Blog

Frank Boland
October 16, 2020

Ben Gaines and I approached the front door of the Union Club of Boston. Ben was a political commentator from Washington with a heavy Yiddish accent. And I was a 25-year-old Irish kid from public housing with a bad Boston accent. A butler opened the door for us. The club was a total bastion of Boston investment Brahmins. These people were from...

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Frank Boland
September 10, 2020

To me an open secret is something known but not acknowledged. Years ago, a client, who was an executive of Coca-Cola, invited me to the company in Atlanta, Georgia. I was surprised by two things. Firstly, that Robert W. Woodruff – the entrepreneur who built the company – had an apartment in the building and secondly, the formula for Coca-Cola...

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Frank Boland
August 17, 2020

Professor Peter Drucker was sitting on a hard wooden chair center stage. Below him, a large lecture hall was filled with middle age businessmen. They all looked as though they had attended elite business schools and ran major corporations. Most of them did. The professor was there not to give a lecture but to answer questions. It was totally...

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Frank Boland
July 27, 2020

Change is the very essence of the investment business. Because of this reality, every portfolio manager I’ve known has a desk that can only be described as saved chaos. And that’s not including the piles of newspapers on the floor. Some managers even have a library behind their desk. Not in nice wooden cases as you would expect but stacks of...

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So long as predictions remain popular, and are so numerous as they are today – and so long as they receive notoriety through repetition in the press and on the radio – contrary opinions will increase in importance as thinking aids. “

– Humphrey Neil