Gil Blake

Gil Blake is a speculator investor and fund manager who devised an investment strategy known as mutual fund market timing. This method of investing is based on the historic pricing patterns of mutual funds.

Career

Blake has attributed his participation in trading to a friend of his, who had shown him some municipal bonds and inquired for Blake's opinion. Blake noticed a trend in the numbers his colleague had showed him, and investigated further. His investigation led to the discovery that persistent trends in municipal bonds were decidedly systematic. This served as the basis of his mutual fund timing strategies. According to Barron's, Blake placed second in the U.S. Trading Championships in 1988 and first in 1989-1993.. This has been confirmed by Mr. Blake. [4] According to Andrew Selby’s posting on www.donttalkaboutyourstocks.com/market-wizard-gil-blake/ on February 26, 2013 his top five quotes from Gil Blake listed in Jack Schwager’s book Market Wizards (1992) were: Quote #1: "I’m not a big fan of diversification. If the odds are 70 percent in your favor and you make fifty trades, it’s very difficult to have a down year." Quote #2: "Whenever I take a position, I like to imagine what it would be like under the worst-case scenario. In doing so, I minimize the confusion if that situation actually develops. In my view, losses are a very important part of trading. When a loss happens, I believe in embracing it." Quote #3: "The lesson for me was that if you break a discipline once, the next transgression becomes much easier. Breaking a diet provides an appropriate analogy – once you do it, it becomes much easier to make further exceptions." Quote #4: "Opportunities change, strategies change, but people and psychology do not change. If trend following systems don’t work as well, something else will. There’s always money being lost, so someone out there has to win." and Quote #5: "First of all, most traders don’t have a winning strategy. Second, even among those traders who do, many don’t follow their strategy. Trading puts pressure on weaker human traits and seems to seek out each individual’s Achilles’ heel." [2,5]

Biography

Mr. Blake (Gilman D. Blake III) was born on 7/14/1945 in Pittsfield, MA and graduated from Cornell University in 1967, served in the US Navy Submarine Service, and then graduated from the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania in 1972. He founded Twenty Plus Inc, a wealth management firm in Boston, MA in 1982, and as of 8 /1/16 he continues to manage this very successful firm using the same methods as described above.[4]

Sources

• Bonello, Professor F. (February 2, 1999). "The Mutual Fund Industry Scandal". Economics 421: Money, Credit, and Banking. University of Notre Dame. Archived from the original on 2006-01-05. Retrieved 2006-04-12.

Further reading

• Schwager, Jack D. (1995). The New Market Wizards. 13 pages: Wiley; New Ed edition. ISBN 0-471-13236-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)