Reflections from a fund manager with a fifty-five-year record
Carret founded the Pioneer Fund in 1928, one of the first mutual funds in the United States, and managed money for more than sixty years. He wrote this short book at ninety, and it collects his views on investing, business and his own long career.
His approach was long-horizon fundamental investing with a preference for companies with strong balance sheets, low debt, honest management and reinvestment opportunities, bought at reasonable prices and held for very long periods. He held some positions for decades. He was sceptical of trading, of market forecasting and of paying up for popularity, and he emphasised reading annual reports directly and visiting companies. He also wrote The Art of Speculation in 1930, which is the more substantial book, and readers wanting his method in developed form should go there.
The reference has not verified the specific performance claims and anecdotes in this volume, which is a memoir written at the end of a long life rather than a documented record. The book is brief and informal, mixing investment observations with reflections on business ethics, taxation and his own habits. Its interest is as a first-hand statement from someone whose career spanned the 1929 crash, the Depression, the postwar expansion and the 1987 crash, which is a longer continuous perspective than almost any other investor has recorded. It is not a method book and it contains no systematic framework.
Investors interested in a first-hand statement from one of the longest continuous careers in American fund management, read as memoir rather than method.
Founded the Pioneer Fund in 1928 and ran money for seven decades through Carret & Company; died in 1998, aged 101.
The Art of Speculation, published in 1930, made the case for buying securities on appraised value with a margin of safety two years before Graham and Dodd's Security Analysis, which places it at the start of the value tradition rather than downstream of it. A Money Mind at Ninety records the holding periods, position sizing and management assessments behind a record spanning the Depression and the post-war decades.
Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.