A Book About Paul Cabot

choi

John Steele Gordon, Get the Facts, Face the Facts; Cabot, a mutual-fund pioneer, independently forged an investment philosophy that closely mirrored Benjamin Graham's value investing. Wall Street Journal, Feb 29, 2014
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303426304579405273492144930
(book review on Michael R Yogg, Passion for Reality; The extraordinary life of the investing pioneer. Columbia Business School Publishing, Columbia University Press, 2014)

Note:
(a) names
(i) The southern French surname Cabot is "a diminutive of Occitan cap ‘head.’"
(ii) "Paul Cabot's father, Henry Bromfield Cabot, was a prominent lawyer as well as an investor, mostly in real estate. His brother Charles, two years younger, would have a long law career and sit on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court."
(A) The English surnames Bromfield/Broomfield: "Old English brom ‘broom’, ‘gorse’"

broom (plant)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broom_(plant)
(natives of Europe, north Africa and southwest Asia, with the greatest diversity in the Mediterranean [suggesting the latter is where it originated from])
(B) A state supreme court, Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts "was established in 1692 and is the oldest appellate court in continuous existence in the Western Hemisphere," according to it.

(b) "The Cabots were a happy family, Mr Yogg tells us, the boys typically rambunctious. (Their grandmother called looking after them when the parents were away a 'God-awful job.')"
(i) Their grandmother called the task a "God-awful job."
(ii) god-awful (adj): "extremely unpleasant or disagreeable :  ABOMINABLE <god–awful weather>"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/god-awful

(c) "After Harvard he [Paul Cabot] formed, in 1924, State Street Investment Corp with his cousin Richard Paine and one of his best friends, Richard Saltonstall. State Street was an unusual investment company in two fundamental ways. First, it was a true mutual fund—known as an open-end fund—in which people could invest and withdraw at any time. The idea was revolutionary in the early 1920s, when investors were usually required to either make their own investment decisions, or stick with bank savings accounts. Today the assets of US mutual funds exceed $13 trillion. State Street was also a pioneer in research, carefully investigating companies before putting money into them."
(i) State Street Corporation (founded in 1792; headquartered in Boston)  Wikipedia
(ii) The website of the corporation does not contain history.
(iii) How to reconcile the two years of origin?

State Street Corporation History. Finding Universe, undated
www.fundinguniverse.com/company- ... orporation-history/
("1792: Union Bank becomes the third bank chartered in Boston.
1865: Union Bank receives a national charter; the bank is renamed National Union Bank of Boston.
1891: State Street Deposit & Trust Company is chartered in Boston.
1897: State Street's name is shortened to State Street Trust Company.
1924: State Street Trust becomes custodian of the nation's first mutual fund.
1925: National Union Bank and State Street merge")
(iv) mutual fund
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_fund
("The first mutual funds were established in Europe. One researcher credits a Dutch merchant with creating the first mutual fund in 1774.[6] The first mutual fund outside the Netherlands was the Foreign & Colonial Government Trust, which was established in London in 1868. It is now the Foreign & Colonial Investment Trust and trades on the London stock exchange. Mutual funds were introduced into the United States in the 1890s")

(d) "In 1925, State Street was heavily invested in Kraft Cheese and he and his partners would travel to Chicago, where Kraft was headquartered, to talk with management, including the head of the company, JL Kraft. On one visit Kraft—a marketing man, not a financial one—casually told Cabot that he was taking a large loan from another investment house at what Cabot and his partners thought horrendous terms. State Street immediately sold its Kraft shares at a modest profit, before news of the loan reached Wall Street. Today, the use of such inside information would get you in very deep trouble with the SEC."
(i) James L Kraft
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Kraft
(JL Kraft; 1874-1953; Of German origin, born in Ontario in Canada to Mennonite parents; After immigrating to Buffalo and then Chicago in 1903, he began selling cheese from a horse-drawn wagon [which he bought from wholesale to do retailing]; was the first to patent processed cheese [qv])
(ii) The Proto-Germanic--but not later, like modern, German--noun kraft means "strength, power."

(e) "Cabot's motto—"First, you've got to get the facts. Then you've got to face the facts"—is reminiscent of Benjamin Graham's analytical approach to investing, explicated in his classic 'The Intelligent Investor,' published in 1949."
(i) Benjamin Graham
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Graham
(1894-1976; a British-born American professional investor; Graham is considered the father of value investing, an investment approach he began teaching at Columbia Business School in 1928)
(ii) Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor; A guide for the general reader to wise investment practice under today's financial conditions.1st ed. New York: Harper & Brothers (1949).

(f) "Until then, [university] endowments had been managed with utmost prudence, mostly invested in gilt-edged bonds that paid modest interest and had little capital appreciation. Cabot began to change that formula, investing more of Harvard's endowment in common stocks."
(i) gilt-edged securities
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilt-edged_securities
(ii) One need not go to images to search "gilt-edged." He certainly has seen gilt-edged bibles.

(g) Well, I have lived in Boston and Cambridge for a quarter century. I have heard the Cabot surname as if it was in the distant past somewhere in New England, but never a person complete with a first name. The Lowels? Never heard of it.