Equity in Equities

In my early 20s, working my first job out of school, I received a promotion and a large, unexpected cash bonus. The day before the payment hit, I checked my bank accounts. I had a negative net worth and a total of $667 to my name. "One dollar more than the devil," I thought to myself. Overnight, I paid off my college loans, set up an emergency fund, and funded a brokerage account.

I then purchased a book that changed the course of my life: Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (1995). I learned of the book after reading an interview with the Black fund manager John W. Rogers Jr., who recommended it strongly. In those pages, I saw the blueprint of the life I wanted to lead. I'd never owned a share of stock, though, and I didn't think I was ready to. I studied the business press daily and read several other books, including Philip A. Fisher’s Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1984) and Benjamin Graham and David Dodd’s Security Analysis (1934).

My timing couldn't have been better. It was 2008, and as the financial markets came undone, I was learning how businesses worked and how to analyze them, earning money, and saving. Several months later, I felt ready to invest.

I made my first investment on November 11, 2008. It feels like centuries ago technologically. My broker at the time had no online platform to invest. So, I went into my office in Manhattan, up to the 33rd floor, stood in an empty conference room overlooking the Hudson River, and made a phone call. I placed an order for shares in Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. I'd never been to one of the company's locations or sampled its products. I read its financial statements in detail, though, and I understood its value proposition and competitive advantages. My weighing of the probabilities suggested the business was underpriced. As I still do today, I wrote my reasoning down. Before I sold out a few years later, I made a handsome return. Other, more profitable investments would soon follow.

I reflected on this as I read a Wall Street Journal article today about rising interest in stocks among Black American youth. This is a good thing, especially if most are accessing equity markets through low-cost, diversified ETFs.

I once wrote in an investor update for The Mutoro Group about the appeal of financial markets to me as a young Black American. From my Q3 2016 Letter:

What I am trying to say is that all investors eventually learn that the public markets do not care where you went to school, what your zip code is, or how much money you or your friends have. Nor will any of these help you. I have always welcomed this. The impersonality in the vicissitudes of markets can also be viewed as a lack of bias. To a young African-American man such as myself—living in a world where he is told on the one hand that his race does not matter, but confronted with more examples than he can count where it clearly does—trying to build a record of achievement through taking advantage of an environment truly disinterested in your background is inspiring.

When I shared this, an old white guy who was very well-established and connected in the investment management industry emailed me to complain. He said he didn't understand this paragraph. Why was I bringing up race? I was disappointed but not surprised. This guy—who managed billions of dollars—apparently didn't have basic reading comprehension or was so ignorant of lived experiences beyond his own that he couldn't appreciate other perspectives.

So, I'll repeat it more simply. What I love about investing is the markets don't care who you are. What I love about owning financial securities is my share of Berkshire is valued the same as your share of Berkshire, and I can get the same terms buying or selling shares as you can. That’s not true elsewhere.

It is well-established that real estate appraisers often value the assets of Black property owners less. It is also well-established that job seekers with more stereotypically white names will receive more opportunities than those with stereotypically Black names. And unlike me making a phone call to buy stocks, this isn't ancient history. Despite what billionaire morons like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman would have you believe, the greatest threat to American society is hardly DEI. Corporate America has a long way to go in promoting not just diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also belonging. I could write a whole book about the ridiculous racial biases I've seen and experienced in just the last five years. We have yet to reach the world MLK famously imagined in his “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. What I love about investing, though, is that if you're a regular person investing in the public markets, you receive no benefit or reduction in the value of your holdings because of your race, sex, religion, etc. (It is more complicated as a professional investor, where your job is investing, and well-established biases in fundraising and investor commitments come into play. But that is for another note.)

Racism is the disease of the person being racist, not mine. So, I focus on what is within my circle of competence and that I can influence strongly. For me, it means I gravitate to entrepreneurship and long-term investing in public markets. And I try to remember MLK’s words from his Street Sweeper speech:

"What I'm saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.'"

June 11, 2020

“All living is listening for a throat to open. The length of its silence shaping lives.” - Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

Never before have tempest and tranquility coexisted so beautifully. Never before. In my life, perhaps never again.

