Word: puts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fish-Bowl Policy. The fund that has done more than any other to put shares in the household sugar bowl is Massachusetts Investors Trust, oldest and big gest of the mutual funds and the one that set the pattern for all the rest. M.I.T is a child of Boston, which has raised the handling of O.P.M. (other people's money) to the status of a fine art. The art was born of an 1830 court decision, the "Prudent Man Rule." In settling a suit charging a trustee with negligence in investing in common stocks, the judge held that...
M.I.T. helped put an end to all that. Despite howls from the financial world, it opened its books and portfolio of stocks to the public, setting the pattern for the "fishbowl" policy under which the whole fund industry now operates. Instead of fighting New Deal legislation aimed at regulating investment-company practices, it recognized the need for regulation, helped the New Deal frame the laws. So similar were M.I.T.'s bylaws to the Investment Company Act of 1940, which laid the ground rules for the funds, that M.I.T. had to change only a few commas...
...quirk of fate (his engineer father had taken his family there while working on a construction job). He was indisputably a Boston product. He had gone to Noble & Greenough and Harvard (1920), taken a dutiful fling at engineering, gone back to Harvard Business School to study finance, put in his time in a Boston investment banking house. The trustees hired...
...automobiles, mining and steel. With a poker player's eye, Robinson could look at a company's present and guess its future. He personally researched the Texas Co. (now Texaco, Inc.), persuaded the trustees to buy 15,000 shares. The trust kept on buying until it had put $9,400,000 in Texas Co.; today the shares are still in M.I.T.'s portfolio-at a market value of $44 million...
...into M.I.T., the trust moved into first place among the nation's mutual funds in 1936, with assets of $130 million (v. $15.1 million in 1930). Despite its bullish position, M.I.T. sailed through the sharp market break of 1937 with hardly a change in its portfolio; it simply put new cash into Treasury notes as a defensive measure. In that year, Dwight Robinson was rewarded for his work by being moved up to trustee. In 1954, when Merrill Griswold moved up to honorary chairman of the advisory board, Robinson slipped into his chair to guide M.I.T. through its greatest...