Modern Stockbrokers versus Olden Days Ones

Are you a modern stockbroker? You don't know anything about stockbroking!

I met J. Paul Getty on the steps outside the front of Raffles Hotel in Singapore when I was 10 years old – 1968. Have I told this story before? Probably...

When I read his book “As I See It” almost twenty years later I couldn't get why my father claimed not to have liked Getty. Getty I recall caused quite a stir when, following introductions to the Sultan's education fund from Shell Far East and Burma Oil executives, the Getty organisation donated US$50 (and $15 personally from Getty himself) to the Malayan government education and library reconstruction fund accompanied with a letter saying how proud his organisation was to have been able to sponsor the fund and that were it to sponsor every meritorious applicant that approached his organisation every year he would go rapidly broke. My father I know thought it was something of an insult, but I had my doubts he was reading things correctly, and later on I thought Getty was being as generous as he could possibly have been given all of the surrounding circumstances.

People want, some need, and lots seek, – money, all the time.

Standard stockbrokers promote this myth about themselves that they raise money and capital for new enterprise and development and research. They don't. Getty would have told you that and in the latter part of his life, he was the world's richest man and was in a position to know so categorically. Worse still, he recounts the story of how the only broker who ever assisted him was E. F. Hutton, who, during the Depression, at least held onto his 'nearly worthless' stock and stuck it 'in the bottom drawer' instead of selling it all up like they mostly all always do. And by this act of consideration Getty was not as severely damaged as he otherwise might have been and was thereby enabled to find a way through.

I tell these kinds of stories because there is much I would like to contribute about raising cash (something I have done a little of) for capital ventures today. Much I am probably not permitted to say, unless asked. I come from an old school. And you would have read me say as much a few times here already and on another board I participate on. Certainly it was well past troubled times, but I was raised to some extent in the Tiffin Room of the Raffles Hotel and in the E & O alongside the remnants of the pre-War luminaries and their children. I lived and breathed with the family remnants of the legendary Sarkies Brothers and the people from out of the Sassoon stockbroking firm. These were real business-people and real money people.

I don't think I'm merely being nostalgic about this: there is something different about the finance business today compared to the past of which I am familiar. And I am talking strictly about the character and style and personalities of the people themselves. Money is never boring. I don't find money boring... It is though if you stick it under the mattress all the time!

; )

Calvin J. Bear

Gold! Gold!

Present-day trust issues over money...

Back in the Eighties I knew as a reasonably familiar personal acquiantance, Australia's now most-famous gold prospector Mark Creasy. I knew him through a small band of crazy sharemarket dabblers from the State Fire Brigade, known locally among stockbrokers simply as 'the fire-ees.'

Mark Creasy was considered a brilliant geo by those who knew him even back then. Creasy has by today already made history but will in all possibility go down in history as indeed Australia's greatest legitimate gold prospector. There is a lot about gold prospecting that is not at all well-known and even though the internet provides a good resource that pulls together the wisdom of old hands and careful science and solid university study, there are reasons why only a few special types end up making either the great discoveries still left to be made, or find a steady enough set of patch locations to realise the potential that is all the same definitely still there.

Another of the people I knew back then – and I knew this guy very well – was the electronics engineer who successfully developed the modern Pulse Induction Gold Detector (of course, the device can detect other metals too...) I handed out a few dollars to help him develop the technology but frankly, like quite a few other things I invested in, the basic end market was not there given that the gold price was and had been stuck in the doldrums between $250 and $370-ish for years.

And to be honest I just didn't like the way listed mining companies in those days were doing business and what their ethics were in terms of shareholder's rights. The P.I. device was being hawked around a few local mining companies and for me the whole thing suggested a certain inevitability about loss of control of intellectual property. The fact the technology survives as one of a number of favoured current prospecting instruments is testament to its real usefulness and I'm pleased for that.

My own view is that one cannot rely only on technology but must have the active human brainpower driving it. You need the Mark Creasys.

