YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Keefe

lines on the record: 106
first: 2023-10-15
most recent: 2023-10-15
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

“Smart, laid back guy. He was still smart, but he certainly wasn't laid back. He was ashen faced, and he was quite grave. And he said again, give me an hour. I got a business to fix. I'll answer whatever questions you have to the extent it's legal for me to do so. So have at it, and then I got to go see if I can fix this business”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, businesses are like people, they make mistakes and they have hard times. And so American Terror had its hard time and it's a big mistake, which was getting over levered. The dot-com bus. There are also some adjacent businesses. There's a teleport business that they were trying to boot up at the same time. They were just getting an awful lot more than they could chew. And they got overlevered in the process. And so Steve agreed to see me and Chuck. And so struggling with one up to visit with Steve, and he said, I'm going to give you an hour. He said, you understand, I have a business that I'm trying to save. It requires my full time and attention. But you guys were early on, you act like my business partners, not like renters or the stock. And so, you know, we'll give you an hour. So we went up to Boston to visit with them. And Steve, who was ordinarily a”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the point is, I mean, the number of cell sites and cell towers had to grow exponentially for a long period of time. People figured this out. They bit up these stocks to really unsustainable prices during the dot-com boom, which helped further fuel the rise in these stocks. Well, American Tower got over levered, and like all of the people in the sell-tower business did, they almost had to because there was a land rush. You know, you don't get a second chance to buy a cell tower. You know, once it's bought, it's gone. And so that was a mistake. And so the stock went from 44 bucks a share to under 80 cents a share in a fairly short period of time.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that was the pillar assumption that you had to make. Or digital communications got to expand or not. And we made the assumption that there were, so we bought a lot of it. And as you probably know, American terror got caught up in the land grab when people figured out the Cell Terror business and the carriers, AT&T and back then GTE and others were selling their carrier, their tariff portfolios because the carriers had to figure out whether they wanted to sell service or be in the real estate business. And of course the network of towers and cell sites had to expand dramatically to accommodate the growth in wireless communications combined with the lower procogation characteristics of the digital capable frequencies.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or 20 bucks, and the one issued market, then went to $44 this year after people figured out what a great business to sell to or business was, you know, where you're operating cost for $10,000 a year and your rents might be over $100,000 a year, and anybody can do the map. And all you had, the only assumption that you had to make was were digital communications going to grow or not. And this is long before the iPhone. So we're really talking about voice.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you'd have thought I called the Defense Intelligence Agent Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, and then asked an uncomfortable question. He basically hung up on me. So I knew that there was something here at which to look that required further inquiry. We always figured out that it was a sell tower business, and we got some sense for is it bigger than a bread box type economics. We understood that they were good. So we started to buy We already had a huge position in American radio, but we bought more American radio because we figured that this business was going to be externalized in one way, shape, or form. That's why they had a separate stock option program for it. So sure enough, they did. They wound up spinning it off. And it went to 44 bucks a share. Remember there was a one issued market even before it was spun off. People started to get really excited about it. It went to each.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a footnote in one of American towers SEC filings that made reference to a separate stock option program for the employees of something called American Tower Systems. That's all it was. It was a single sentence, but I read it and I called up Steve with whom I had a great relationship. We talk about the radio business and other businesses and other things for a long time.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Steve began to get some calls from people who wanted to hang digital cell phone antennas on his radio towers. Digital communications require a much denser network of cell sites than the old analog because the signal propagation characteristics, which means the distance of the signal will carry are much lower. So you need a lot more cell sites. People wanted to hang or put cell sites on Steve's towers. So he gets the idea, well, maybe we can start aggregating these towers into a business.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was an English major in Yale. I think he might have gone to NBA somewhere, but he didn't let that hurt him. And he's just a serial value creator and a great guy by which I could tell you some wonderful stories. He digrantically a few years ago in a bicycling accident down in Florida. But he was running American radio systems, which itself was a terrific business. It was terrestrial radios, which until the internet came along as a fabulous business because if you own the dominant radio station, you make down, you know, if you own any W in New York, you had no choice but to advertise with them. And of course, nothing except for a small amount of money for content to run a radio station. Anyhow, after the telecom act of 1996, I think it was, sort of paved the way for digital communications, for the explosion of digital communications.