My college major, however, was Anthropology. And while I graduated with a Masters of International Management in Finance, my goal was initially to work for the US government, either the State Department or what was then the Overseas Private Investment Corp.
In fact, I got my first job in the investment business on a recommendation from one of my oldest friends, writing letters and answering phone calls for a financial newsletter publisher. That was real hard work. But it did teach me volumes about something business school couldn’t: What really motivates investors, and what readers really want from advisors.
I continued to answer reader queries from 1989 to 2013, when I was sole and founding editor of Roger Conrad’s Utility Forecaster. I can say right now that not everything I touched turned to gold.
The electric industry deregulation scare of 1993-94 found me fighting for Utility Forecaster’s very life, as many investors fell prey to the very wrong conventional wisdom that the sector business model was done.
In 1999, I relied on subscriber anger to convince my publisher not to change the name of the newsletter in a tech-crazed world. And while I did sell Enron before its final collapse in late 2001, many of my Portfolio stocks did take on big losses in the wake of its fall in 2002.
These setbacks did teach me one thing above all else: Keep a steady hand no matter how bad things get.
Over the years, I have had to cut some stocks loose at a bad time. Sometimes it’s been the consequence of not seeing emerging troubles before it was too late. Sometimes, it was due to circumstances that could not have been reasonably foreseen. And sometimes, I’ve lost simply because management was less than truthful with me, as well as others.
Keeping steady, however, has enabled me to weather the setbacks while staying in position to profit from better times that inevitably came. And that’s ultimately the reason why Hulbert Financial Digest rated me number one for 10-year risk adjusted total return in April 2013.
That’s a period that included the Financial Crisis of 2007-09 and I’m very proud of it. But it was time to leave my labor of love for 24 years, Utility Forecaster, to join my partners at Capitalist Times and to launch Conrad’s Utility Investor.
CUI has since then been the advisory I always wanted to write. The electronic format has enabled me to provide a wealth of information in a more timely way than was possible under the old print format. I’ve been able to provide multi-media, rapid alerts and quarterly online subscriber chats. And it’s been truly liberating to control the marketing message my name is used for—no more “rare” coin advertisements!
As far as performance, the five plus years from 2013-2019 have been generally a much tougher slog for essential services and income investing in general than the prior 10. Nonetheless, what I’ve provided in our three portfolios has been generally in line with the average annual return of 13.1% I delivered for readers on average from 1989 though mid-2013, as my graph of rolling total returns shows: