When the focus is on boosting one's beer business, who has time to research picking the right stocks for the portfolio? Well, such is the case for a beer billionaire.?
Jim Koch, the 74-year-old billionaire cofounder of US-based?Boston Beer Company, recently told Forbes about his unusual investment strategy. He?likes to randomly pick a stock to buy every two weeks, and even for that, he trusts his family's former babysitter to carry out the trade.
Jim, who has a net worth of $1.6 billion at present, is known as a founding father of the American craft brewery movement. The company's brands include Dogfish Head, Twisted Tea, Angry Orchard and Truly Hard Seltzer.
"I don't believe that I have any chance in hell of outsmarting the professional investors," Koch said, noting that if he did buy a stock, whoever sold it to him would probably have more and better information than him. He prefers to focus on running his business and puts money into stocks not to get richer, but to protect his fortune and diversify his risk, he said.
The beer billionaire added that it would be too much hassle to personally oversee his portfolio. "I don't want to worry about it," he said. "It's boring. It's annoying."
74YO Koch leaves the buying and selling to his wife's assistant, whom they first hired as a babysitter two decades ago. Every fortnight (once in two weeks), she cashes in any losing positions, then randomly picks a single stock to buy from a list of indices including the S&P 500 and Russell 2000. The "zero-engagement" strategy has outperformed most actively managed portfolios and requires minimal effort, Koch said, as per a Business Insider report.
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The billionaire brewer, whose company's flagship beer is Samuel Adams, started investing in stocks more than 60 years ago. At age 12, he took the money saved from his paper route and bought two shares of Procter & Gamble (P&G) for about $140. He's never sold them, and after six stock splits, they've turned into 128 shares worth a total of $20,000 today.
Koch might have a knack for investing, or he may have simply gotten lucky. Either way, he clearly believes that he brings the most value to the beer business, and has no interest in competing with elite investors like billionaire 92-year-old Warren Buffett and Carl Icahn.
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