I have a friend who manages the money I made when I made
money. From the time I began to realize
that my moneymaking days were numbered, my investment instructions to him were
simple and direct:
“I would like to make money from my investments, but way more
importantly, I would not like to lose
money from my investments.”
Following these guidelines, my friend has helped my investment
portfolio to remain healthy. And I truly
appreciate that. At my friend’s
wonderful and accomplished wife’s request, I once wrote a commemorative limerick
for a party honoring his birthday. It
went:
A man of great
prudence and purity
He takes care of our
money with surety
As our net worth
advances
He reduces our chances
Of depending on Social
Security.
My highest praise is
reserved for my investment adviser’s ability to have kept me relatively
un-wiped out during the economic meltdown of 2008. I now brag that during “the Collapse”, my
investment advisers lost me less money than almost anybody else I know.
I don’t know if the company would care to highlight that achievement
in their brochures, but as a result of my appreciation for their efforts, I
have desisted from calling the quarterly fees that they charges me exorbitant.
Extremely high praise indeed.
My financial adviser friend is now retired, though his name
remains on the company letterhead, along with one partner who is also retired
and a third partner who is dead. Leaving
the money I need to sustain my wife and myself for the rest of our lives in the
hands of three people who are no longer there.
I suggested renaming the company, “Retired, Retired and
Dead”, but my friend suspected – correctly, though not one hundred percent correctly – that I was joking. (In truth, my friend continues to serve as a
consultant for my investments, thus altering my proposed title changed to
“Retired, Dead, And Retired But Not Entirely Out Of The Picture.” Which was also
rejected.)
I like my friend a lot.
He has hosted me to numerous hockey games, and he and his wife have
invited us to Disney Hall concerts and
to parties at their house. It was on one
drive to a hockey game that my friend informed me that his firm’s other retired partner now had a yacht
anchored somewhere near Tahiti, a yacht, he described, that a helicopter could
land on, providing some idea of the
size of the yacht, since were helicopters to land on the majority of yachts, they would presumably sink under the
helicopter’s formidable weight. This one
demonstrably does not, which, to me, says we are talking about a prodigiously
sized watercraft.
My friend’s story reminded me of a anecdote I once read in a
book whose title I cannot presently reveal as it is the punch line to the
anecdote.
A visitor to New York is taken on a tour of Wall Street, and
then to the Battery, where his guide pointing to the boats anchored in the
harbor says, “Look, those are the bankers’ and brokers’ yachts.” To which the visitor not inappropriately queries,
“Where are the customers’
yachts?”
The book Where Are The
Customers’ Yachts? (by Fred Schwed) refers to a long ago era, so the disparity
described in the anecdote is hardly unique to our times.
The difference, however, is the scope.
Metaphorically speaking, the “Money People’s” yachts have
grown exponentially larger.
I realize I am veering into a touchy area. In our economic system of choice it is not
possible to say that a person makes too much money. Culturally speaking, this claim makes no
semantical sense. It’s like saying a batter
in baseball is getting too many hits. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing.
The entire arena of personal income in our culture is a
sensitive one. Though it is acceptable
to ask someone what they do for a living, it is unacceptable to ask them how much they make doing it. Salary inquiries are an etiquettian
“No-no.” It is simply not done. (Declaimed in a quavering Margaret Dumont
voice, waving a lorgnette.)
It is the marketplace that determines how much you make, rendering
judgments concerning its magnitude confusingly inappropriate. And of course there are never complaints in
the other direction. At no compensation
level will you hear someone say,
“Yeah, that’s too much.
Pay me less.”
That is also simply
not done.
The problem, at least for me, arises when the recipients of the bountiful beneficences
handed down by a disinterested marketplace start believing that they actually did something to deserve that much.
Since I know almost nothing about what investment advisers
do, allow me to analogize with an example from an arena about which I am
somewhat although not substantially less ignorant:
Baseball.
Up till the mid-sixties, a good salary for a baseball player
hovered around twenty thousand dollars a year.
(The superstars got more, but the “mean”, round figures, was in the
general neighborhood of twenty G’s.)
Then, as a result of free agency (no longer bound to a
specific team, ballplayers could now peddle their services to the highest
bidder), agents negotiating on the players’ behalf, and, most importantly,
skyrocketing cable television contracts, it is not unusual for players (See: The recent multi-year contract signed by ace Dodger pitcher Clayton Kershaw) to be
paid upwards of (keeping it in round figures) twenty million dollars a year.
No question, Clayton Kershaw is an excellent pitcher. But, as an example, Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax – one of the greatest pitchers of all
time – in his best year, Koufax made a hundred thousand dollars a year.
They are both doing the same job, exceedingly
well. Yet Sandy Koufax was paid one
hundred thousand dollars and Clayton Kershaw will be paid twenty-three million. Inflation? I don't think so.
The difference between today’s ballplayers and the Hall of Famers of the past is that Clayton
Kershaw and his contemporary ilk simply lucked out magnificently with their
timing, entering the game when a combination of circumstances totally beyond
their intention, effort or control dropped astronomical salary remunerations
into their (and their agents’) fortuitously “Lucky Ducky” laps. (And the future bodes even more auspiciously for the players to
come.)
Does Clayton Kershaw deserve twenty-three millions dollars a
year? Does today’s retired money manager
deserve a yacht that can support landing helicopters? Does the word “deserve” have any meaning in
this context whatsoever?
I cannot answer that.
I don’t know if anybody can. Or
if the question itself makes any reasonable sense. What I do know is that when today’s astronomical
compensations are sincerely defended by the words “I earned it”, my spontaneous
response to such claims is an arched eyebrow and a skeptically expressed,
“Really?”
2 comments:
The great Willie Mays topped out at 165,000 in 72 & 73; Aaron made 240K his final 2 years; the Mick never made more than 100K (and once took a 10,000 cut after a down year; according to baseball reference, the Babe maxed out at 80 grand. The Big Train, Walter Johnson, probably the greatest right handed pitcher of all time, never made more than 20K. Today, the major league minimum is 500,000, and the average salary (in 2013) was 3.6-mil. Robinson Cano is going to get 240-mil. from Seattle over the next 10 years. Why? Different eras of course means huge salaries. One thing for sure, the MLB Players Assoc. is the finest union - ever.
The same is seen even more extremely in tennis, where before 1968 the biggest events in the sport were closed to professionals and the pro circuit was tiny. When the women's tour got started, I remember reading in Billie Jean King's autobiography that she scraped and scrambled to earn $100,000 one year because she thought it was a really important milestone for women athletes to reach. I believe Serena Williams' haul (just prize money) was $9 or $10 million last year (plus untold millions more in endorsement income). Timing is everything.
That said, my father taught me young that if brokers knew what they were talking about *they'd* be rich (and at the time they weren't). So for the last 35 years my investment advisor has been a copy of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor. I commend it to you.
wg
Post a Comment