Death of a Salesman
Photo by Art Streiber
Blaine Lourd was once a self-loathing Wall Street stock picker. Now, his perspective has changed. The man who once obsessed over financial news spends his time watching SportsCenter.
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From Louisiana to L.A.
Blaine Lourd with his father at his wedding in 1988. Lourd grew up in New Iberia, Louisiana, where his father made a pile of money in the oil industry and Blaine assumed that he too would one day eat four-hour lunches at the Petroleum Club, hunt ducks on weekends, and get rich. When his father informed him there was no longer a family business to inherit, Blaine heeded his advice and headed to Wall Street.
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A Trader's Memoir
Photo by Art Streiber
Wall Street is a fee meritocracy. As long as you earn a lot of commissions ... you can have the keys to the kingdom. No C.E.O. at any bank that I've worked for, no managing director, no chairman of the board, and no associate has ever asked me how my clients are doing. They just congratulate me periodically on my gross commissions and covet my corner office and my celebrity clientele. —Blaine Lourd
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Playing the Role
Lourd moved into Hollywood circles, tapping his brother's clients at Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency. He attended a 25th-anniversary benefit at the Museum of Contemporary Art with Mitch Glazer and Kelly Lynch in May 2004.
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Investing With the Stones
Blaine Lourd got a big break when the business manager for the Rolling Stones introduced them, and the band handed him $13 million to invest. But this was also when he decided he had to get out of Lehman Brothers after colleagues ridiculed him for putting the money in Treasury Bills—trusty, but not the most lucrative investment.
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The Anti-Buffetts
In the early 1960s, the efficient-markets hypothesis finally took off, thanks first to Paul Samuelson and then to the University of Chicago's Eugene Fama (right), who tested it against actual U.S. market data. He co-wrote a series of papers with Dartmouth's Kenneth French (left) casting doubt on the validity of the capital asset pricing model.
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Dimensional Fund Advisors
After attending a Dimensional Fund Advisors seminar, Blaine Lourd succeeded in getting $100 million of clients' money into D.F.A.'s funds. He worked from his own little space in Beverly Hills, which was, in its most salient feature, as unlike a Wall Street brokerage firm as could be: It was completely silent. No TV blaring CNBC. No squawk box. No urgency.
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Back to Basics
Lourd with his wife, Crystal, and children in the spring of 2007. Since changing his focus, Lourd says he is happy. He works surrounded by large black-and-white photographs of the Louisiana bayou of his youth. Every now and then, he feels the old itch to be a player, but, as he puts it, "When I pick a stock, I do it for my own account, never for clients."
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