Photo By VICongress / CC BY 2.0
Early Life:
Joel Greenblatt came into this world on the 1th day of December, 1957. He is a value stock investor which basically means that he seeks stocks that are priced low but have incredible potential because they seem to be worth more than what they are priced at based on financial reports. Joel Greenblatt uses part of his time to work as a professor at Columbia University in the graduate business school. In addition to this, Mr. Greenblatt was a chair board member for the Alliant tech stems. He has a lot of background in the stock market industry. Also under his belt, is the claim to fame for being the original founder of the auction securities corporation in New York City.
Joel Greenblatt went to the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in the year 1979, receiving his Bachelor of Science degree and his Masters of Business Administration degree in 1980. He worked hard and made his way through college while being recognized more than once for his work ethics and rewards. He is a dedicated man in nearly everything that he does.
Career Achievements:
In the year of 1985, Joel Greenblatt began a hedge fund called Gotham Capitol. He started with just a mere seven million dollars. While 7 million may seem like a lot to most people, in the investment world it can be to many people just drops in a bucket. Most of the 7 million he used was obtained by Michael Milken who is better known as being the king of junk bonds. Joel Greenblatt has had great success with the company and has returned more than 40% annualized return between 1985 and 2008. That’s a pretty great return and something he should be commended for. This achievement has catapulted Joel into the limelight for achieving such an accomplishment. He has one of the investment records of all time.
What Joel Greenblatt does is try to find cheap, but still good companies. He looks for value within these companies with a catalyst, so good things can happen quicker. Joel Greenblatt enjoys special situations and believes that they are simply a different place to find cheap stocks. Joel Greenblatt uses the basic principals of the magic company within his own fund. This magic formula includes looking for high ROC and high earnings yield. Joel Greenblatt tries to decipher what “normalized earnings” will be in the future of three to four years. He makes sure that the stocks are cheap based on normalized earnings. Joel Greenblatt puts a lot of concentration into his investing, having five to eight securities that make up eighty percent of his portfolio. One position can be all the way up to thirty percent.
Additional Information:
Besides being a famous investor, Joel Greenblatt is a professor at Columbia’s business school. He is liked by his students and teaches a curriculum that is cutting edge to the business industry. Joel Greenblatt is a highly intelligent individual and is considered the go to man by many people who are looking for significant returns on their money.
Along with a colleague, Joel established a website for investors’ value club members. The clubs is highly regarded and has a cap on their membership of only two hundred and fifty members. With such a small number of available spots, it is nearly impossible to get into the club. Members of the club can submit innovative ideas for investment each week. Whoever submits the best idea wins a prize amount of five thousand dollars. These guys certainly do not play around with pocket change.
Joel has also written a couple of books over how to put a strategy in place to by cheaply priced stocks with higher end yields. His writings also touch base on formula type investing. Joel began the formula investment company which is basically an management system for money that is online. It runs on a model that is quantitative and is very selective on choosing stocks based on selected criteria that is entered. It can perform the calculations with precision giving excellent options of stocks to choose from for investment. This is a much disciplined model and it allows money to be invested without as much risk because of the removal factors it has in place to such as projections of the future or emotion excesses. Just because this model has proven successful, does not mean it is foolproof. Things change, technology changes and factors change. There is no guarantee that an investment will be a good one just because the model chose it.
Joel Greenblatt is not only a man of integrity; he is also a man with heart. He has made many donations to help educate the inner city New York children. These schools are many times desperate for the cash because they have such a massive population of students with extremely limited funds from the state. Since Joel has started donating money to some of the schools, their progress on student testing scores have heavily increased showing that his money is doing something to help. In addition to donating to public schools, he also started up his own group of charter school which are academy success charter schools that became known as Harlem charter schools. He has a position on the board of the student achievement and has the vision to start building smaller high schools to alleviate some of the stress that is placed on the public schools due from overcrowding and a shortage of money. It is very true that it takes everyone to raise a child and Joel Greenblatt is a fine example of that. He cares about the students and truly wants our young people today to succeed in life. Young people today are our future and if we do not give them the tools today that they need to succeed then we will have a lost generation for certain. Mr. Greenblatt recognizes this and intends to do his part to rectify the situation.