History
In September 1987, one month before the crash of October 1987, and during his first year at the University of British Columbia, Teal Linde buys his first stock. He puts his entire life savings of $3,000 into a Vancouver Stock Exchange company called Galaxy Industries. A few of his friends buy shares too. Within a year, the stock plummets to pennies and is delisted. Linde and his friends lose 100% of their investment. Having lost everyone’s money, Linde is turned off by stocks.
After two years working in the BC forest industry marketing building materials to Japan, Linde had savings in the bank earning 3%. In order to earn a higher return, he had given mutual funds a try. But he lost money on them, and didn’t like their inflexibility, high fees, and over diversification. Having majored in Urban Land Economics at UBC, Linde recognized that the real estate market in Vancouver had enjoyed a strong 7 year run following Expo 86. Anticipating the 5 year lull ahead, he passed on real estate. The only viable option left was to consider stocks again. Except this time, he couldn’t afford to lose all his money.
To improve his odds of success, Linde tried to find a broker with access to good research reports to open an account with. However, after failing to find an advisor with research he felt confident in, Linde decided he would have to learn to invest his money himself.
As a fan of reading autobiographies and biographies during late high school and university on subjects of business, politics and entertainment, Linde spent two afternoons at Vancouver’s Duthie Books skimming through all the books in the business section searching for an investor who had done extremely well, and who wrote a book about it, or was written about. Linde found many books written by authors whose biggest claim to fame was that they were the author of a previous best-selling book on how to pick stocks, or how to retire wealthy etc. Linde was not interested in someone who was a best-selling author, but rather someone who had had actually done it, someone who had brilliantly succeeded at stocks. He would eventually find books on Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett. Lynch had achieved a 31% annualized during his first 10 years managing the Fidelity Magellan Fund. Buffett had achieved a 27% annualized return during his first 10 years managing the Buffett Partnership. He bought books on both individuals and meticulously studied their strategies.