About Me
I’m a mid-60’s guy, married to the same girl and fortunate to be the father of two wonderful individuals who have steamed off in their own directions and begun to enlarge the clan. Long ago I thought I wanted to be a writer but instead I went to B-school and eventually I managed to accumulate a bit of capital. Like many others, I now try to make that capital work hard so I can play. And I’ve become a writer.
Having grown up around Boston, I led an exclusively East Coast life until the early ’90’s when the family decided we needed a Rocky Mountain refuge from the steaming summers of the New York area where we had lived since 1976. I went exploring, revisiting various ski villages the family had enjoyed during winter vacations. Through a fortuitous detour from plan, I discovered Crested Butte, CO, a town of great beauty and diversity of talented people. I was sold after my first meal there. It is a place where geography creates character, by which I mean it has a rare beauty but is hard to get to. Thus, it attracts people who are sufficently sensitive to the beauty of their environment that they are willing (some even anxious) to sacrafice various urban conveniences for it. Crested Butte has become home now, though we still maintain a base in the East.
People in the East ask what I do in Crested Butte. I play tennis on the mountainside courts and hike in the hills. I ski cross country in the valleys and downhill on local and nearby slopes, and I spend a lot of time managing investments, which became both a hobby and a business about 15 years ago.
I manage family-related assets employing standard ways to achieve income, safety and diversification. Since 2004, my investment work (and, indeed, a lot of my life) has focussed on energy because of the great transformations now occuring in energy. The combination of rapid industrialization in emerging economies and the coming of Peak Oil is changing everything in our world, not least the values of companies that are particularly impacted by energy costs. All the accounts I manage contain energy-related stocks, but one in particular, called the EIS (Energy Investment Strategies) account, which has been aimed at achieving long term capital gains since it was formed in 1996, contains only stocks that relate to Peak Oil or other energy trends. This account is the “proof of the pudding” for the investment strategies discussed here, so its results are being made public.
Why I’m Publishing
Most of my reasons for “going public” have to do with trying to become a better investor. Better discipline is the first and most important benefit to me of this web site. Holding myself to the higher standard of public observation and feedback challenges my assumptions and sharpens my logic and helps me organize my thoughts and my information more rigorously. Secondly, I may gain better access to information by virtue of being a journalist of sorts. Thirdly, I get new ideas and improve my own ideas from readers’ comments and questions. Hopefully the site will prove entertaining and useful to like-minded investors. Plus - and this is maybe the most compelling reason - it just turns me on to write about what I think is the most powerful trend that will exist during the rest of my life, the transition during the next fifty years from a largely petroleum-based economy toward an almost exclusively electric-based economy. It’s a great story of politics, money, technology, and human emotions, not the least of which is greed. It contains all the drama of human existence. to coin a phrase.