Sunday Morning Coffee

The Barron's Electronic Investor took a fun detour from the normal column to feature a 67 year old retired do it yourselfer who appears to have had a lot of success with stock picking since he retired in 1999. The article was a little light on performance specifics which is understandable, he has no burden for performance data.

As I took it, his IRA was worth $250k in 1999, is worth about $1 million now and he has been taking some out for income. If that is an accurate, or anywhere close to accurate reporting of his results then it is an awesome outcome.

The reason I mention this, regardless of the accuracy, is there is a tie in to a long running theme here about investment success depending on time available and interest in the task--in most cases--and this guy is a living example of what I have had in mind.

Apparently he spends his afternoons studying stocks and other related work so it is not an 80 hour endeavor although the article said he "monitors his more than 100 stock holdings" so I am not sure how he does it. Making it a little more relatable for more do it yourselfers keeping tabs on maybe ten stocks, four or five narrower ETFs and one or two broad based funds (as a random not so unreasonable combo) would be easy to find time for if the do it yourselfer has the needed interest in the task.

As a follow up to yesterday's post, one outcome to the current mess the country is in could be a situation where more people must become more engaged with managing their portfolios (personally I don't think there will be a wave of millions of new customers of RIAs from this). As the article points out, there are plenty of resources to help people have success but first people have to be willing to help themselves.

We had our first meaningful snow storm this weekend, about a foot at our house, and the picture is of Roscoe romping in the snow.