Well, that's kind of what I'm trying to find out with evidence. Also, when I say 'where does the money come from?' I mean a little more than so and so is a CEO. Did they found the company? If so, where did the money come from? Are they truly self made, or did they have a lot of help. For instance, Trump inherited millions from his father. Now, to be fair, he has increased the size of his fortune dramatically, but I would not say he was a 'self made man' in the traditional sense.
I kind of wonder how valid this story is: http://www.moneytalksnews.com/why-youre-probably-better-investing-than-donald-trump/ Trump Worth $10 Billion Less Than If He’d Simply Invested in Index Funds
http://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historical-chart Dow has gone up 16,000 points since a bottom in 1982. The S&P 500 has gone up 1900 points since around the same time. Correct my math since I am probably wrong. The $200 million he was worth in 1982, 200 x 800% = *gun in mouth* My guy at Merryl Lynch convinced me to invest in European and Shanghai indexes last year. Yeah. I'm debating whether to let it ride come March or just stick it in bonds.
That article should be taken with a grain of salt, period. The author probably read Rich Dad, Poor Dad and was super impressed by it. Real estate investing vs the stock market are driven by such wildly different factors that they arent comparable. Yikes. I hope you diversified...
$15B plus in revenue a year. Printing paper when you're the preferred vacation for the obese and the white trash who want to be "fancy". Illinois: Ken Griffin- $6.6B- founder of Citadel Investments, a badass hedge fund. His story is pretty impressive, was a market wizard from the jump in college. I remember reading he got a satellite dish on his dorm in college to get faster real time data. Next level shit. Since I grew up there: Wisconsin: John Menard, Jr- $9.1B- Founder of Menard's, a home improvement chain. I didn't realize he was worth that much. But Menard's is everywhere in Wisconsin and other parts of the Midwest. I didn't know shit about Home Depot or Lowe's till I went to college, cause it was all Menard's all the time growing up.
Warren Buffett is the #2 richest person on the planet. Here is his company's website: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ Its very much what the guy's personality seems like it is too. No frills, no bullshit. Just business.
Richest person in Ontario (and all of Canada, not surprisingly) is David Thomson, 3rd Baron of Fleet, worth 30 billion Canadian dollars. His grandfather Roy Thomson was like a Canadian Rupert Murdoch, and started from selling radios to buying radio stations to create something for his customers to listen to on their radios to owning the world's biggest newspaper empire.
I dig this guy's investing attitude. The past couple he weeks he was no doubt buying up more GM and IBM. Carl Icahn was probably doing the same with Apple. Hell Apple is doing the same with Apple; they are in the middle of a massive buyback. During the recession Warren made something like $10 billion inside 3 years from the fire sale prices. Companies like Am Ex, GM, Coke, and Wells Fargo aren't going anywhere (though GM was up in the air for a while). When there is blood in the streets, buy. IBM seems like a peculiar buy in the days of other tech giants, but whatever, it appears to work for him.
Ask the folks who owned shares of GM that just disappeared under bankruptcy about that. I was able to salvage pennies on my dollars before that happened. I had already been through it with K-Mart., 2000 shares gone in the blink of an eye, then they issued new shares.
Ken Griffin comes from money, he started a hedge fund while at Harvard (which, you know, is really cheap) by obtaining $265,000 from 'friends and family (mostly his grandmother who was very wealthy). Yes, he's a bit closer to a 'self made man' but let's not forget his father was a four term Congressman. So in other words, he inherited his wealth.
I respect what Buffett's done, but he's become pretty full of shit lately. Daniel Loeb called him out on some stuff last year and it was great. He also advocated for people re-mortgaging their homes a few years ago to buy more homes as a good investment, which was way too simplistic. Then again, he's old as fuck so while he's a legendary investor, he's still firmly in crotchety old man territory. And your point? He's on of the most successful hedge funders of the last couple decades and is the wealthiest man in the 3rd largest city in the country. Not like he inherited a vast fortune or a massive company. He got some seed money but I imagine he probably would have been in the same place if he used $10K in student loans or a small loan from his parents. Not everyone needs to start with 2 nickels and product in the trunk of your car. Also, for the associated bullshit about it, Harvard is cheap. If your parents make less than $75K you dont pay anything. If they are making closer to $100K, its still only like $7-8K a year, which is like a state school.