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the name “George”? I think of my older brother George Z. Bakuli. Since he passed away six years ago, I think about him literally every single day. Every single day. I am blessed to have had him in my life. I am blessed to continue to have him in my thoughts. But the heartbreak lingers, especially with each passing year; the feeling grows of just how young he was when he died. Just 29 years old. Just beginning his life in so many ways.

When I think of George, I think of his social courage. His steady moral compass. His independence of mind. I think of his indomitable will. His loyalty to those he loved and who loved him. His pride in his Blackness, his ancestry, and his family. I think of his big smile; how he playfully lorded over me that, unlike me, he had a great smile without ever needing braces. How he encouraged me to stand up for myself and to never brook the opinion that I wasn’t capable. I think of how he knew, like I knew, that the odds were stacked against us; and how he encouraged me not to mind if pursuing my dreams or doing the right thing made other people feel uncomfortable about themselves, especially white people. I think of how every time after I achieved some big goal growing up, whether an A on an essay or victory in a school election, I would tell him, “Next time, y’all best bring kryptonite”. I think of how, many years later, just a few months before he passed, on New Year’s Eve, after midnight, he unexpectedly texted me, “Next time, y’all best bring kryptonite! That’s your saying. Don’t ever forget that!” I think of how grateful I was and am that he remembered and appreciated details from our lives. I think of his arena-sized laugh. I think of his beautiful energy and ambitions and hopes and dreams. I think of how those were cut short, at just 29 years old, because of mental illness. I think of how it was not his fault. I think of how he fought for his life and his dignity. I think of how the health care system failed him. I think of how his employers and human resources failed him. I think of how even six years after he died, too many people continue to use language that stigmatizes mental health, unaware or uninterested of words besides “crazy” or “insane” to describe something negative. I think about so very, very much.

Above all, though, when I think about George, I think about courage. I think about how before he got sick, his courage to live better was his greatest gift to me. I think about how courage is the real wellspring of any meaningful change in our lives, communities, and societies. Since he passed away, on his birthday, June 11th, I’ve tried to meditate on courage. I try to remind myself to live courageously. This year was no different. If anything, the reminders were heightened. Because when I think about “George,” I also think about George Floyd. Unlike my brother, I don’t know intimate details of Floyd’s life. He was a Black man too. He had energy and ambitions and dreams. He had people he loved and who loved him. He also died too soon. In many ways today he is a symbol. A symbol of so many Black lives unjustly ended. Whether at the protests I have joined or on social media, when I see all the glorious signs for him and Breonna Taylor and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and too many Black lives lost trying to say they mattered, I can’t help but think of my brother George, whose life mattered so much to me.

I’ve read a lot of late from white strangers, friends, and acquaintances about what they are doing to help make change happen and to prove that Black lives matter. They seek a better criminal justice system. Some even go further; they understand we will not have a better criminal justice system without other forms of justice, whether social, medical, or, above all, economic justice.  This will take stamina, resolve, and courage. They are signaling they are ready to actively join a fight so many of us have been battling every single day of our lives. When I think about courage, though, I can’t help but think how unaware or uninterested so many of these strangers, friends, and acquaintances seem to be to opportunities to be courageous in their daily lives. It seems so much easier for people to stand in solidarity with people they have never met, and will never meet, than people in their own lives and communities. Black people in their own lives and communities. I don’t have a lot of answers for how to improve criminal justice. But I have some thoughts around how to improve economic justice. Here are a few: 

Hire and retain Black people. Promote Black people. Fund Black people. Become a customer of a variety of Black businesses. Compensate Black people justly. Don’t steal Black people’s ideas and efforts and then erase their contributions. Don’t make excuses for, give special treatment to, or put on a pedestal non-Black people if you wouldn’t do likewise for Black people. Don’t penalize Black people for things you wouldn’t penalize others for. Don’t label Black people “angry” or “agitators” when they display the courage to specify their experiences as relates to being Black. Don’t gaslight Black people when they hold you accountable for your words, policies, and actions.

These aren’t hypotheticals. These are tangible choices in response to events I’ve both experienced and witnessed firsthand.

