The $260 Billion Portfolio Shaped by Bodybuilding, Scripture, and Slow-Thinking

Scott Minerd wadded up another piece of paper and looked out at the Pacific Ocean from his Santa Monica, Calif., office. He needed a better blueprint for his organization—a foundation for his investing process that could support consistent performance—and his ballpoint drawings still weren’t right. So Minerd kept sketching: boxes, arrows, words, whatever came to mind. When he found himself swimming in “spaghetti” doodles again, he’d ball up the paper and start anew.

Minerd had dealt in bonds, structured securities, currencies, and derivatives during highflying stints at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Credit Suisse First Boston in the 1980s and ’90s, running desks for bosses such as John Mack and Bob Diamond; the work burned him out at the ripe old age of 37. “I walked away from extremely large offers on Wall Street,” he says today. “I realized this wasn’t a dress rehearsal for life, this was it.”