Growing A Fortune: Twelve Investing Secrets I Learned In My Garden
Sourcebooks 2002; ISBN 1-57071-774-5.
I was puttering in my garden sometime during the great stock market boom of the late 1990s when it occurred to me that my great success in investing was very related to habits of mind I’d learned in my garden – thinking long-term, planting perennials instead of annuals, learning to plant a seed and then to wait calmly until harvest.
So, as is my habit, I wrote a little book about this, distilling what I’d learned as a gardener-investor into twelve simple principles. (Having notched up returns in excess of a thousand percent over five years, I felt I had the right!)
I have to admit, this little book did not sell terribly well, perhaps because I’m not famous like Peter Lynch, and perhaps because it came out at the gloomiest moment of the stock-market collapse of the early 2000s. But the book is still filled with sound, time-tested advice that’s continued to help me grow my fortune through rain, shine, drought, pestilence and onslaughts of Japanese beetles.
Five-star review on Amazon from Trish Rintels of Keswick, Virginia:
“This fascinating, well-written little volume is investing made easy for those of us who aren’t Warren Buffet, and may even be ‘investing-challenged.’ With excellent analogies and anecdotes drawn from his puttering around the garden, the author makes the seemingly daunting task of what to do with one’s - and one’s family’s - cherished and hard-earned savings seem not only less paralyzing, but even fun. And since the author writes informatively not only about finances but about gardening, it’s a terrific ‘two-fer.’ Quite simply, it’s the best investment I ever made.”
Five-star review from Amazon reader, who described the book as “wise, simple and incredibly useful”:
“I loved this little book! I tend to be rather daunted by numbers in general and financial statements in particular, but this book discusses the basics of investing in terms of gardening — tending the soil, planting the seed, waiting for the harvest — rather than in terms of things that make my eyes glaze over. I’ve never heard investing described in this way, but it really helped me understand so much!”
Excerpt
“If somebody had $100 to spend on a garden, I would probably tell them to spend $60 to $70 in good soil preparation and the rest in plants,” says Andre Viette, the jolly king of gardeners and one of the biggest growers of perennials on the East Coast. “I would much rather a person buy less plants from me and put them in soil that looks like chocolate pudding. When plants go into soil like that they’ll say, ‘Yeah, oh boy, I love this!’”
Good soil, Andre says, “smells fresh and alive.” With the right soil, you can practically get an axe handle to grow leaves. He chuckles and rubs his hands together, thinking about the beauty and power of that kind of soil.
Andre’s advice is a great way to help your vegetables and flowers thrive – and it’s a good way to make your portfolio grow. Because as a general thing, you should spend vastly more time “preparing the soil” and “selecting a viable seed” – studying and then selecting your investments – than in tending to them. Andre’s precentages sound about right: 60 to 70 percent of the time you spend on your investments, perhaps even more, should be spent doing the research necessary to pick good investments in the first place. After that, you don’t need to do much except weed and water. (That is, just follow their progress in the papers and make sure their story hasn’t changed).
Nothing will ever grow without properly preparing the soil, and it’s unlikely that you’ll ever make a spectacular investment without thoroughly researching it first. Take it easy. Take your time. What’s the rush? As a Wall Street wag once remarked, “buy in haste, repent at leisure…”
