Gary Kinder the author of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, Random House, NY, 1998 essentially wrote 3 stories in one  – the first one a description of turn off the century California when gold was discovered. Then the story of the travels between the ports of New York and San Francisco with a stop through the Panama Canal, together with the reports of what the hurricane was similar to. The next story is the person who discovers methods and ways to search for the gold – an amazing creative engineering mine of Tommy Thompson who has to make discoveries to work in the deep oceans. The last chapters are what happens when gold or valuables are discovered. Who do they belong to and who should see them?

There are lots of reasons why investors invest and some of them have similar themes – they like to see what American ingenuity could come up with next, the investors liked the person Tommy. First he was extremely methodical. Second he had a dream, most scientists do not. Third he had way of convincing you without making a great effort. He was living the thing day in and day out. Out of the above there are aspects which are hard to quantify because it is investing in the person.

When Tommy was trying to narrow the field of where to search in the big ocean, he used known field points converted into formula and computed each scenario expecting the 3 known points would line up, the problem was there was an inconsistency or a piece was still missing. In turned out the ships were on the Gulf Stream and it had to be taken into account. When the current was the maps began to overlap and one could see where a starting point was in the deep blue sea.

The deep sea can be a very hostile environment and it costs millions of dollars to be out there so unless there was a reason to be there, people in the community would quickly know. Half the time the reason was government and it was top-secret, the other time was highly proprietary big business venture. Everybody in the deep-ocean community ran around with little secrets and they listened very closely – which meant they could determine what and when you are about to do something. The reason is in the deep blue sea the depth of the ocean presents problems – there are only a limited and rare equipment to go to the bottom of the sea. The deeper you went, the greater the seals on the equipment had to be or the equipment is highly specialized or only a few were involved. This is similar to most industries – it is easy to see once you are in the industry.

In going to sea, Tommy purposely picked mavericks – because he had do the impossible. Mavericks are people who are very good and think outside the box to solve problems, the box is generally liked by large organizations. Tommy used the approach let us talk about all the problems that might arise and then evaluate a couple dozen solutions to each of them. Generally deep ocean clients came with one problem to solve.

Sometimes the best solution was to build your own. Tommy liked to retreat to the point where technology had branched and all thought had taken down the path which lead to conventional wisdom. Tommy liked to go back to the fork in the road and take another look at the landscape. Maybe somebody missed something.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, often times dividend paying stocks are the conventional wisdom, if they are not continuing to view the landscape this is when the landscape changes because something is different than what it was for a long time Part of your job as an investor is to see what is out there and how threatening it is. It is up to the company to have the non conventional thinkers on their radar.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.