The Education of a Value Investor by Guy Spier

1 FROM THE BELLY OF THE
BEAST TO WARREN BUFFETT
O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
. . .
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
—Hamlet, act 1, scene 2, lines 129–130
and 133–137
HAVE YOU EVER FELT THAT WAY? UTTER SELF-LOATHING. UNL
wasn’t suicidal. But I felt almost as wretched. I was disgusted with
investment bankers as a breed, and especially the ones I worked with. I felt
the same way about my investment banking firm. Worst of all, though, I
was disgusted with myself.
Less than two years earlier, I had felt ready to conquer the world. Back
then, I was a student at Harvard Business School (HBS). For good measure,
I also had a degree from Oxford University, where I’d come top of my class
in economics. Everything had seemed possible—until I threw it all away
with one recklessly foolish career move.
In 1993, a few months before I graduated from Harvard, I stumbled upon
a job listing for an assistant to the chairman at D. H. Blair Investment
Banking Corp. I’d read a bit about investment banking and fancied myself
as one of these budding Masters of the Universe.
Brimming with youthful confidence, I headed to New York City to meet
with D. H. Blair’s chairman, J. Morton Davis. Morty had started out as a
poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn. He graduated from Harvard Business
School in 1959 and went on to become the owner and chairman of D. H.
Blair, which had been founded in 1904. People told me that he’d made
hundreds of millions for himself.
I met with him in his wood-paneled corner office at 44 Wall Street. The
place hadn’t been renovated in years, and it looked like a traditional
investment banking partnership from John Pierpont Morgan’s era. In fact, J.
P. Morgan’s headquarters were almost next door.
Morty was a consummate salesman, and he did a brilliant job of beguiling
me. He talked to me about some of the great deals he’d pulled off in hot
areas like biotech, adding, “You’ll be doing deals right away, working
directly with me.” He assured me that there was “no limit” to what I could
achieve there with him and later gave me a book by Frank Bettger called
How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling. I liked the fact that
Morty was an outsider—unconventional, self-made, and highly successful.
Shortly afterward, I read a New York Times article that referred to D. H.
Blair as an “infamous” brokerage house whose “brokers have been known
to refuse to let customers sell when they request that a stock be liquidated.”
The article also mentioned that securities regulators in Delaware had “tried
to revoke Blair’s license” and that regulators in Hawaii “said Blair was
using fraudulent and deceptive sales practices.” When I went back to ask
him about the article, Morty told me that people envy success and try to
take you down. I was gullible enough to believe whatever he told me.

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier