By Anna Prior
Ronald Read may have spent years pumping gas for a living, but
he was even more adept at pumping up his portfolio.
Mr. Read, a longtime resident of Brattleboro, Vt., died in June
at the age of 92. His friends were shocked when they learned his
estate was valued at almost $8 million. Long widowed and with two
stepchildren, he left most of his money to a local hospital and
library.
So how did he manage to pull it off? Besides being a good stock
picker, he displayed remarkable frugality and patience.
He lived modestly, working as a maintenance worker and janitor
at a J.C. Penney store after a long stint at a service station.
Those who knew him talk of how he at times used safety pins to hold
his coat together and sometimes parked his 2007 Toyota Yaris far
from where he was going to avoid having to feed the parking
meter.
"If he could save a penny, he would," says Bridget Bokum, a
senior client associate at the Wells Fargo Advisors office in
Brattleboro, and who is assisting with his estate.
When he died, Mr. Read left behind a five-inch-thick stack of
stock certificates in a safe-deposit box. The shares represented
the bulk of his estate, and his executor and Wells Fargo still are
working to determine their exact worth.
"We all knew he was into the stock market, but not to this
extent," says Claire Johns, who worked with Mr. Read at J.C. Penney
and is executor of his estate.
Mr. Read owned at least 95 stocks at the time of his death, many
of which he had held for years, if not decades. They were spread
across a variety of sectors, including railroads, utility
companies, banks, health care, telecom and consumer products. He
avoided technology stocks.
Friends say Mr. Read typically bought shares of companies he was
familiar with and those that paid out hefty dividends. When
dividend checks came in the mail, he plowed the money back into
more shares, Ms. Bokum says.
Among his longtime holdings were blue-chip stalwarts such as
Procter & Gamble, J.P. Morgan Chase, General Electric and Dow
Chemical. When he died, he also had large stakes in J.M. Smucker,
CVS Health and Johnson & Johnson.
Physically holding stock certificates became passé for investors
more than a decade ago, but Mr. Read held onto his.
In recent years, as investing shifted to electronic platforms,
firms began imposing fees for ordering the actual certificates. So
Mr. Read turned to a more thrifty option, agreeing to have his
purchases held by the official record-keeper for share
ownership--known as a transfer agent--that each public company
employs. That likely saved him from $25 to several hundred dollars
per transaction, says Peter Duggan, a senior vice president at
transfer agent Computershare.
By buying shares this way, he likely also paid low fees, even
compared with those charged now by many online brokerages for
do-it-yourself investors. The average fee for buying shares in a
so-called direct-stock purchase program is about $3 at
Computershare, Mr. Duggan says.
Mr. Read didn't always hit home runs. His portfolio included
shares of Lehman Brothers Holdings, the financial firm that
collapsed in 2008, for example. But he was willing to stick with
his picks for many, many years.
He bought 39 shares of Pacific Gas & Electric on Jan. 13,
1959, for example, Ms. Bokum says. The shares were worth about
$2,380 then, according to a PG&E spokesman. They were worth
about $10,735 at his death, taking into account subsequent stock
splits of 2-for-1 and 3-for-1 that increased the share total to
234.
When he died, he owned 578 shares in all of PG&E, worth just
over $26,500, some of which he may have purchased with the dividend
payments the West Coast utility made to shareholders.
In unwinding Mr. Read's holdings, Ms. Bokum has processed 328
stock-ownership certificates from 87 different companies--now 76
companies after recapitalizations and mergers--and has so far
tracked down investments in 19 other companies held directly at
transfer agents.
While there were a few "bad" certificates--shares that were, for
example, no longer valid because they had later been deposited
electronically--most were in fine order, she says. Mr. Read "was
impeccable about what he did. He was organized and he took care of
them, " she says.
Mr. Read relied in part on print publications for his investment
research and, while he subscribed to The Wall Street Journal and
Barron's, he also made use of the local library. He also chatted
about investing with those he knew, including a neighbor who also
was his Wells Fargo adviser in Brattleboro. He regularly sought
advice from this adviser and kept a brokerage account at the firm,
but it held only a small portion of his investments, according to
Mr. Read's attorney, Laurie Rowell.
For today's investor, using Mr. Read's exact approach could be
somewhat cumbersome. The fees now charged for paper certificates
make that kind of trading expensive, and having purchases held by a
transfer agent puts an added burden of research and record-keeping
on the investor. Most low-cost investors these days favor the ease
of online trading platforms and the ready accessibility of research
on the Internet.
Of course today's investor likely has a computer. To Mr. Read's
way of thinking, "a computer would have been wasteful," Ms. Bokum
says.
Write to Anna Prior at anna.prior@wsj.com
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