Beating the Odds: Eddie Brown’s Investing and Life Strategies

Eddie Brown was born with an exceptional mind, into a loving and supportive family. From an early age, his doting caregivers instilled in him a love of learning, a spirit of self-reliance, the drive to excel at whatever he turned his hand to, and the self-confidence to back it up. Except for the fact that he was born poor and black to an unwed mother-who was, at thirteen, a child herself-in the rural South during the Jim Crow era, Eddie Brown had everything a baby starting out in life could ever want. As heirs to three centuries of institutionalized racism, segregation, and poverty, the best most African-American children born in 1940 could look forward to was a few decades of sub-standard wages for performing backbreaking labor, and a significantly shorter than average life expectancy. Yet Eddie Brown has achieved more in his seventy years than most people dare dream of. In this unforgettable memoir, Eddie tells how he beat the overwhelming odds stacked against him to become one of the nation’s most revered financial superstars. A story with as many surprising turns as a Dickens novel, Beating the Odds recounts in vivid detail how a twelve-year-old moonshine runner, plying the back roads of Central Florida in a souped-up Ford pickup, went on to become an electrical engineer and highly regarded IBM technocrat, a vice president and star portfolio manager with T. Rowe Price, a media celebrity, and finally head of Brown Capital Management, one of the most successful financial services firms in the United States. You’ll learn how after leaving T. Rowe Price in 1983, Brown began his company out of a home office, and how over the next two decades he built it into a financial giant that has amassed more than $6 billion. You’ll also discover the source of Eddie Brown’s uncanny ability to spot growth stocks well in advance of the markets, and the development of GARP (growth at a reasonable price), the guiding investment philosophy behind Brown Capital Management. Among the fascinating cast of characters you’ll meet in Beating the Odds are Eddie’s beloved grandmother, Mamie Magdalene Brown, whose unwavering belief in her grandson’s potential for greatness gave him the confidence to do great things. There’s Ed’s charismatic Uncle Jake, a natural-born entrepreneur with his hand in everything from moonshining to migrant-labor contracting, who taught the young Eddie Carl the value of personal initiative and imbued him with a dogged desire to become the master of his own financial destiny. And there’s the colorful financial commentator Louis Rukeyser, on whose show, Wall $treet Week, Eddie rose to prominence as the country’s first African-American financial celebrity. The remarkable true story of how one man overcame poverty to attain the pinnacle of business success, Beating the Odds is inspiring reading not just for business readers, but for everyone who believes that a person’s ambition should always be as big as his or her dreams.