I have an idle pet fancy that as the gold price rises and people begin again to tour the various gold prospecting grounds, the function of the internet could have a role for those who do not care to brave 50 degree outback temperatures and endless road and sand-track miles and field rations and so on.

But the problem appears to focus on whether or not some stranger can trust some other stranger to hand in any gold nuggets or gold flakes or gold dust to the person who commissioned them to go out and do the laborious field work. And in spite of data logging and telemetry and wireless satellite webcams there is always this element of doubt that stops people from handing over say a hundred bucks to join in a gold prospecting expedition fund and then to just lay back watching through the internet webcams some dilligent students bleep-bleeping their White's goldmasters across the laterite topsoils to acquire a retirement nugget for them.

The vision though, is enticing to me. And so I've got together three listed public companies and one private one, to stump up a hundred thousand dollars in listed shares to underwrite the involvement – as I see it – of a number of private armchair explorers spread around the whole globe who would stick in a few dollars to see if the kids can come up with a few nuggets. So the propositon basically is that an armchair explorer/prospector buys a stake for a hundred dollars (or fifty or whatever) and if there is no gold found or not enough, they get a return anyway via the listed shares that they can sell on the market. As far as any discoveries go, 40 per cent of the nuggets will go to the buying-in stakeholder, 40 per cent to the underwriting companies, and 20 per cent to the people actually doing the physical work. And this seems to me to be a way to fairly split things so that there is little incentive for thieving discovered gold. The field workers could also be handpicked by the companies so that professional judgements are made as to high ethical standards, and many modern-era audits and processes adopted to limit the pocketing of discovered gold – which of course in any case would be illegal and subject to criminal prosecution and likely restitution orders.

I wonder if anyone out there thinks this is as exciting a proposition as I do? (That's the inventor of a British-built robotic detector in the pic, btw...)

There is a lot of highly-prospective gold bearing ground out there in Australia and people I think fail to realise that new methods and technologies definitely can find what older methods definitely will have missed – and that even though the technologies have been available for a number of years, no one really went looking when the price languished around the low to mid hundreds of dollars, in spite of what people assume might have been the case with mining companies.

At $2,000 an ounce the thing is very feasible. But at $5,000 an ounce you'll kick yourself you didn't do it! Will it get to $5,000? Oh yes most certainly it will; the amount of time you hand-wring and negate this idea in your mind because you have doubt and fear and anxiety about money – when it offers the only real liquid thing in town – is multiplied exponentially when it comes to dealing in bits of paper vended by banks or even governments these days.

Certainly contact me if you find yourself interested in any of this: interdeq@iinet.net.au

Best, Calvin J. Bear

Drinking wine, entertaining women, and rescuing old buildings

Okay I don't remember who said that. But it was some important person. Or it should have been.

Old buildings are important in ways that are regularly unobserved by far too many of us. When cities fail to retain some pockets of run down, less than salubrious buildings, the economic spectrum changes inside that city. Old buildings often attract only meagre rental rates – but this has the consequence of maintaining the presence of rare types of start-ups, students, minority special interest endeavours and a flow of humans who in spite of other factors contribute economically to surrounding businesses and to transport and other services. Apart from structural architectural real archival meaning, old buildings preserve a social continuity that without which, cities have only a theoretical and 'experimental' form of social and economic foundation. Old buildings create employment at basic levels in ways that new buildings only create vast gulfs of unemployment on account themselves thereof, and old buildings provide and maintain social and economic bridges between one mature business cycle and a nascent one. Today's worldwide property market problems are expressions of a mindless and over-excited – and ultimately a mistaken – obsession of making money from property 'development.' And property 'development' is quite different to the philosophy of architecture. That is my own view. I always remember the phrase delivered by Woody Harrelson in that movie with Demi Moore, which quotes the architect Louis Kahn: “every brick aspires to be something... ...more.”