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every megacompow we've only had a long secular tailwind behind it. And of course, we didn't know that at the time we bought Microsoft, but it was there. But in the case of American Tower, which is an interesting story, I discovered it in, I think, 1998 when it was part of a predecessor company called American Radio Systems. A lot of people don't realize that American Tower was spun off from American radio in the late 1990s. American radio was run by the”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That he came in with an extraordinarily high stock price with $30 or $40 multiple on it. But ultimately, Satya came in and has done just incredible things for the business. He didn't happen to just come in when the stock price was low. He came in and did magnificent things, from a capital allocation standpoint, whether it's booting up Azure to many of the other things that he's done. So that's the path to Microsoft. had a margin of safety and we're buying a great business the outlet business that is at a discounted price”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What the rest is history. Satya came along and we know what he's done with the business since then. So we thought our margin of safety was modest multiple. We thought we were paying for what we considered to be the most important and understandable part of the business. And of course, that a great balance sheet and their buying back stock. I think Steve Valler gets bad rap. He may not have done a Hall of Fame CEO, but she also came in when the stock was extremely high priced. And if you look at his tenure as CEO, free cash flow and earnings and all the important stuff were compounded nicely, returns on capital were nice, were good. They made some mistakes. And I think a lost style points because of his personal approach to the business. But, you know, he couldn't control.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that computer, probably has Microsoft operating software on it. And the Outlook business is probably on every single one of those. And it ain't going anywhere for a long time. So we're willing to pay 15, 16, 17 times free cash flow for that business, and maybe something good will happen to the rest.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the stock price was under 30 at the time. And so we said, well, you know, we're paying mid to high teens multiple for the outlook business. There's everything else on top of that, you know, whether it's server business, the Windows business, all the other software businesses that Microsoft owned us. We may not understand those. But our moment of epiphany came when my colleague Jim Roney and I were looking at our office window, the building in Pennsylvania Avenue and D.C. And we looked out over the Edward Murrow Park and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And there's probably two or three hundred glass windows on these buildings that we can view just from our vantage point. And we made the observation every single, behind every single one of those windows is a computer.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we came up with some simple arithmetic, the Microsoft Outlook business alone, that is your email, your PowerPoint, Excel, and your Word, that was in virtually every office in the United States and mostly around the world and was worth about $1.80 per share. In terms of free cash flow.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Each of those three businesses illustrates a distinct path to getting to investing. So when we bought Microsoft, Balmer was still in charge there. And nobody liked him. Nobody liked Microsoft. It was technology dinosaur. They had announced that they were going to buy Nokia, which is a cell phone company back then that nobody cares about today, at least from a standpoint of cell phones. And I think Microsoft agreed to pay something on the order, pay $910 billion for it. The market valuation went down by that amount, by the purchase price, literally when they made the announcement. So the stock market rode off the entire purchase price of Nokia in 30 seconds. We had been looking at some of the old technology businesses like Microsoft and eBay and some others”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be Yeah, there's a lot of clutter in our 13F if you look at it, but you're essentially right. I think that our top three businesses are at least 30 to 5 to 40 percent of our assets. And the top 10 are easily 75 or 80 percent of our assets. And there's small farm team above and beyond the core holdings.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I figured, well, what's a manageable number? And I said, Well, 20 sounds like a lot. 15 sounds okay, 10 sounds even better because I just can't keep the financial details of 15 businesses in my head with any depth. So I just always felt comfortable owning 10 or 12 businesses that I thought I could know well enough to risk sizable amounts of investor capital want my own capital.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. I was in some conference up in New York, and I can't even remember what it was, but I remember the moment like it was yesterday. Again, you know, as this person who's trying to form an investment philosophy and reading Buffett and Monger and saying, yeah, that makes sense, but how do you apply this? And I heard Mason say in his speech to an investment group, why on your 40th best idea? And I said, aha. Yes, that's some of the wisdom that I have been searching for. What is the point of owning your 40th best idea? Let's say it's an equally distributed 40 business in a portfolio. If you're lucky enough to have that business double in value, it will add exactly two and a half percentage points to your portfolio. Who is smart enough to find 40 businesses that are that? Well, I'm”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I completely agree with your assessment. For the investing community, it means you ought to put your money in an index fund, but for the people who are on the other side or in the investment community itself, it means, well, if you're good and you can find those businesses that are going to compound and create above average value over a long period of time and buy them right, it's good news. It's got two interpretations.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I love your characteristic of subversive because I think that's exactly what it is. But I said, hallelujah, this means someone who's got the ability to figure out what those 4% are is going to kill him. And if you're going to be in this business, I think you have to have internal belief that, yeah, I can find those great businesses. After all, what are we all doing every day? I mean, most of the people that I know and respect in this business are doing nothing but looking for those four percenters. And so, yeah, I said this is really, really good news. This means someone who's got a quality bent and a concentrated portfolio is going to win. Supports in one sense the Bogle argument, which Warren and Charlie endorse that most people ought to be an index funds. But for those few active managers who are good enough to identify the great businesses and buy them in quantity, I thought.