Tales of a Ninth-Grade Fund Manager:
Brandon got the idea to start the fund in November when he took a financial-literacy course. As part of the program, he and other students had to develop their own business plans. One student wanted to open a skateboard shop. Brandon, who became interested in markets with a virtual-reality game called Neopets and was setting up mock stock portfolios by the age of 12, wanted to start his own investment fund. “It blew me away,” says Jay Ellis, a regional manager of Washington Mutual in Manhattan and the course instructor.In six months, Brandon says he has increased the value of his fund — which consists of money he earned fixing neighbors’ computers and contributions from his uncles — by some 30%, to about $5,000.
Because he is being home schooled, Brandon can adjust his schedule to attend investor meetings, as he did recently, hopping on a subway with his father to hear London-based billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, chief executive of Mittal Steel, at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. Mr. Mittal was meeting with some analysts and about 100 investors.
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Brandon recently decided to put the fund on hold for a few months while he is in math camp in Colorado. (He moved the fund’s assets into a money-market account.) At the end of the summer, he plans to relaunch the Mariner fund with the $5,000 plus another $30,000 he is trying to raise with help from a lawyer. Because he is only 14, his mother and father are custodians of the brokerage account where he does his trading.His mother, Judith, a computer programmer who home schools Brandon, doesn’t mind his running an investment company out of their home. But she worries about him investing so much money, and about his frustration at things that don’t normally frustrate a teenager, such as his inability to take a six-hour Series 7 exam for would-be securities traders. (You have to be working at an NASD member firm to take the test.) After finding him following Asian markets on financial TV networks at 4 a.m., she told him to get some sleep.
“I’m terrified, I have to say, as a mom,” says Ms. Conley.
Part of Brandon’s home-school curriculum involves finding unusual classes and learning opportunities on the Internet and in New York City, including volunteering and training at the Brooklyn Public Library, online math classes through Ivy League schools, chess clubs and Lord of the Rings reading societies. The unorthodox schedule allows Brandon to spend as much as eight hours a day researching companies and investments and making trades.
He often wears a tie, suit or dress shirt in the middle-class neighborhood where he lives, partly so people will take him seriously but also to avoid being suspected of violating truancy laws because he is not at a traditional school.
Brandon’s father, Terence, a jazz pianist who has played with the Count Basie and the Duke Ellington orchestras, says he and his wife try not to restrict Brandon’s moves, but to monitor them, and make sure he has good advisers, which include his uncles.
My lawn-mowing money went into a savings account, where it more-or-less kept up with inflation.