How a 64-year-old man built a $14 million fortune from stocks after retirement

What is the right age to start investing? Many aspiring investors grapple with this query. Some even regret not starting their investment journey early.

However, the best age or time to start investing is when you are truly ready. A powerful example of this is the story of a man who started his investment journey at the time of his retirement.

Paul Garrett, who worked as the vice-president in charge of public relations at General Motors, was just a year away from mandatory retirement in 1956. Aged 64, he had the option to sit out the rest of his life like other pensioners. But he wanted to make his last years "his best years". So he set out with some ambitious goals.

Garrett's first goal was to grow his capital fast, which would help "increase his power to help others." He decided that he could increase his savings fast by investing in a fast-growing company. To identify such a company, he had set four conditions:

1: It must be small.

2: It must be relatively unknown

3: It must have a unique product that "would do an essential job better, cheaper, and/or faster than before, or provide a new service with prospects of great and long-continued sales increases."

4: It must have a "strong, progressive, research-minded management."

Garrett's quest was far from easy. He had to pick from over 50,000 stocks. "The odds of finding a needle in a haystack would be about the same if one could hunt with a magnet."

Although Garrett had no magnet, he had friends on Wall Street and in business, some of whom advised investors or managed pension funds. He was looking for stocks that professional buyers liked but were not sure of. In the process, he initially identified 50 stocks, but he didn't put his money in all of these stocks.

"Since his goal was to make big money, he did not make the common mistake of buying a little of each of the fifty. People who bet on all of the horses in a race always have a winner but never make any money," said Phelps.

Garrett zeroed in on three stocks by studying their financial reports and analyses. He even made field trips to those three companies and met their chief executive officers. After all the research, he finally settled on one company, Haloid, which later became Xerox.

Phelps said Garrett invested $133,000 in Haloid shares between 1955 and 1959. He purchased over 63,000 shares costing around $1 a share, but in 1971, those shares were trading at over $125 a share.

At the end of 1971, Garrett's holdings were worth ₹14,000,000. But it wasn't because of just one stock. Apart from Haloid, he also had a large number of shares of companies like Teleprompter and McCulloch Oils.

Garrett's formula was simple: "buy right and hold on".

No.

According to the author, Garrett had to face many hurdles.

• First, he had to find the stocks he wanted to buy.

• Second, he had to buy them despite recommendations against it

• Third, he had to hold and buy more against repeated sell recommendations he started to receive even before the stock had doubled in price.

What did Garrett do with all this money?

He gave away $1 million for a cancer research fund, $1 million to his college, and another million to Columbia University's graduate School of Business for a chair on "The Public Problems and Responsibilities of Business."

Even at the age of 80, Garrett was looking for "new financial worlds to conquer," not because he wanted to die richer but because he wished to "live more richly in terms of service to mankind."