One thing in particular is critical: It’s not giving implicit special treatment to white people. I’ve seen over and over again white people say they are “acknowledging [their] privilege” and “learning to use [their] privilege well”. On the wide spectrum of say John Brown to Jefferson Davis, it is a gesture on the progressive side of things. But it is hardly enough. It just perpetuates in new ways the problems that got us here in the first place. I can’t help but think, “There’s no universal law that you should have privilege in the first place. How about a world in which white privilege doesn’t exist?” That seems to me a truly courageous idea and series of actions worth publicly speaking up about and fighting for. As a Black woman I work with said so well, “Rationalizing or compartmentalizing racism because it preserves privilege is a form of racism.” Rather than recognizing how good you have it undeservedly, and benevolently using that goodness for the benefit of Black people, how about a world in which you don’t undeservedly have it so good? Wouldn’t that be truly courageous?

30 Years in America

I am an American, Nairobi born. Thirty years ago today as a small child I arrived in the United States of America. I came with my mother and two older brothers to join my father here. As with many who came before us, we didn’t come to America because of its past. We came because of its future. A future teeming with potential, yet still unwritten, which we thought we could have a hand in writing. Though I had no say in the decision, it’s one of the defining moments of my life. Years later, when I graduated high school, as class president I had the honor of delivering a speech to my wonderful classmates and their families; I chose to speak about our voyage to America and some lessons it taught me that I thought broadly helpful. Today I’d like to share those words and the gratitude and love in them as I celebrate my American birthday because all these years later they still ring true:

June 13, 2003
Amherst Regional High School Graduation
Mullins Center at the University of Massachusetts

My name is Godfrey Bakuli, and I’m the class president and the boy voted Most Likely to Succeed—meaning that I’m the unlucky soul who the class thought would be fine with loads of pressure to be successful. Yikes. But what does this all mean, all my nifty little nametags.

Do I know something about life that others in the class don’t? No, definitely not. I am no guru, I have no crystal ball. And when I need advice, I look to the same divine source of counsel that you and millions in this devout nation certainly all call upon: I watch Oprah.

Nevertheless, we are experiencing this glorious time in our lives in similar ways, feeling the same anxiety, eagerness, and doubt.

I can only tell you about what I have learned in my life because it is the only life I can speak most candidly about. Hopefully, this will resonate with you, but if it does not then that is alright, because you can sit tight. Our graduation speaker tonight will inspire you, make you laugh, make you cry, and at times make you wonder how a woman of her age could be so shockingly hip.

But back to my speech.

Recently, a friend of mine told me explicitly and rather harshly that she would never speak to me again if my speech was melodramatic. My teachers have implied that they would disavow any knowledge of my formal education at Amherst Regional High School if I came across as pretentious. My mother told me that I should make sure to thank the audience when I was done speaking. She said, “Don’t make them think I’ve raised you with a foot in the gutters.”

And just recently, coming to understand that those closest to me see me as a flashy, overdramatic, and ungrateful person, I laid down, rolled up into the fetal position, and willed myself into a midlife crisis at the unripe age of 17 and started to think about my life.

I’ve had a lot of free time the past few months, and I’ve been thinking about a lot of choice subjects. Well, I haven’t really had much free time, but there’s this thing called senioritis and it makes you think you have a lot of free time to sit and stare at the wall or play with a ball of yarn somewhere in the corner of a room when you’ve got a term paper due the next day.

And so I thought about a lot of things.

In my youth—OK, fine, two weeks ago—I was reclined in my bedroom, and thought about a situation that happened many years ago.

I remember one dark autumn night, when I witnessed first-hand a little boy, walking with his family in tow, trip over a curb and skin his knee. By the parents’ thick foreign accents, I assumed that they were an immigrant family and probably new to the United States.

The boy cried long and hard about returning to where he and his family had come from. The boy’s parents implored the boy to stop crying. Well, they didn’t actually say anything, but in their silent actions it seemed that they implied that with a lot of passion, a little inspiration, and a lot of dedication that little boys like him could leap over the troublesome curbs in American life.

I can relate to the boy because I too am an immigrant, hailing from Kenya, having touched down in the United States on August 22, 1988. However, there is something outside of the immigrant aspect of the story that interests me all the more in this time of our lives.

Ruminating on the experience made me realize something I had gradually and then suddenly realized.