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, y And Dr. Hendrick Messenbinder at the University of Arizona put a fine point on this when he, in his study, which is also referenced at some point in your book, that since 1926, 4% of all public companies have accounted for 100% of the return in excess of the five-year treasury. That means the other 96 cumulatively added up to return from the five-year treasury. So that puts a real fine point on how difficult this business is. 96% of the business is at which you're going to look are not going to add value and help you justify your fees.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so one of the things when I tell young investors when I'm mentoring them is make a choice. You're either an economist or an investor unless you're one of those five people you mentioned. And I just rhetorically say there's probably five people on the planet who can consistently tell you what the dollar is going to do, what the price of gypsum is going to be, what oil might be, or the price of money. I know none of those things, and I simply don't have enough mental bandwidth to be able to allocate any room at all to these things. So I do my best to invest in a manner where those things are ultimately going to be unimportant. And this leads to a real important point that you made in your book, and Howard Marks talks about if you were out of the market for months out of the last 7,000 months or something like that, you missed 100% of the market return.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And on do everything that you want to compound or to do. Well, I bought it right and sold it after it depreciated four or five times in our portfolio because I allowed some thinking about erroneous thinking about valuation and probably about the economy to creep into my thinking. Full construction is somewhat linked to the construction cycle. And so I probably let all these things influence my thinking and wind up selling the position in its entirety and having made, like I said, four or five times our capital on the business. Well, I think it's appreciated about tenfold since then. So what that taught me was that, you know, there have to be an investor or an economist. Not many people can be both. And I don't know any wealthy economists, so I'd rather be an investor. And so I just try to tune out some of the second.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is not exactly a business mecho. But in any event, it checked all our boxes. Manny Perez de la Mesa, who's still the chairman of the board, I think, was the CEO then. He'd been at GE. He had a great background. He was an understood capital allocation beautifully. And Full Corp was a terrific business. And for those of you listeners who aren't familiar with it, I'll tell him in a breath. It's a distributor of pool supplies and equipment and it gets margins in the mid single digits. Most distributors, margins in the low single digits, but pool corporate has this unique franchise that permits it to get these ridiculously high returns for a distributor. And those ridiculously high returns multiplied by frequent inventory turnover mean they get huge returns on”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think full corporation is the biggest mistake I've ever made in my investment career. And like you said, selling early is the high blood pressure of the investment business. It's a silent killer. And people will always talk about the business they bought that went to zero or the one that went down 50% or 75%. Yes, that's bad. You want to avoid that. But the business that you sold too early that went on the compound tenfold or 20-fold after that in my career has been a real killer and I bought full corporate at the right price. Interesting story that I could tell you about going down to visit management in Covington, Louisiana.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“20 years, but nonetheless, we were able to hang on to enough of these great businesses that we wound up building together a pretty good track record. And in 1998 and brought Jim Rooney into the business and the rest is history.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Particularly early on. And you're right. We're a couple to 300 above the ST over three decades. It's disproportionately early on in the first 15, 20 years that that record was achieved. I think we've been more marketish for the last decade. But whether it was because we applied the Buffett and Munger principles, which we were assiduously trying to do or got lucky, we wound up buying a handful of businesses that simply turned out to be really, really great businesses that compounded for many, many years. And one of my biggest mistakes was cutting back some of those businesses. I don't think I had yet read Warren or Churley's admonition to not to cut flowers and water the weeds. I did a fair amount of flower cutting and weed watering in those first 15 or”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I underline that in the book about five times because early on, I think He was your term elder statesman. And I was the young guy, the fire in the belly. And I think that that kind of economy sort of resonated and was great in terms of our relationship. But I think it also appealed externally for some reason. There's a fire and ice thing going on there. But in any event, we had a terrific results early on. The markets were roaring, and so we had the wind at our backs, and we got lucky at a handful of businesses. Like I said, I devoured everything that Warren and Charlie and all the others, all the other greats of the age were seeing. That doesn't mean that we really knew how to implement it. It doesn't mean we know how to implement it today. We wound up buying a handful of concentrated businesses that treated us extremely well.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, you know, there's a million people out there who speak fluent buffet and munger, but they don't invest particularly well. I think it was in your book, Zach Zacharias said that I wrote this down, so it's going to permit me to refer to some of my notes.