Bankrate: Are you, yourself, a conservative investor?
Mike Greenberg: I am a noninvestor myself. All my money is invested through a discretionary account with the stockbroker who's handled my dad's money since the 1960s. He has never given me any reason to want to do it on my own. In fact, he has suggested that I take some money, 20 or 30 grand or something like that, and invest it myself, online, just to have the experience. But I don't have the time. I could not imagine doing that and not really studying and not really following it on a day-to-day basis. So I just sit back and get the statements once a month and see how it's going.
Bankrate: Do you express any preference to him as to where your investments should go?
Mike Greenberg: Yes, I do. My wife Stacy and I met with him when she was pregnant with our first child. That was during the dot-com craze. We said that the volatility was exciting and that we trusted his judgment completely, but that we wanted to siphon some money into safer areas that would be used for things like the kids' education, and making sure that, God forbid something really terrible happened in the stock market, or the Internet thing would collapse, as it subsequently did, that we would never find ourselves in a position where I had to sell my house. So to that extent we took control of the situation. But nothing more specific than that. I never said: I want you to invest in this, or in that. We have since put some money into 529 accounts with an eye on my kids someday going to college. That we've done on our own, but that was a different situation.
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Bankrate: Can you pinpoint some investments that did exceptionally well for you?
Mike Greenberg: Yes. Research in Motion. They make the BlackBerry device. That has been great, without question. Also, I'm fond of saying I bought my house thanks to my good friends at Yahoo. What else? My Starwood stock, Starwood Hotels, has done very well in the last year or two, maybe even more than that. I also had a very big position in a company called Ryanair, which is international investment. It's an airline in Europe that over the years has done very well. Maybe not as well recently, but in the scheme of things it has.