what do you think and give me your views? This is right and wrong. So I did start by MBA at Pace University four days after I graduated Bucknell. And I went four nights a week. And I went for three hours in evening and I spent the weekend studying. And of course, that ended up being like a great experience. So the combination of working for a smaller accounting firm where I spent time in audit, spent time in tax. I moved around to a 25% firm. So therefore, you're applying during the day. And that night you're learning the concepts of accounting. And therefore, the concepts become easy when you actually apply it. So accounting is a boring major, boring subject for many people. But of course, it wasn't. I could see it live and in action and the information it gave you about companies. And that was it. The business of Pastor Reno had two pieces. One, I would do daycare center audits in the world.”
2024-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH046: A New Golden Age w/ Bob Robotti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Accounting program was easy. And so when I graduate with a C, well, I'm not going to get a job with the Big Accounting Firms. So there were not four, but eight of them, but still that was going on. And in New York, there were 25 large accounting firms. But none of them could I get a job with. So therefore, it ended up the job I did get was my father's childhood friend was the guy named Fred Punisi, and he had a small accounting for imposter public. January in my last year, he gave me an internship and I didn't make a fool of myself, so therefore he thought, okay, maybe the guys just didn't apply himself and is smart enough. And so I started working for Pastor Rino Puglisi and I fell into the right place that therefore opened up all these opportunities that formed in my life.”
2024-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH046: A New Golden Age w/ Bob Robotti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Engineering school. I'm not going to apply there because it'd be harder to get in, but they have a business school that at the time nobody'd apply to. So it was mathematically oriented and therefore I could hopefully speed in when they shouldn't have gotten into the school and I ended up, I got into Bucknell and I graduated with my C. So exactly what I thought would happen. I did, I fulfilled my expectations, you know, my disappointment probably in aggregate from that. So yes, that was, and of course I attribute in large part by success the fact that I got that C and the fact that so when I got to Bucknell, the question was, what mage do I have? There's a management major and is it counting major? So here I am on the football team. So I'm talking to all the football players and say, okay, so which is the easier major management of your accounting? And they say, oh, the accounting professors are becoming an accounting major. So that's how I selected accounting as my major. So I got in through the business school, which is the easier part of Buckingham at the time. And then I became an accountant because it was the”
2024-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH046: A New Golden Age w/ Bob Robotti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was driven in ambitious but not for studies, and so therefore in high school, I did reasonably well, each progressively zone grammar school, I was developing thorian of my class. But then in high school, I did okay, so I was the top third. But I was busy trying to play football and do other things and occasionally did some studies. But that's what I did do. I spent my junior senior year figuring out where it was going to go to college because I knew I was going to goof off. I knew I was going to get a C. And I figured the better the school I can get into, well, then the better the C from that university. So as it turned out, you know, Bucknell, Lafayette, Lehigh, Goldengate were the companies that schools that I identified that I thought were in the tier that I could get to. And of course, that was also what I applied as a major because my verbal score is 490. So like I'm a kid from Queens. I can't speak. I can't write English. But I did get a 710 in math. So therefore, when I applied to Bucknell, they have a really...”
2024-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH046: A New Golden Age w/ Bob Robotti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was the cheap draftsman. And so we have in our conference room, we have a couple of blueprints from, I have it from the 47th floor of the Rockefeller Center. After they did the Empire State Building, Depression came and Rockefeller Center was built. And it's all limestone. So he didn't work on that. He worked on St. John Dubine. So he was fortunate, happened to be at the right place at the right time, ended up with a phenomenal job during depression. And so therefore really did pretty well and accumulated some money. And so we owned some real estate like that was down the block from the neighborhood we grew up in. And so therefore, that gave the family definitely a good sounding place to start from.”
2024-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH046: A New Golden Age w/ Bob Robotti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my grandfather, who is Baptist Rabati, ended up, we lived in Long Island City. There was a stone company down the Black Hole Gillies& Sons, and Gillies and Sons had been in business for many years. Unfortunately, his good fortune, the original chief draftsman, was the son of the owner. And the son in a major building forgot there were four sides to the building, and he only bid it for three sides to the building. So when they lost an awful lot of money, he lost his job. And my grandfather got promoted. company did a lot of work with limestone and it was a critical change in construction right so the right the chrysler building was one of the two buildings that fought with one exchange place for the tallest building it's the last brick building that was built it's the tallest brick building in america in the world uh and then of course when you built the empire state building you went to limestone so you could put up steel girders you could slap pieces of limestone on it so there was an extremely efficient way to do that and that was the company that my grandfather had worked for so he”
2024-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH046: A New Golden Age w/ Bob Robotti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A ground floor opportunity to understand a business that's a strange business, property cash insurance, its own little industry with its nuance. So it was interesting.”
2024-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH046: A New Golden Age w/ Bob Robotti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so before he started that brokerage business in our house. And that I did see kind of grow from the inception. And as a kid, I worked in business with him and helped some. Not that much. I was not an early kind of like pitching in, doing a whole bunch of things. But I do think that it was interesting because it really did give me a sense as I would say joke. I understood the property casualty business because my father was a broker, but he did underwriting. So as I say, when the piganos across the street wanted insurance, that's the guys who ran the numbers and got arrested every so often for making book. So they came in, they went with this insurance company. But the veterosis up the block where they came in, they tipped the car, didn't go anyplace. You know, it was really pristine. He put it with his top-rated company. So he was effectively underwriting knowing which ones have exposure to loss here and which ones don't. So, you know, how that works and how the insurance business works was, you know, I had.”
2024-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH046: A New Golden Age w/ Bob Robotti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's more modest than that. My grandmother's did own the building. We owned the building and the store was downstairs. We lived upstairs. And the department store didn't do a lot of business because it had been put out of business with people in the neighborhood wanted to go to Macy's. It was easy enough to get them the subway and go. So back decades before, it really was probably a business that was critical to the community, but really wasn't that. It was not a thriving business, but it was more an opportunity for me when we played stickball up the block. We lost the spauldean, I would get the spaul dean from my grandmother's store. So therefore, I was a source for getting things out of my grandmother's store. And then my dad started it, you know, kind of upstairs originally in the living room. He started an insurance brokerage business. And I guess when he was 17, he had gotten some kind of disease that actually blinded him. And for most of his life, actually he had significant eyesight problems. So eventually he did probably with my grandparents help start that business.”
2024-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH046: A New Golden Age w/ Bob Robotti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT