The newspaper advertisement touted "The Super Bowl of Success". For less than six American dollars, I was in. With a dozen or so world class speakers, including three ex-presidential candidates, I just had to go. And you know how much I love to view speakers from past posts : Dr Andrew Rudnick defends Buffalo against Forbes , Life Sciences Commercialization Lecture Series at the Center of Excellence and Robert F Kennedy Jr. Speaks at Canisius College.
The "will call" windows opened at 6:45AM, the event kicked off at 8 AM. I had read BRO's Dan Fisher's take on the anticipated traffic bottlenecks in Another Traffic Update: Road Travel News, so I took the rapid transit and saw a couple of friends that could not attend as they had to go to work. Got there around 9 AM for the end of Forbes magazine CEO and ex-presidential candidate Steve Forbes' speech. From what I did catch it sounded similar to what he talks about on his financial show on the Fox News Channel at 11 AM on Saturday mornings. I ran into Andy, a friend from my Toastmaster group, who told me that Dr. Robert Schuller had led things off today, speaking about the topic of possibilities, and that four time Super Bowl Champion "Joe Cool" Quarterback Joe Montana was the second speaker, who I regret missing.
The floor itself made me think of a boxing ring that I had once seen at an Oscar De La Hoya boxing world championship bout out west. The four posts in a boxing ring were red white and blue, with a single action word on each (e.g. Inspire!), while the ropes were replaced with alternating yellow flowers on one side, and red flowers on the next. There were some 2,000 ringside seats on the floor, and more than some 15,000 folks filling the regular seats, except for the seats in the suites that were pretty empty. I forgot to bring my binoculars, but 10 large video screens and an excellent sound system made the VIP seats equal to the nosebleed seats, not a bad seat in the house. Alas, all I could find at first was in section 24 on the 300 level. With open seating attendees kept peaking in to see if there were any seats available in my section.
A Buffalo song motivated us:
Singer Leon Patillo sang at intros throughout the day, and early on encouraged the crowd to sing along with a trio of songs, the first of which was the "Shout" song from the movie Animal House, as well as an unofficial Buffalo Bills anthem. I wonder if he knew about the Buffalo connection? At one point, our focus turned to one front row section had all United States Army soldiers in combat fatigues, and they were honored with a standing ovation.
Mr. Market is bipolar:
Phil Town, who has written a New York Times bestseller, talked about internet tools to integrate better return on investment (ROI). He felt that the average investor could lower risk with superior knowledge better than the big guys. As Phil felt that the market is bipolar, meaning a lot of big moves up and down a lot, he touted a covered call strategy, where you own a stock, and sell an opportunity for others to own your stock, for the price of a premium, which you get to keep. This is a safer strategy, as you always keep the premium for the option, the downside being that if the stock goes to Pluto, you only participate in a little of the gain.
History shows this strategy works well in a bipolar market due to higher than average option premiums, but I felt it was inappropriate to suggest this to everybody there, due to many people I have seen in my life stray from this conservative strategy into riskier strategies once they start buying calls instead of selling them. Also, the option premium dollar amounts that you get to keep in the example that he used seems way too optimistic.
Phil's other strategy:
1. Buy a wonderful business on sale(value investing)
2. Watch institutional money moves
3. Watch the technicals
The secrets to Warren Buffett's Success:
Phil mentioned Berkshire Hathaway's CEO Warren Buffett, but should have mentioned Warren's "Buffalo" connection to this crowd, perhaps he is not aware? Phil's Wealth Magazine website does a lot of pre-calculations and indicates in one place when certain situations are favorable or unfavorable. He looks for stocks that are trading for 50 percent less than what they currently sell for, a value strategy that Warren Buffett uses, and originally proposed by Ben Graham, the father of value investing. Oh, lest I forget... Phil mentioned Warren Buffett's two rules to success!: 1. Never Lose Money. 2. Don't forget rule one.
We are moving at the speed of innovations:
Krish Dhanam talked about gaining with goals. He mentions that when we near the end of our lives it about comes down to two things: I wish I had, and I'm glad I did. So go for it now! Krish believes that the United States is way too young to have problems, compared to counties that are many hundreds of years old, and that we are moving at the speed of our innovations. His speaking style reminded me of the famous rhyming style of Zig Ziglar, who we would hear from later on.
Still to come: Rudy Giuliani and General Colin Powell, Get Motivated co-founder Tamara Lowe
Nothing like being right on top of a story that's almost a week old.