“Man, Florida drivers are nuts,” I muttered to myself as rows of Florida license plates weaved back-and-forth in front of me as we headed south on I-95.
The traffic had slowed to 45 miles per hour just south of Daytona Beach. And each Florida driver was hell-bent on breaking free. They zoomed left… then right… honking at each other with each mighty swipe of the wheel.
But they didn’t get anywhere.
They remained in the exact same spot on the road… simply alternating between being behind the car ahead in the left lane and the car ahead in the right lane.
I couldn’t help but think – this is a microcosm of the current state of humanity. We just can’t bear to sit still…
It was a sunny day in April. The first blooms of Spring were upon us. And I was on my way to meet my heroes.
My SUV was packed with stuff that might furnish a south Florida apartment. I didn’t have one yet though. Minor details.
More importantly, my head was packed with ideas that might help lift Agora’s newest publishing group from a hodge-podge collection of franchises to something more cohesive. And more profitable.
My destination was Delray Beach – an intercoastal town just north of Fort Lauderdale. That was the corporate headquarters of the Agora’s newest business. It had formed through the merger of four franchises: Bonner & Partners, Casey Research, Palm Beach Research, and Jeff Clark’s option trading service – formerly housed within Stansberry Research.
Bill Bonner was the driving force behind Bonner & Partners. And Bill’s the Godfather of the entire financial publishing industry. More on that in just a minute…
Doug Casey – an Austro-libertarian hero with a radically anti-PC bent – headed up Casey Research.
Mark Ford and Tom Dyson co-founded Palm Beach Research together. Mark was another OG in the industry. He was also an entrepreneurial genius. And Tom, formerly of Stansberry Research, was considered a market wizard and a brilliant writer throughout the Agora network.
Then there was Jeff Clark. He’s one of the few options traders who actually made money trading options. In fact, Jeff made so much money trading that he retired in his early 40s. He got rich and then wrote a newsletter to share his trading wit with people.
These were my heroes. I had been reading their work every day and every month for years.
To me, these people represented what capitalism was supposed to be. Character. Integrity. Win-win deals. Independence. Self-educated. Customer-focused… they each represented the ideals of the free market.
That’s why I walked away from my cushy career in the corporate banking world, packed up my SUV, and made my way to south Florida. I wanted to meet my heroes… learn their secrets… and maybe even become a major player within the Agora myself. I knew I had a unique perspective to bring to the table.
But I harbored some doubt.
Some 737 miles behind me – way up in the mountains of Virginia – sat an isolated property on five acres at the end of a gravel road. That was my home. But I didn’t know when I would be back. And I didn’t know if my gambit would pay off.
I just knew that Destiny called…
When I walked into the three-story Spanish-colonial building that housed Agora’s newest offices, I was a nobody. I did have a small online business and an email list consisting of about 1,000 customers… but that’s it.
By comparison, the Agora network served hundreds of thousands of customers. And their free e-letters reached well over a million people every day.
That had my head racing. What could I do to drive the business forward? How could I stand out?
For those who have worked in corporate America, you know it’s easy to stand out there. All you need is a personality. And an ability to chuckle at the absurdity of the paper-pushing and daily meetings.
That’s how I stood out when I worked in the corporate banking world. That Joe, he’s a rebel.
But the Agora was entirely different.
Bill Bonner started it back in the ‘70s. And he is fond of saying that the investment newsletter business is perfect. It’s part of the media, but it wouldn’t be mistaken for a reputable part. Here’s Bill reflecting on the industry he helped birth:
What was delightful about the newsletter business were the nuts and kooks, the charlatans and dreamers, the brazen hucksters and earnest geniuses who made up the industry.
Here were thinkers whose thoughts were untainted by any trace of advanced doctrinaire theory, let alone rudimentary training of any sort. Here were mountebanks and scalawags galore… along with a few saints… dispensing market wisdom, stock recommendations, and macro-analysis so far reaching you needed a Hubble telescope to see where it came from…
And here, too, were the sort of men whom rich widows were warned about. And the sort of theorists who made you wonder about the limits of human reason itself.
Colorful eccentrics, careful analysts, cheerful con men, and self-assured delusionals trying to figure out how things are put together — this is the world of investment gurus.
But guess what? The gurus are often right. True, some financial gurus have gone broke following their own advice. But many have gotten rich…
Investment gurus are an original bunch. They come up with all sorts of systems, ideas, and approaches. Almost all of them are successful — sometimes. There are a lot of different ways to invest and to make money.
And often one that works spectacularly well in one period may collapse completely when the market changes course. So, too, an approach that often works poorly under certain market conditions will work poorly in other conditions.
But, generally, an investment advisor who works hard to develop and refine a system and who sticks with it can do reasonably well, sometimes. He can be a technical analyst, a chartist, a Graham and Dodd follower, even an astrologer. Almost any disciplined approach, pursued intelligently and steadily, can pay off.
We have a theory that explains why this is so. Investing is, when you get down to the basement of it, a competitive undertaking. If you do what everyone else does, you will get the same returns as everyone else. In order to get better returns, you have to do things differently.
Investment gurus seem to be favored, in this regard, by their own originality and quirky self-reliance.
“Sometimes right, sometimes wrong,” they say. “But never in doubt.”
Taken together, they are probably the most independent and contrary professional class in the world. And this contrariness, alone, seems to put them at odds with the great mass of lumpen investors, allowing them to make more — or, often less — than the common results.
How do you stand out in that world??
Tomorrow I’ll share with you the three major investment themes on my radar for the coming decade.
-Joe Withrow
P.S. Yesterday I talked about my chat with Tain Nix on his Expat Phyles podcast. The episode is now online – links are below if you care to give it a hearing.
I would also highly recommend subscribing to Tain’s podcast. He’s got a great perspective and a rolodex of very interesting people that he’ll be doing episodes with in the months and years to come.
Apple Podcast Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/joe-withrow-a-world-class-libertarian-analyst-talks/id1686906959?i=1000617572575
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ7qwTXTd0Y