YouSaid · the spoken record

Fred Martin

lines on the record: 117
first: 2023-01-08
most recent: 2023-01-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So, just think about that kind of clarity of thinking, that clarity of process. So, you know, to carry it forward to managing money within my company, we have every stock, there's one person responsible for following the stock, and it's a sign. Everybody knows who it is. Every client we have, there's one portfolio manager that's responsible for shepherding that relationship. We don't move it around much. There's also one portfolio assistant that's responsible for developing the relationship. So you see that kind of line clarity throughout, okay? So I think that's sort of management 101. The idea of process, though, came more slowly. I just, I wish I could give you like a moment when I realized that it was right thing to do. It might have been when I started DGI because I was part of a star system. I thought, I think a group effort can be superior to one.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have to confess to you that many decisions I made over my lifetimes were implicit decisions, not explicit. I didn't sit around and say, you know, you've got to think about processes. But I walked out of it seeing safety in the Navy was paramount. You know, if you read the history of World War II, one of the reasons that we want as the Japanese thought their pilots were expendable and we would do everything we could to save a pilot. It turns out they're really expensive to train and you only have a certain pool. And so the Navy was obsessed with safety, which I thought was great. The process part had to do with this. You're on a bridge. So you've got multiple people. You've got a guy behind the wheel driving, and he takes orders from the counting officer. You always want to make sure everybody knows who the counting officer is. The captain's on the bridge anytime you wants, he can say, this is the captain. I have the con. That means the only person that can tell that guy what to do is the captain. The XO could also do the same thing, the executive officer.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It looked like you took a welder and he cut off the front half of the ship. I mean, it literally looked like the ship just stopped, just almost where the bridge was. The front half was gone. It literally was right up and down. And it seared in my mind. So what you do is you start thinking, okay, I'll give you an example. When you're on a bridge, the radios are blaring. You got six or seven people on there. You got the radio, the engine room calling you on something. You got all these distractions. You have to cut through all that. So I always had the habit of walking out on the bridge, wing, if we're turning right, I'd walk out in the starboard wing and I'd take a peek to see what's out there. If we're going left, before we threw the helm over, I'd go out and take a peek. That was 15 seconds, but I want to make sure there was nothing out there.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't shut it out. Well, that's good in a way. I could still go after the return, go after the opportunity, but I can never shut it out. So the Evans just crystallized my mind. So I'm starting to think, how do we avoid that? And one of the symptoms.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've done a lot of snow skiing. Typically, I go to an area, I'll scout all the runs, skiing the next day. Or if I'm in a pack of people and they're doing runs and I don't necessarily want to do the runs, I'll just split off and ski myself. What it is is the book Psychology of Money and Jim War is a great thinker, by the way. Talked about right, left brain balance. That is the ability to assess risk and opportunity simultaneously. And as you grow and he claims Buffett has that, can look at both sides of it. And I think I probably have that. It's just, it's a gift that you're born with. And I can never look at something and shut out the wrist part of it totally. I can never do that. I can't, okay, it's always there.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can broad that into, which reminds me of sort of a book I read years ago by a wonderful named Jim Ware about the psychology of money. It's worth reading. It's quite good. But I didn't realize at the time, but I was already very tuned to risk. There's pluses and minuses to that, by the way. So I grew up in a very active family of six boys, right? Well, if I saw something was risky and exceeded my risk tolerance, a Daredevil can block that out and overpowered. I could never block it out enough. So we went to Chicago one time at an amusement park. The owner was a friend of my dad's and he would put us on the rides. And their fastest roller coaster was there. And I'm the only one that didn't ride it. And of course, she get called chicken and my brothers are making fun of me. I eventually wrote it later in the day only after they tested it and I was satisfied that it was going to be okay. I'd done that.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting the In batches, well, it was third rate posted, so you get 13 and one dump, you know. I mean, we'd get mail delivered by helicopter typically. You know, they'd come and drop a big bag of stuff. So, yeah, I didn't, it's hard to read when you get 13 in a row because you're losing the pacing of it. But I was still very interested investing even through the whole time in the Navy.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Proving ground. The other part was I got these high ratings, and yes, I was clear command really early. I never wanted to stay in. I'd go see the captain. Say you're doing a great job for me. What are you going to do when you get out? I was going to manage money. I was the unofficial financial officer to the investment officer to the ship. I remember looking at mutual funds and reviewing it for people. And I was already thinking about investing.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was gruelly duty when you're in a war zone, you're standing eight hours watch a day plus your regular job. So the other memory is I got out, looked for a job, and I didn't get a single question about my Navy career. It's kind of interesting because that's all I knew, you know. But there were a lot of clues in there about my self-concept, my effectiveness. Play the tape way forward. I have this idea, you know, unverified, but we learn stuff in our lifetime and you put it in the closet. And 20 years later, it comes out and you have this stuff that's there. It's knowledge is rarely wasted. It just resides there. So my management skills as a money manager are way above most money managers who tend to be loaners and, you know, and I got lucky because I had that middle manager experience in early age in a lot of the functional parts of it I use today in structuring the firm. So he was just like an amazing.