On many occasions in my life, I had in times of great passion and anger told my parents that everything I had or would accomplish in life was because of my self-motivation and feelings that I was the only person concerned with my life. Wow.

My parents made sacrifices when they came here. They sacrificed the comfort of their familiar, native environment and intimacy of their relationships with family and friends so that their kids could attain something far more important and magnificent than any clichéd, popular notions of the American dream. 

But enough of my confessional. This is not a speech intended to teach you about loving your family.

It is intended to show you that the storyline that is one’s life has no beginning, no middle, and no end. The decisions we make, big and small, resound forever in the storylines of others. They made a decision and a sacrifice fifteen years ago and it resonates to this day and beyond.

They have never belated me with stories of their sacrifices to bring our family here, but what they have done, and what I now realize is, they inspired me to do great things.

And in all this pensive procrastination senior year, I learned of a beautiful truth: We too can inspire others to do great things.

In their moving of a family, I saw them moving a mountain—laying the foundation for something that with the right attitude, a lot of passion, a little inspiration, and a lot of dedication, I could construct to reach glorious heights.

We must relish life. We must enjoy every moment for its inconsequentiality or its fatefulness. It can be cruel, it can be unfair, but it can also be joyous and magnificent. We have only one life to live, so we must live it right. We must engage and pursue the life we want because every moment of our lives is important to us individually, to the people we come into contact with, and to the society we live in.

Do you remember that young immigrant boy that skinned his knee tripping over a curb? I was that young boy. That’s my first memory of the United States.

And so, mom, I won’t come across as ungrateful. Thank you both for picking me up that evening, and thank you for inspiring me to see that my classmates and I, with the little things, like curbs and a helping hand, and the big things, like leaving our homes, Are Moving Mountains Every Moment of OUR Lives.

Thank you.

Now I’d like you to welcome to the podium this year’s graduation speaker, storyteller, grandmother, and Dean of Students at Amherst College—the admirable Onawumi Jean Moss.

A Country Road

I spent one hour today walking solo along a country road. Three trips down, three trips up; it made 3 miles. At 280 feet in elevation per ascent, that was 840 feet total in elevation. I can count those stats, the physical, visible, and directly-measurable ones, accounted for by, and filed away within, the tiny powerful computers on my wrist and in my pocket. But I can’t directly measure what really mattered: The time away from the city, surrounded by trees and dust and fog and dew and clouds. Nature. Not just surrounded by it but within it. At 2,260 feet above sea level, I was in the clouds. As I broke a sweat that turned into a stream and soaked my workout clothing, all-black from years spent wearing the anonymous dark uniform of my New York, I actively thought and considered and reflected. I reflected on what I wanted with my business and my personal passions. And it felt great. To have nothing to interrupt me but me and the mountain stream nearby rushing downhill constantly, washing away the night rain toward the Hudson, eagerly awaiting its newest brood. And I loved it. That hour. Alone, but in the company of an honest, loving, encouraging nature and myself.

The Science of Hitting

"I think you will find as we go along that much of what I have to say about hitting is self-education—thinking it out, learning the situations, knowing your opponent, and most important, knowing yourself. Lefty O'Doul was a great hitter, one of the prettiest I ever saw, and he always said that most hitting faults came from a lack of knowledge, uncertainty, and fear—and that boils down to knowing yourself. You, the hitter, are the greatest variable in this game, because to know yourself takes dedication." - Ted Williams

A strange thing happens sometimes when you release your writing into the world. You might summon what feels to you like this immense force of cerebral energy to create it. It can feel as though its influence should bend steel or rattle the highest, darkest rafters of the universe. Instead, in the immediate aftermath, you might receive a dozen “likes” digitally or “good jobs” in-person or several hundred “impressions” on social media; but you don't get a real sense of whether your writing fundamentally changed the thing you were trying to alter. 

If you’re like me, you try to remember that sometimes the best and truest feedback is delayed. And you also remember Warren Buffett’s advice: When playing the game of life, it’s better to prioritize your inner scorecard over outer ones. So you pat yourself on the back for what felt like a good swing of the bat and the contact you made, and you set up for the next good ball to come your way; you promise yourself to swing with more intent and to hit harder, unaware the echo might be taking its time to reach you and you might have just hit the rafters.