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we throw in together because I saw an opportunity to commercialize what had essentially been just a small internally operated Shamley office and Charlie had a succession problem to solve. So scratch both itches. My entrepreneurial itch and Charlie's need to get a successor. But it wouldn't have worked if we weren't intellectually compatible. We were different enough so that we had approaches that could complement each other. But the Venn diagram overlapped enough so that we could work together and in fact enhance each other's processes.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By 1991, when that rolled around, assets had swelled to $18 million. And Charlie was in his mid-50s and Avenue had to get registered with the SEC because it had a sufficient number of clients truly having accumulated. This friend, that relatives, and some other portfolios because he'd established a reputation as a pretty good stock picker. But Charlie's an interesting guy. He's not he's quiet, thoughtful, extremely intelligent, and he's wired to understand how businesses work. And he's an extremely quick study. And so he was just a natural born stock picker. He mentioned Marty Whitman earlier. I'd put him in that camp. He could see value in a lot of different types of business and a lot of different types of industry. But we were rooted in things like the intelligent investor, Graham and Dodd and Buffett.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of his said, Well, listen, my family has some substantial resources, and why don't you just leave the bank and come run our family's investments? Charlie said, that sounded like a good idea. And so he formed an avenue to do that. So while the term wasn't in common usage at the time, Avener was, for all intents and purposes, a family office, you know, with eight or nine million dollars under management when it opened up its doors, which back in 1980 was a lot of money.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Step for me. But so this fella introduced me to Charlie Makele. Charlie and I got along instantly. He had formed an avenue in 1980. My background, Charlie graduated from Princeton with a degree in chemistry. And he was a chemist for a couple years afterwards. And then he went to the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia where he got his MBA and he became a banker. So he was a successful banker and ran the commercial lending unit of the local bank here in DC that's now been merged three or four times. But he'd always had an interest in investing and invested his own money and some of his family's money over the years and he'd been successful at it a banking client.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of my great compliments in my career was when a guy who runs a forensic accounting firm that advises hedge funds and short sales offered me a job despite the fact that I had zero formal training and accounting. But obviously I turned it down. But going back to Avener, so I just happened to run into Charlie. He had someone who was assisting him at the time and we're both in the CFA class. He said, you know, the guy who I work for is in his mid-50s. He's got this little investment management firm. He's concerned about succession. And I said, well, that's interesting. I said, I was sort of down the road with a large firm in New York to go up there and run their research department, but that would have been an intermediate.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I learned a lot from him. And by the way, before I forget to mention it, you and I have something in common, you know, when I was in college, I never set foot inside of business or an accounting classroom.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On day one, you've got to pay the rent on day two. Building a family. Day three, you're thinking about the legacy. So the way you approach your life evolves over time. But yeah, I mean, I just, like I said, I got here D.C. and thought I was going to be a lawyer and decided that that was a really bad idea. And I just wanted to do something. I had a lot of energy and I was curious about everything, which can be a problem because if you're curious about everything, it's hard to focus on one thing.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you're a young man, young woman, you know, we've all been there. You just want to go out and slay the world. I think that's just part of the natural deal of being young and mowing to a new city like I did and wanting to do something. I tell people I have no idea what I wanted to do, what I wanted to do something and I wanted to make an impact on people's lives, a favorable impact on people's lives.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are serving someone, and you should be serving those who need your skills. If you are good at this business, then you have an obligation to give those skills to those who need it. And they're desperately needed. They're desperately needed by hospitals, schools, retirees, poor people, wealthy people who simply don't care about investing. So the need is enormous. So I think it's important to approach this business from a standpoint of service. And if you're any good at it, you know, the money's going to rain down upon you. More money than you ever imagined and more money than you're ever going to need. So, you need to take the money out of the equation because if you're any good, you're going to make a lot of it. If you're not, you still might make a lot of it. But I think the principal motivation has to be to serve.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you have any thoughts? You've got to enjoy the game, but you've really got to appreciate the craft. And you do have to, the reason I ask that question, would you do this on a teacher's salary? It's serious, but it's also a trick question because anybody who's good at this, who's not going to have to live on a teacher's salary for very long. But I don't want to be involved professionally with people who are doing this solely for the money.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, and of course, am I interested in the rewards, the financial rewards of this business? Absolutely. I don't know anybody in this business who isn't, and I'd worry about you a little bit if you said that you weren't. But having said that, this business is a calling. And I think that when I'm talking to people about why they want to be in this business or when I'm mentoring younger investors, I do, this is sort of an ominous statement. It says, we're all think that we're in service to others, but sometimes you're serving yourself. So I sort of ask this question. It's gently. You're serving someone, but who are you serving? Make sure you understand who you're serving. So we're all in service to others, but make sure you understand who you're serving.