A decade ago, Dan Goldie stood on Court One at Wimbledon facing Jimmy Connors in the second round. The crowd clearly favored Connors, the two-time Wimbledon champ who was reaching the end of his career. Goldie, ranked in the top 30, knocked off No. 10 Connors in four sets. Connors left Wimbledon in his limo, while Goldie advanced two more rounds, losing to Ivan Lendl in the quarterfinals.
These days, Goldie plays on Wall Street. Having left the professional tennis circuit seven years ago, he now manages $100 million in individual assets as a financial planner. Last fall, he and colleague John J. Bowen wrote The Prudent Investor's Guide to Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game (McGraw-Hill, 1998), a book that challenges conventional advice and recommends a strategy called asset-class investing. Instead of paying a financial wizard to try to outsmart the market through forecasting, stock picking or timing, the asset-class investor buys and hangs on to a large sampling of a specific class of assets that share the same risks and returns -- such as automotive, steel or real estate stocks, or a mix of international stocks. This "passive" and "unemotional" approach has benefited institutional investors for at least two decades, but many individual investors have no idea how to use it, Goldie says.
Pro tennis -- unlike prudent investing -- is an intensely emotional experience, he says. "It's a world of extremes; your life goes up and down according to how you're playing. You either feel great or miserable."
There wasn't much misery in his early tennis career. Goldie started playing at the age of 12. By age 18, he was ranked third in the country for boys 18 and under. Raised on a single income by his divorced mom, a bookkeeper in northern Virginia, he dreamed of attending Stanford but knew he could get there only through an athletic scholarship. "That was the drive behind my ambition," he says. Coach Dick Gould, '59, recruited him as a freshman in 1982. During his four years on the Farm, Goldie won two NCAA team championships and a singles crown his senior year.
He turned pro in 1986 with the intention of someday falling back on his economics degree. In his nearly six years on the professional tennis circuit, Goldie reached No. 27 in the rankings, traveling 30 weeks a year while studying toward certification as a financial planner. Today, he's a senior financial adviser with Reinhardt Werba Bowen in San Jose, Calif. He and his wife, Christine Mathews, '86, have two preschool-age sons who are already beginning to learn the game.
-- Blake Hallanan, '76
