Investing for the Long Term

CHAPTER 1A Bit About My Early Years

I will start at the beginning, resisting the temptation to spare my own blushes. I feel it would not be natural to share my experience as an investor without first revealing a little about myself. There won't be any major surprises, but I think it is the natural order of things. I feel this is the way to do it.

ORIGINS

I grew up in an average and pretty normal family. My father was a naval engineer, a civil servant. He retired as Director of Maritime Industries in the Ministry of Industry, after having confronted the once famous ‘naval restructuring’ of the 1980s and being Professor of Projects in the Naval Engineering School. My mother was a housewife, mother of five children and an excellent cook. I cannot clearly recall them wanting to impart great life lessons to me; perhaps they tried, but I proved not at all receptive and confounded their best intentions. My introverted personality inhibited such ‘important’ conversations.

Even so, when I look at how I approach life, with the benefit of time, I do see some important traits that I inherited from them. For example, I have this inexplicable belief in the need to do the right thing. My father ‘did the right thing’ regardless of the circumstances and, without a shadow of a doubt, I share the same conviction. Likewise, these days I find the need to pass on my mother's folk wisdom to my own children, even though I used to laugh about it. Clearly this comes from them, whether genetically ...