The third in the bestselling Market Wizards series, this time focusing on the barometer of the economy – the stock market.
It has been nearly a decade since the publication of the highly successful The New Market Wizards. The interim has witnessed the most dynamic bull market in US stock history, a collapse in commodity prices, dramatic failures in some of the world’s leading hedge funds, the burst of the Internet bubble, a fall into recession and subsequent rumblings of recovery. Who have been the ‘market wizards’ during this tumultuous financial period? How did some traders manage to significantly outperform a stockmarket that during its heyday moved virtually straight up?
This book will feature interviews with a variety of traders who achieved phenomenal financial success during the glory days of the Internet boom. In contrast with the first two Market Wizard books, which included traders from a broad financial spectrum – stocks, bonds, currencies and futures – this volume will focus on traders in the stockmarket.
In June 1999, at the peak of his career, after eight years establishing one of the most extraordinary stock trading track records of the 1990s, and with $150 million under management, Stuart Walton returned all money to his investors and walked away from trading completely. The emotional repercussions of a marital breakup were interfering with his ability to focus on trading, and he did not feel it was right to manage money until he could once again devote "100 percent energy and enthusiasm" to the task. In the preceding eight years, he had achieved an astounding 115 percent average annual compounded return in trading profits (92 percent for his clients after deducting management fees), with annual returns ranging from a high of 274 percent to a low of 63 percent (excluding the 1999 partial year).
Stuart Walton's career as a trader is marked by a string of contradictions and paradoxes. He wanted to be an artist or a writer; he became a trader. Though he valued academics and disdained the financial world, the markets became his profession. He once hated trading so much that he awoke feeling that he couldn't do it for another day and quit his job that morning; several years later, the markets were his endeavor and passion. His initial forays into stock trading were marked by such ineptitude that he nearly went bankrupt, yet he subsequently became so skilled that he more than doubled his money annually.
I visited Walton, a Canadian expatriate, at his office in downtown San Francisco. I discovered that, although managing a nine-digit sum, he had no trading assistants, no back office staff, no marketing people, no programmers, not even a full-time secretary. His firm, Reindeer Capital, consisted of Stuart Walton alone. His isolation was deliberate. After having gone wrong so often by listening to tips and opinions, he had come to realize the importance of not being influenced by others while trading.
Walton was relaxed and outgoing. We talked for five hours straight without interruption. The time passed quickly.
Is there some significance to the name of the firm or are you just partial to reindeer?
The firm is named after my great-grandfather, William Gladstone Walton, who was given the nickname "Reindeer" for a famous trek he conceived and led. Much of what I know about him I learned from my grandfather, who passed away last year at the age of one hundred, narrowly missing the feat of having lived in three separate centuries. In 1892, at the age of twenty-three, Reindeer Walton left England to work as a missionary in northern Canada. He typically traveled over two thousand miles a year by canoe and dogsled, visiting his far-flung constituency—the Indians and Eskimos that lived around the Arctic Circle.
One year, vast forest fires swept through northern Quebec, destroying almost all the regions vegetation and game, and leaving the native population at the brink of starvation. Reindeer Walton came up with the idea of herding the Siberian reindeer, which are also called caribou, from Alaska to northern Quebec. Through sheer perseverance, he convinced the Canadian government to finance the trek, which he organized and led. It took him five years, from 1921 to 1925, to herd three thousand reindeer across northern Canada. Reindeer are not like cattle; they move only when they want to move, and they go in all different directions.
How did he keep them herded together?
Caribou will follow the feeding path. He used a lot of foresight in choosing the right route. He succeeded in getting three-quarters of the herd to migrate; the remainder died or dispersed. His trek permanently changed the migration patterns for Siberian reindeer. The portion of the herd...
