The Market Wizard
by Chris Taylor
The Market Wizard
Investing guru
Jeremy Grantham riffs on the stock market, the
housing bubble, and why our treatment of the environment could be
our riskiest bet of all.
. Photograph by Steve Moors.
All you need to know about investing legend Jeremy Grantham sits
just to one side of his desk, overlooking the breezy wharves of
Boston. It's a massive stone Buddha, standing about four feet high
and weighing hundreds of pounds, that made it all the way here from
ninth-century Java.
First, the Buddha's serene gaze implies "everything in moderation,"
meaning bubbles come, and bubbles go, but things always drift back
to the middle. And second, Grantham, 68, got the statue for an
absolute steal during the Asian currency crisis back in the late
'90s, when antiquities from the region just weren't selling. "So I
called up Sotheby's after the auction and made a bid far below the
reserve price," he remembers. "They said, 'Yes, please!'?"
Now that's the instinct of a true value investor.
And it's the kind of attitude that has made Grantham - chairman of
investment-management firm Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co.
(GMO) and its $121 billion in assets - the kind of money manager
that other money managers listen to. Understandable, when you
consider that he has popped up at the most revolutionary movements
in modern investing. Investments that are indexed to track the
market's performance? He was a pioneer. Small-cap investing, for
people who want a piece of tiny-but-growing firms? His too.
International investing, to take advantage of markets around the
world? He was among the first. Quantitative investing, for "numbers
nerds" who are able to find value in reams of company data? You get
the picture.
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