An Investment in Friendship

Daniel Goldie beat Mats Wilander twice when he was the world’s top-ranked men’s tennis player.

He beat Jimmy Connors and Michael Chang at Wimbledon in 1989 on the way to the quarterfinals.

While at Stanford in 1986, he beat the competition to capture the NCAA men’s singles title.

Last year, Goldie beat the clock.

The former tennis star turned financial advisor and writer coauthored  The Investment Answer, an investment guide book, with Gordon Murray, helping his beloved friend Murray who is dying of cancer realize a dream that just months ago seemed impossible.

Goldie said completing the book has been an “obsession” since doctors told Murray last summer that he had just six months to live. Murray was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2008.

“I basically wanted to do this for him because he's wanted to write this book for so long and he never did it, so this was my gift to him,” said Goldie, who like Murray, lives in Burlingame. “It’s been extremely rewarding.”

The Investment Answer, which hit bookshelves on Jan. 6, distills the essence of what’s widely viewed among financial experts to be the most successful longterm investment startegy, encouraging individual investors to capitalize on long term market trends as opposed to trying to “beat the market.” It’s an approach that went against the grain of what Murray practiced and preached during a 25-year career on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse First Boston.

When doctors told Murray over the summer he only had seven months to live, Goldie took matters into his own hands.

“When he told me that, I just decided spontaneously, ‘we should write that book that he's been wanting to write,’ ” Goldie said. “He'd been wanting to write a book like this for some time, and he and I talked about doing it together for some time, but we really never had the impetus to get it done. This gave us a reason to do it.”

Murray had been a longtime advocate of active portfolio management until meeting Goldie shortly after retiring from Wall Street in 2001. He sought out Goldie on the advice of his wife, Randi Murray, who’d worked with Goldie as an investment advisor in the early 1990s. The two instantly became close friends.

“Here's a guy who spent 25 years working for major wall street banks, and after retiring from that career, met me and got into a totally different way of investing,” said Goldie, who heads Dan Goldie Financial Services in Menlo Park. “For him that was when the light bulb came on in his head and he said, ‘wow this is an incredible way to manage money.’ ”

Murray spent most of the last decade working as a consultant advising clients of the benefits of this approach, and a few years ago began jotting down some notes that would become the rough draft for The Investment Answer.

Murray has been outspoken in his criticism of his former Wall Street colleagues, whom he blames for misleading investors leading to the 2008 housing crisis that plunged the U.S. economy into the Great Recession.

“He’s been on a crusade to keep people from getting suckered,” said Gene Fama, a longtime friend of Murray’s.

In January of last year, Murray testified before congress that he believed more oversight was needed to prevent future financial crisis.

Murray was introduced by Congresswoman Jackie Spier, who said of Murray, “I think of him more as a patriot than I think of him as anything else, because what he is willing to do here this morning is the sign of a true patriot; somebody who’s willing to question his government when it is not doing its job, someone who is willing to tell the truth to power."

Murray was not available to be interviewed for this story due to his declining health, his publicist said. He was quoted in a November New York Times article, describing what he perceived to be a steep decline in the values of Wall Street that led to the foreclosure crisis.

“Our word was our bond, and good ethics was good business,” Murray said in the New York Times interview, describing how Wall Street once was. “That got replaced by liar loans and ‘I hope I’m gone by the time this thing blows up.’ ”

Known for his sardonic sense of humor, Murray remained true to form, telling the New York Times in what’s believed to be his last media interview “This is one of the true benefits of having a brain tumor. Everyone wants to hear what you have to say.”

The Investment Answer is Goldie’s second literary venture. In 1998 he co-authored The Prudent Investor's Guide to Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game, which he said touches on similar themes to his most recent work, but in more technical terms.

Goldie and Murray recommend individual investors seek advice from fee-based brokers who aren’t paid proxies of the stocks or mutual funds they sell.

They advise a broad and balanced portfolio made up of low-cost index funds that seeks to profit from providing capital for human ingenuity, as opposed the nearly impossible task discerning which individual stocks are overvalued or undervalued.

“If you look at investors’ performance, one of the things that becomes clear over time is that when the cost is too high and the frequency of trading is too high, the investor returns on average are lower,” Goldie said.

Goldie acknowledged that Murray pushed back when he first approached him about finishing the book.

“He said to me ‘I don't have the energy to give to it,’ ” Goldie said. “I decided I was going to finish that book for him, it was my gift to him. I wanted to get it done and get it in his hand before it was too late. It was almost an obsession to get that book finished as quickly as possible.”

Fama said the book has given purpose to the end of Murray’s life.

“Instead of doing the usual Bucket List thing where you're supposed to go out to Hawaii and finally you're out of the grind and there's no point to (life) anymore, he took the exact opposite approach to where he said 'my life's work isn't done.' "