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, you know, a lot of what you write about in your book and your podcasts, people are, one of the things you're really good at, William is getting people to open up about what really makes them tick. And I think if you opened up the minds of a lot of people in this business, you discover that their motivations may not be exactly what they think they are. I think money is an incredibly powerful motivator, and people may not be willing to admit just how powerful a motivator it is. I think it was Henry Kissinger who said money's the ultimate aphrodisiac. And it just can accomplish all kinds of things. And I think we all know that subconsciously.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, well, I won't tell you whether you should or shouldn't have, but I'm reminded of the old discount broker commercial where the couple comes in and sits in front of his desk and says, do you have any retirement plans? And the broker says, yeah, I'm going to buy a yacht and I'm going to travel around the world. And they go, no, no, wait a minute. Retirement plans for us. The point is it's clearly Marty should have been thinking differently about your situation, particularly since it's your mother's money. One of my filtering mechanisms, just thinking about investments as though my mother's money is going into this. Buffett talks about writing his letters for his sister. I think about it. My mother, who's no longer with us, but didn't know anything about investing. But, you know, is this a business that my mother should be invested in? It's one of my thresholds.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Washington lay has a longstanding tradition called the Botter Code, whereby he didn't lie cheap or steal. So if you embraced it, it was a place for you. If you didn't, it was not the place for you. And there was a single sanction. And that was expulsion. So we all bought into it. And at least if you were going to stay there, you bought into it. And so it's something that I think most of its alumni carry forward into their professional lives. And it's formed a bond among the alumni that I think is exceptionally strong. But going back to the environment in which I grew up, Anthony Deedon refers to money as irreplaceable capo. But we don't think about it these days. But to a certain generation, money was not plentiful. And it was irreplaceable. So you were incredibly careful with it.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Safe deposit box. I don't know how they acquired it. I also have, I'm looking at some gold company that my great-grandfather invested in that disappeared by framed the certificates and got them on the wall here as a reminder of what can happen.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we weren't four, but my parents are both children of the depression. My mother was essentially an orphan when she was quite young. And my father was fortunate enough to go into college, but there just wasn't a ton of money. There was enough for kids through private college. But these are depression era people that I grew up around. And the idea of entrusting your money to someone else, giving them discretion, as we call it, was just anathema. And you simply didn't do that. And to this day, I still have some deep part of my reptilian brain that says, wait, what? People are handing their money over to someone else, whether it's an institution or an individual, they're letting somebody else call the shots. That just is not the type of environment in which I grew up. And I didn't know anybody who owned stock. I think there was a couple of shares of some utility stock that was in my parents.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a 7.5% front end load, which meant that in an average year, your investor was giving away at least one year's worth of return before they even broke even. Another popular investment product, as they call them, by the way, calling somebody's money a product is like chewing aluminum foil for me.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going through this process of teaching myself accounting and then trying to apply the small lessons that I learned on a daily basis to the investing, you know, whether it was my own money or other people's money. The entire industry was undergoing this radical change as a function of Mayday. I remember some of the brokers who were holdovers for that period of time. And like I said, they're walked around in a daze and they were shell shocked because most of them, and they were all men, unfortunately, were of a different age, in different era. And they didn't want to compete and they couldn't compete in this environment where you had to come up with some razzle-dazzled story to sell a stock, or you had to have the emotional and perhaps ethical indifference to sell a mutual fund.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just wasn't coming out for that. I mean, I just wasn't emotionally prepared to do the things that you had to do to be successful in the business. So I sort of muddled along. And for a decade and all the while, I'm trying to hone my talents as an investor. I understood intuitively that value was not created by the flickering electrons on the screen or by news as most of my brokerage colleagues did. I knew something else was going on, but there had to be an organic process underway at businesses that answered the philosophical question, how does a dollar become more than a dollar or less than a dollar? And how does this happen on a unit basis, a unit being a share of stock? So these were all philosophical questions that I endeavored to answer.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this was the early 1980s, and your listeners might not be aware that in 1975, the SEC allowed commissions to be negotiated as opposed to fixed, which is how the business had worked forever. And that meant that there was going to be competition for commissions. And that gave rise to the discount shops like Schwab and TD Ameritrade and Fidelity and others who could compete solely on commissions. And that was really shell shocked. A lot of people in the business, some of the old timers who are accustomed to going out and selling a couple hundred shares in local utility preferred stock and being on the first tee by three o'clock in the afternoon. You know, suddenly it turned into a cutthroat business. And those of you, your listeners who've seen the movie Wall Street understand what I'm talking about.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT