Bio

From The Intelligent Investor website:

What can you say about a boy who purchased The Financial Review on his way to school? Yes, it’s rather sad, but we wouldn’t want him any other way. And neither would our subscribers.

Greg grew up in central western New South Wales and developed a healthy (or, depending on your perspective, unhealthy) interest in money and finance at a young age. His savings came from selling home-grown vegetables and ‘helping’ his parents in their local jewellery store. At the age of eight he invested $250 of his hard-earned ‘farming’ money in a local trucking concern and learnt his first investment lesson: Don’t buy shares in your local trucking company unless the boss’s name is Lindsay Fox.

By age 16 he was teaching guitar and, somewhat deterred by his early investing experiences, switched to the relative safety of AGC debentures. With some melancholy, Greg recounts how he invested his next $500 worth of savings in AGC for two years at an annual rate of 16.67%. In his final year of high school he and Steve Johnson (who you’ll read more about later) entered the ASX’s sharemarket game and in nine months turned a fictitious $50,000 portfolio into $120,000. They’d love to claim this performance as the result of consummate stock picking but it was actually due to a cleverly exploited arbitrage the pair had spotted. In any case, they collected a handy cash prize and made the front page of the prestigious Wellington Times newspaper.

After moving to Sydney in 1996, he tried his hand at charting, with moderate success. It was, he says, difficult to fathom how representations of the past could somehow anticipate the future but it still took him a few more years to discover value investing. After reading Roger Lowenstein’s excellent Buffett biography (the first book on The Intelligent Investor’s reading list), his second investing lesson sunk in: Read lots, think for yourself and don’t worry too much about pretty pictures. He then acted upon Warren Buffett’s advice to ‘learn accounting’ and headed to Sydney’s University of Technology to begin his formal degree in accounting and finance, although he never thought much of the finance component. Others will testify that Greg needs little encouragement to embark on a tirade about the fallacies of efficient markets, betas and modern portfolio theory.

In 1997 he began managing his parents’ retirement fund. After a few lean years during the tech boom (which, being a Buffett devotee, he avoided) the portfolio has comfortably outperformed his parents’ ‘professionally managed’ super fund. Greg has extensive experience in the financial markets with various institutions including NatWest Markets, Royal Bank of Canada and Macquarie Bank. In his opinion, Buffett’s letters to shareholders are the world’s best reference guide to investing and he tries hard to follow his third investing lesson: It’s usually a good idea to pay up for quality. Still, Greg enjoys an old-style Ben Graham cigar butt opportunity (more commonly known as an asset play), a predilection from which many subscribers have benefited. Greg still loves music — there are literally hundreds of CDs piled high on his desk — but not nearly as much as he loves the stockmarket.