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"Ride It Out." Every investment decision and matter of importance is left to Robinson and the other four trustees, with help from the six-man advisory board. In the tradition that the trustee shares in the rewards he brings to others, they are among the best-paid men in U.S. industry. Vice Chairman Kenneth Isaacs, Robinson's righthand man and the president of the Growth Stock Fund, made $360,989 last year. The junior trustee made more than $100,000.
Once the trustees have taken a vote, the job of buying or selling stock is turned over to longtime Market Trader Almore Thompson, who works through more than 200 brokerage houses. In order not to upset the market in a stock that has captured M.I.T.'s interest, Thompson often executes orders over a period of several weeks or disperses them widely. M.I.T. never puts more than 5% of its assets into one company, or more than 25% into one industry. Since it buys for the long pull, it is not bothered by short-term fluctuations. "When the market turns down," says Dwight Robinson, "we just try to ride it out."
Quirk of Fate. Robinson joined M.I.T. in 1932, eight years after a stock salesman named Edward Leffler teamed up with Boston Broker Charles Learoyd to form the trust. Leffler thought that the ordinary investor usually bought the wrong stock, should have help in investing. At first the financial world laughed at him for his radical new ideas: the redemption feature of the fund and the disclosure of portfolio. He bowed out of M.I.T. six months later, and in came Boston Banker Merrill Griswold, an early buyer of M.I.T. shares who became M.I.T.'s first chairman.
Robinson walked into M.I.T.'s offices and suggested that Griswold and the trustees needed a research staff to back up their own investment judgment. He had the right background. True, he had been born in Seattle, but only by a quirk of fate (his engineer father had taken his family there while working on a construction job). He was indisputably a Boston product. He had gone to Noble & Greenough and Harvard (1920), taken a dutiful fling at engineering, gone back to Harvard Business School to study finance, put in his time in a Boston investment banking house. The trustees hired him.
40,000 Shares. Easygoing, brilliant Merrill Griswold and sober, diligent Dwight Robinson made a crack team. With his flair for drama, Griswold pulled Massachusetts Investors Trust through a major test in 1932. Despite the fund's respectable performance in the crash, the idea persisted that it could not handle a run on its shares. When a Boston bank was forced to cash in 40,000 M.I.T. shares held as collateral, it called up Griswold, advised him that it would deliver the blow gently by selling over a period of several weeks. Snapped Griswold: "Send them in this afternoon." M.I.T. redeemed $200,000 worth out of its cash reserve (still kept for that purpose)—and the financial world got the point.