Image credit: Anna Hurst
By Jason Zweig
Dec. 3, 2014
Almost exactly a decade ago, I met perhaps the toughest and most disciplined investor I’ve ever encountered: a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army named Jack Hurst.
When I interviewed him, in late 2004 and early 2005, Jack had already had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) for more than 17 years. He couldn’t walk, talk, move a finger, go to the bathroom or even breathe without mechanical assistance. Other than a few muscles in his forehead and face, he was completely paralyzed.
Jack communicated through an electrode, taped to his right cheek, that converted the subtle electrical activity in his facial muscles into signals that were transmitted to a laptop. By twitching those muscles on cue, he could select letters or words displayed on a modified touch screen on the laptop monitor. The specially adapted laptop could also convert the signals to speech through a voice synthesizer. And Jack and his wife, Anna, had developed their own private Morse code based on his facial twitches, which were almost invisible to other people. Using these various methods, he could type and send email, use the Internet, speak or dictate at surprising speed.
Within minutes, I forgot that I was speaking with a man whose disease had stricken him mute; we had a riveting conversation about investing, politics, and life that lasted at least three hours. Afterwards, Jack sent me dozens of emails detailing his investing strategy and describing his daily routine.
Perhaps because the ease of quantifying it appealed to the former physics major and radio technologist, investing became Jack’s hobby, if not obsession.
He stayed informed up-to-the-minute about what was going on in the financial markets; he watched CNBC for several hours a day.
But he almost never did anything about it; he intentionally watched CNBC only with the sound off, and he traded a half-dozen times a year at most, often just to realize a tax loss that would offset a gain.
He knew why he owned every stock he owned, what he felt the underlying business was worth, and what he would sell it for. He never bought anything merely because its price had been going up or sold it just because its price had gone down. He spent the late 1990s online all day long, yet he never felt the slightest temptation to buy into the dot-com bubble.
Jack was contrarian to his bones: He ended up owning a bunch of Internet stocks, but he hadn’t bought them at insane prices in 1999 like everybody else. Instead, he bought them only after the dot-com bubble burst, when nobody wanted them anymore.
He wasn’t immune to the virus of speculation; from time to time, Jack did buy risky stocks in the hope that they would turn into big scores. But he did his homework on them first, and he segregated them away from his long-term holdings in what he called his “play” account.
After my article came out, Anna and Jack sent me a lovely card. The front of it is at the top of this post. Inside, it said this:
[Click the image to enlarge.]
In almost 30 years of writing about investing, I haven’t received many notes I prize more than this one.
Jack Hurst died in July. I consider myself fortunate to have known him.
My article on Jack is in two parts. These color PDFs are large files and may take a while to load; you might need to right-click, Ctrl+click, or hold down your cursor.
Source: “The Soul of an Investor,” Money Magazine, March 2005