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember that vividly. It was kind of half in. And then I somewhere along the line said, Well, you got three more years. Let's put the afterburns on. Then I got really serious about it. And then I started really becoming effective. So what I remember about was, first of all, the idea where you go in as a kid, come out as a man. I came out as a very, very serious man. We fired big guns that fired bullets a long way. You know, I had all kinds of intensive middle management. My last job, I report directly to the captain. I had 65 people working for me. I've never worked at hard since.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it's a funny sort of starting point to that. So I was going to school in New England, right? And I was an NRTC. And so for some reason, and I cannot explain why, I had my heart set on being on a destroyer in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I mean, I bought a chart of the Hawaiian Islands. I circled Pearl Harbor and read, but it was really stupid because what I didn't understand was that was the front line for sending ships to Vietnam. So my reward for that was I had three deployments. I was only in for four years. So I had three seven-month deployments to Vietnam. So I was, you know, home for six, gone for seven, home for six. I mean, you can run the math. So I got three tours in. So I had a tremendous amount of sea time. I recall coming out of, you know, there was a big anti-war movement in the colleges. I remember starting and for the first year in that service, I wasn't committed at all.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My life until about 14. I mean, I have really high energy, but I'm average among my brothers of energy. I mean, they're, you know, brother older than me, he was 79, still rides his bike 6,000 miles a year, his bicycle, okay? The oldest one's a killer. He's got MS for 45 years, and he's just a tiger. So I've said my life until I was about 14, was trying to keep from getting killed by my two older brothers and exerting total physical dominance in the three younger ones. I mean, it's just like, you know, it's chaos. And so the big thing is you get a strong sense of survival, you know, because it was. It wasn't a super healthy environment. We had really good parents, but it wasn't super healthy. But, well, you sure learn how to survive. Trust me.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it took me years to marry up the self image. And I think my mother could have helped narrow that up. You know, a person that we all have different ways of receiving the world. And it was a struggle for me when I was younger to try to fit the world into what I thought it should be, okay? So there was the high self-concept. She could do anything. She knew it. So whenever I start something, I figure, well, let's see how good I'm going to be at it. So just an absolute sense of not so much arrogance as self-confidence.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's a yin and yang to there. There's a good and a bad to it. The good part was that she had an undeniable self-confidence and which got passed on to me and some of my other brothers. So I start something with the ideas how good am I going to be at this. I don't start with the idea that it's not going to work. Just a really high self-concept. The negative part was that I remember this vividly that my In those days, you didn't have any special schooling. I was one of six boys, very active household. I was the second most creative member of the family. My brother Yarn me is actually almost dysfunctionally creative, an amazingly creative guy. It wasn't until my mid-30s that I was working for then Mitchell Hutchins and the head guy from New York came out to see me maybe late 30s. And he said, you know, you're one of the two original thinkers I haven't affirmed. I looked at him. I said, I don't know what you're talking about.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So she lived 25 more years before she got cancer a second time and died at age sixty seven So, with that kind of history. You can imagine she's an idol to all of us in the family The other amazing part to her was that if you had met her after cancer, She's one of these people that never said a negative word about somebody. She was either effusive in their praise or didn't say anything. But this amazing force you would Would never have known she had cancer. You would never know about her background. You never know about her accomplishments. She was one of these people that just walked softly and carried a giant stick. All of my brothers, and I idolize her to this day. My dad did”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then she started to have more kids, and then she had up to three, I'm the third oldest. Then she wanted a daughter. So then she went to number four. Was a boy Choose a name or doubt or joy because her mother was named Joy The fifth was named Jay, another boy. The sixth was named John, another boy. On the seventh tribe she had a little girl. Unbeknownst to her at the time, she had a, I think it was ovarian cancer, and Her little girl was born Prematurely and died 36 hours after she was born. And six months after that, Received a death sentence from three doctors that get your affairs in order. Because that was pre. Chemo was radiation therapy only, and her response Was absolutely true Looked at the triumph. She says, I can't go now because I have three little boys at home”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have five brothers, and they're all wonderful people, which is rare. It's all good husbands, good fathers, good people. And it was our mother. And so let me just give you the dichotomy that was a part of her life. So she grew up effectively as an only child, a pampered daughter of a rich banker in Northern Michigan. And she graduated from college, I think, in 1939. You can imagine how many women graduate from college in 1939. She then had three years of postgraduate music education at University of Chicago. So she was a concert level pianist, concert-level soprano, a sculptress, a painter. She painted oil portrait of every one of her sons. I still have my painting of me. And not a very large woman. When she got married to my dad, she was going to have a child for the experience. She had one. Something clicked, and so she had a boy.”
2023-01-08 · We Study Billionaires · RWH020: The Disciplined Growth Investor w/ Fred Martin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT