I have to admit something that I have learned from a client through this little debacle…

About two years ago I had a client that just had about 100K with me. He tranferred in an old annuity he had, and not much else. Kept things close to the vest. But I slowly learned that he had a few hundred thousand at the bank in CD’s. I knew about his 401K already.



He’s sort of gruff, can rub you the wrong way sometimes. Most of us have a client or two like him. I always thought he was sort of arrogant for not investing his money with me. He kept saying he wanted to wait until stock prices went down. He’s rather young (mid 50’s), but for various reasons is going to need to supplement his current earned income a bit. So he’s been wanting build a portfolio of good dividend paying stocks. Well, I’ve been trying for two years to get him to buy. I thought he was just yanking my chain, and was never really going to pull the trigger.



So about 3-4 months ago, his lightbulb went off, and he’s been buying ever since. Over the past 2 months or so, we’ve bought 12 different stocks (he has the 100 share lot mentality), very well diversified, all high quality, all in mostly different industries, and all at DEEP discounts. We’ve also bought about 120K worth of muni’s. He couldn’t turn away from 5.5% in-state muni’s selling at 80.



The guy’s on a spending spree. And all along I thought he was a knucklehead. Every week he calls me, or whenever there’s a big down day (one of the 500+ drops) and says "this is great, what are we buying now?"



The guy actually quoted Warren Buffett. The one about being cautious when others are greedy, and greedy when everyone’s scared, or whatever the quote is. He reads our newsletter cover-to-cover. He can list almost every stock on our equity-income buy list, the out-of-favor stocks, you name it. The guy I thought was the biggest dope in my book turned out to be the most patient, and have the most guts of all my clients. I have had more fun with him the past two months than with almost any client I’ve ever had. It’s not a huge portfolio maybe a few hundred K, but I really look forward to seeing what his portfolio does over the next few years.



OK, that’s pretty much one of the few bright spots in book…hopefully we each have a little something positive to talk about right now.