I'm not saying the guy isn't good at what he does. As I said earlier, this is more of a research assignment than anything. Just curious to see where the richest in our society started out. So far, it appears overwhelmingly that the richest seem to come from money themselves. I'm not casting aspersions on their ability. And consequently, no, I don't think he's in the same place with 10K in student loans. The guy raised 265K while in college. How many people do you know have access to people with that kind of money to give to you? I may know one or two or throughout my life that had access to that kind of money at any point, much less in college. As to Harvard, yes, they have a great financial aid program. However, their stated tuition, with room and board, is roughly 60K a year. Being super good at math, I went ahead and figured out a 4 year degree would cost 240K. I don't know about you, but I don't consider that cheap. I did a quick search, and was curious to see how many students are at the income levels you mentioned. Didn't see that information listed. In other words, while I don't doubt Harvard has great financial aid, how many of the students come from families that actually qualify for it? Again, not casting aspersions, there is a larger point that I'm trying to bring to the surface here.
But he didn't start Citadel in college. The point was he started a fund, learned stuff, got very good and it lead to his opportunity that brought him to Chicago to learn under another great investor. If he had started a well-capitalized fund in college and grew it, then yeah, its probably a different story. He was just establishing a track record at that point. I just view it differently than a guy starting a hedge fund at 24 with $5-$10MM he got from "friends and family" despite having no history of successful investing. Its not cheap at all, but thats the MSRP. Harvard's endowment and financial aid coffers are ENORMOUS, so most kids aren't paying the sticker price. Sure there are the rich, legacy students who are, but Harvard has a hard-on for "diversified" classes. So decently affluent kids who aren't legacies and come from traditional college student backgrounds and might pay in a closer range to the sticker price, have trouble getting in. I'm not commenting on Griffin's tuition levels he paid, but attending and graduating from Harvard would not automatically make me say "this rich person had already come from money". I went to grad school with two Harvard undergrads. One was a product of Chicago Public Schools (and not a nice charter school program) and the other came from a smaller farm community in Indiana. 2 kids from my affluent suburban HS graduating class went to Harvard, one was a legacy, the other only was accepted cause she was attending to swim collegiately. She had the grades and scores obviously, but wasn't unique enough otherwise to attend. Much like my cousin who is on a full scholarship to Johns Hopkins next year and had a perfect SAT and silly good grades yet wasn't admitted to Harvard or Princeton.
I asked a buddy who went to Harvard once about the make up of the student body, he said the only people that get in are the very rich and the very poor, with a sprinkling of the people in between. Living about 5 miles from the campus, it might as well be on another planet. The students live in their own microcosm of reality.
Damn Chicago.That's like middle east numbers. 110 shot, 17 killed in first 10 days of 2016 in Chicago http://wgntv.com/2016/01/12/110-shot-17-killed-in-first-10-days-of-2016-in-chicago/
Awhile ago I brought up how Chicago has some of the lowest rates of federal prosecution for gun crimes in the US, and apparently it may be that way due to harsher sentencing from the state. Is that really the case? Source Never thought I'd say this, but I agree with what Rahm Emanuel proposed a few years ago... increase the minimum sentencing and do more to ensure enforcement. Source (I wonder if the NRA still opposes this now) Similar story here in Minneapolis. "Our analysis of sentencing data provided by the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission reveals in gun cases across all of Minnesota, judges give less than the mandatory minimum sentence 53% of the time." I think it can be agreed on that increasingly stricter laws, or even whatever laws are already in the books today (whether state or federal), are worthless if they aren't enforced*... so why isn't this happening? What are the reasons against? *I'd argue that a weak or less than minimum sentence is not effective enforcement.
I think if they banned the sale of hi point pistols, you would see a severe drop off in gun violence. Edit: You would see a spike in violence when the rush on buying them up happens, but then it would drop off steeply as they all eventually fall apart.