The Warren Buffetts Next Door: The World's Greatest Investors You've Never Heard Of and What You Can Learn From Them

Chapter 5. Network Miner

Investor: Alan T. Hill

Date of Birth: May 11, 1939

Hometown: Placitas, New Mexico

Personal Web Site: None

Employment: Retired, educational-software executive

Passions/Pursuits: Baking bread, sports cars, his grandkids

Investment Strategy: Micro-caps and yield-oriented stocks

Brokerage Accounts: TD Ameritrade

Key Strategy Metric: Relative P/E

Online Haunts: www.valueforum.com, www.investorshub.com, www.investorvillage.com

Best Pick: China Energy, Up 670 percent

Worst Pick: China Shoe Co., Down 96 percent

Performance Since July 2005: Cumulative return of 1,026 percent return versus 28 percent for the S&P 500^[17]

Like many of the other successful investors in this book, Alan T. Hill takes pride in the fact that he is prudent in the way he spends his money. In fact Hill is quick to point out that his parents lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s and that they raised him with the kind of values people of this era instilled in their offspring. So like his father Hill, 71, has never purchased a new car in his entire life.

"A new car depreciates something like 25 percent the first year," he says. "It just never made any sense to me. So I have two cars." Hill then goes on to mention his 1993 Toyota pickup truck, and his 2008 Toyota Scion. "The Scion gets 40 miles to the gallon!" he boasts.

However, Hill has another automobile tucked away in his garage that he's a bit embarrassed to talk about. It's a racing red 2002 Audi Roadster TT; a real cherry. But true to form Hill ...