Every woman of potential greatness secretly aspires to something... ...more. And that too is my own view coming from the perspective of a man who likes, at least conceptually, to believe that he might rescue old buildings. And also find some space in which to drink wine too. All these things are very difficult to achieve in a fine balance.

One can see the possibility that much is missed out on when society fails to preserve its temples of the mind, and its figures of the recent past, and its social and cultural memory and artefacts.

Alas I no longer have the books belonging to my father written by his favourite writer of the english language – Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. For if I did, I would much more vigorously stuff down the throats of today's long-heads, that (again in my own view) Eton was never, the pinnacle of an english education to those of the genuine aristocracy, but rather, a place to send the second sons of money who could hold no deep thoughts in their head and were better off tying vines and slogging through mud and carrying out orders explicity. Quiller-Couch went to Clifton House. And so did W.O. Bentley.

Who today knows that much about Quiller-Couch? Who knows that much about Gertude Bell...?

Fancy that though, for Gertrude Bell finds an excellent excellent space in the wikepedia. And may I say just this, it would be hard to find a more accurate and more truly inside intelligencer of all things Al Qaeda and politically Arabic than the wikepedia entry for Ms. Bell.

Far be it from me to suggest that Oxonians wrote the Koran. One of my uncle's best friends was a certain Leslie Charles Bower-Yin, of whom it was told in my family that he himself really penned but perhaps two books concerning the adventures of the pulp literary legend The Saint. And far be it from me to suggest that Oxonians also penned the rest of that series! But reading what you can today of Bowyer-Yin, might give you an impression of what goes on in writing and publishing and the marketing thereof.

I do recommend looking at the Wikepedia entry on Gertrude Bell. She was my father's aunt. One of three quite illustrious aunts in fact. Ah for the past!

(Bell is at the extreme left of the hand-tinted old pic)

And yes 'W.O. Bentley' created those British cars. Here's a pic of today's model:

Best, Calvin J. Bear.

WINE, FITNESS, AND FUR

The Singular Problem of the Very Wealthy

I know 'wealthy' people. Or 'said to be wealthy' people. Some have very grand numbers against their stated value. Some have grand numbers stated for them by Forbes or the various national Business Review Magazines that list this kind of thing.

All the ones I know have big ropes manned by sturdy Lascars tying them to responsibilities or duties or ideologies or merely, to strong delusions. There are those I don't know personally, or at least don't know well personally, but who give me indications that they are different – free from the unwanted detritus of big money. I recall one gentleman who attended the evening harness racing events in the middle of cold wet winter with his pyjamas clearly sneaking out from under his trousers and cardigan. He was certainly one of the wealthiest shrimp and lobster shipping tycoons in South East Asia. Not just 'unaffected,' I think perhaps militantly so, really. Eccentricity – of one sort or another - is very common among the rich.

And for the materially normal among us, the firm ties of responsibilities are only too the same – take the kids to school, wash the car, clothes, dishes, go to work, and on and on. They are still demanding of time and energy and care. We cannot do just whatever we want simply whenever we want! But we could do, with a little extra little thing...

I fancy that all one requires (why am I speaking in the voice of Robert Morley here?!) is an evening spa for genuine adults. Not a day spa. Although day spas are great too, of course.

No, I fancy an evening spa.

There is all this needless dressing up and carrying on that goes with so many things. Let's admit it, we live in a digital screen world, many years up the road from just flopping down in front of the analog television. We can let the Hollywood stars and starlets do all that dressing up and primping for us – especially since they have teams of attendants to help.

The customary attire for my evening spa shall be nothing more complicated than an expensive and luxurious bath robe or dressing gown and slippers. If this kind of thing is good enough for Hugh Hefner it ought to do for the rest of us. One ought to be able to be picked up discreetly by a functional, modern, fully-equipped lounge on wheels – something like the latest Honda Odyssey, which the fairly suave George Clooney recently proffers in advertisements. At a whim or a call from an iPhone or iPad, one ought to be able to call round the vehicle replete with a small hamper of pre-arranged pre-prepared finger food, not too distantly recognizable from the standard and quality of high tea fare at the new Claridge's.

