About Stephen
REMOVING EMOTION FROM THE INVESTMENT EQUATION
Stephen Blumenthal | Chief Investment Officer | Author
“The secret to my success is that I buy when everyone is selling and I sell when everyone is buying. If you can do that you will be one of the best in the business.”
– The great Sir John Templeton
“To refer to a personal taste of mine, I’m going to buy hamburgers the rest of my life. When hamburgers go down in price, we sing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in the Buffett household. When hamburgers go up in price, we weep. For most people, it’s the same with everything in life they will be buying—except stocks. When stocks go down and you can get more for your money, people don’t like them anymore.”
– Warren Buffett, Fortune magazine: “The Wit and Wisdom of Warren Buffett”
“People do have feelings. They’ll always bring emotions and foibles to their economic and investing decisions. As a result, they’ll become euphoric at the wrong time and despondent at the wrong time—exaggerating the upside potential when things are going well and the downside risk when things are going poorly—and thus they’ll take trends to cyclical extremes.”
– Howard Marks, Mastering the Market Cycle
Distilling Stephen Blumenthal’s investment philosophy into a single, simple idea—that we must focus, first and foremost, on what matters—wasn’t a eureka moment, but the result of 35 years of investment management experience.
Stephen has been honing the mental discipline and discernment skills that have fueled his success in the financial industry since graduating from Penn State with an accounting degree. His first investment job was manning an option arbitrage desk at Merrill Lynch in 1984. After a year on the institutional side of the business, Stephen became a financial consultant working with individual investors. It was during this time that he received the most formative education of his career. During the October 1987 stock market crash, Stephen witnessed how fear overcame reason en masse, afflicting investors and professional portfolio managers alike. Reinforced by the teachings of his mentor John Ray, this experience would shape Stephen’s investment approach going forward.
After the ’87 market crash, John told Stephen, “Investing is emotional, and that is one constant that will never change.” His message was that what happened in the 1920s and ’30s would happen repeatedly over the course of Stephen’s career. “Make sure you factor that into your thinking,” John said. It’s this simple lesson—and the importance of putting in place a sound investment game plan—that serves as the backbone of Stephen’s latest book, On My Radar: Navigating Stock Market Cycles.
In 1992, Stephen Blumenthal founded co-founded CMG Capital Management Group, Inc. with his father Marvin, applying a rational, disciplined, process-driven investment approach to each of his clients’ portfolios. Today, Stephen is a frequent speaker and writer on investment strategies. He writes investment commentary for Forbes and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Investor’s Business Daily, Bloomberg, Advisor Perspectives, Pensions & Investments magazine, Investment News, ETF Trends, and ETF.com, among others.
Stephen has also appeared in various media outlets, including Bloomberg, CNBC, and Fox Business News. He is the author of the popular weekly e-letter, On My Radar, which helps investors, advisers, and institutions gain a deeper understanding of the forces driving the economy and investment markets.
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