One just might run to a personal masseur on board or at minimum an electronic device that mechanically massages one's feet, or back.

And then one might be restfully and unhurriedly conveyed around the evening streets, to some high vantage point to observe the twinkling city lights, and next on to one's 24-hour Jetts fitness facility to consider the option of a deep night workout... Or a spot in the carpark to read the latest fitness publication or the online Saturday Evening Post via the courtesy wi-fi hotspot.

The truly rich, I think, despair of meaningful intelligent company on fair terms. I wonder myself why cannot company speak with the same deliberate, paced, precision, schooled, practised, designed progression of a Trancelife CD...

But the truly adult, and not the merely rich, just might be able to manage a few arrangements a little closer to what is ideal. Money can buy one a splendid form, or even a decadent form, of solitude. But only knowledge of the world and crafted maturity can supply one with a splendidly decadent form of company. The secret lies in two words: beautiful and wise. The Beautiful Wise. Wisdom has a touch of decadence about it, since it always comes after mere experience, and perhaps after experience alone has already begun its fall into decay. And the beautiful, is not really beautiful at all, unless it is also wise.

It was wise several years ago to purchase gold. It is beautifully wise today to have done so. But to paraphrase the great Warren Buffett: it looked wise, and it was wise, but it might have been even wiser still than it looked. There is a long, long way yet to go for the price of gold. A very long way.

The Generations Of Genius

Great intellects turn up regularly but not constantly or continuously – there is usually a gap of many years between a sort of tide of bright people. Pure intellect is not like art or music, which you might even say is taken to a peak through unwitting inspiration. Whereas the exercise of pure intellect is mostly a matter of just plain hard work. How many people, for example, were convinced because of poor teachers, that they weren't good at maths, or literature, or history...? How many successful mathematicians, scientists, historians, writers will tell you, by the same token, that what got them there, was dumb persistence!

My private theory is that it isn't about genetics or generation-skipping, but about the tendency of the power-driven to exploit the work of great intellects, and commandeer the apex, as it were, and hold back competition.

Thus you will get one generation that is able to avoid the scrutiny of the power-mad at the top who are moving into the decline of advancing years, and thereby re-express the work of genuine active intellect.

Right now I am in the middle of reading a book I missed reading earlier while I had consumed just about everything else of his – Asimov's 'Prelude To Foundation,' a rather large book which pre-sees all this current 'global warming/climate change' stuff. Asimov the scientist and thinker is transparently the author's voice behind each of his stories – he's a very clunky writer whose hand, if not exactly heavy, is quite evident. But of course he's still very readable. His intellectual height comes from his grasp of the importance of science, and his ideas – philosophical and even I would say political – rather than merely his slickness with words. The next identity I'd like to say a few words about is Len Deighton.And here we have a great intellect unhampered by the vast difficulties of specialised and often extreme science. Here we have an intellect - whose actual spoken voice is a cockney one – who can speak in ways so cleverly that out of the frisson of his mental games, we are left only that much later having to acknowledge how towering an intellect he really is.

I find Deighton a dangerous personality. He is utterly self-effacing to the interviewing camera but this belies his obvious self-comprehension about what the public can, and cannot, take, from the genius.

Still, Deighton is from the last great intelligent generation. We have not yet seen what the new crop has to show us; what it has to thrill us with and titillate us about and open our eyes to.

Will it come? Is it really going to come? We've been fed such utter drivel by people like Murdoch and Reagan and Thatcher and that crowd for over more than thirty years now.

Oh yes, it is coming. As surely as those old fools are dying. Nothing surer. You can smell genius. It's like getting into a brand new Rolls Royce – it's like opening a box of brand new leather shoes inside a church basement...

All the Best,

Calvin J. Bear