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Superstripper. Then there is the saga of Frank Burford, who as recently as 1973 was making $19,000 a year. In 1976 his income was more than $4 million. He became a superstripper—of coal. A former Emory University law professor, Burford returned home to West Virginia in 1967 to liquidate his ailing father's highway-construction business. Instead, he and a cousin revved up the company, branched into trucking and started hauling coal. The partners took over a money-losing coal company and started acquiring leases on vast carboniferous acreage. When coal prices soared in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, Burford struck it rich. He struck it even richer last fall by selling his biggest holdings for $10 million, retaining royalty rights that could net him and his partner another $10 million. The sad thing, says Burford, is that "nobody else can do what I did. The regulatory facts of life have made it impossible." To get a strip-mining permit in 1972, for example, cost only $5,000 or so; today it takes $50,000 and up.
Burford, now 47, still lives with his wife Fern in a subdivision house in Elkins, W. Va., but is planning a six-bedroom chalet at Snowshoe, a big new ski resort near by. He owns that too.
Street Smart. Spotting stock market trends takes a special kind of clairvoyance. Marc Howard is, at 36, one of the most successful investors on Wall Street. Though the past three years have been lean and mean for many on the Street, Howard in that time has taken home millions. His secret: "I'm concerned more with the market's perception of a stock than with the reality of the stock itself. I can't afford to buy a stock today because I think it's going to have great earnings in 1982. I buy on the basis of what other people are going to think of that stock in six months."
Howard runs a private investment portfolio—known as "a hedge fund"-that has earned more than 1,000% on its original investment in 1969. His firm's current assets: $20 million plus. Anyone who gave Howard $10,000 to invest then would have upwards of $100,000 today. But then, who would have trusted Marc Howard to handle a $2 bet? A college dropout who had held 25 different jobs between 1962 and 1969, he started Howard Associates on begged and borrowed money in a one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush. Not until 1973 did he feel that he could afford a downtown office and staff. He is behind his desk by 8 o'clock most mornings, burrowing through 4-ft. piles of research reports. "I've been out for lunch once in the last five years," he laments.
Since he made his Marc, Howard has made two significant changes in his lifestyle. "The first one is that I can walk into the office looking like this," he says, waving at his jeans, the American Indian jewelry hanging from his neck, and the Coyote T shirt bought at the Second Annual Hookers' Ball in Manhattan this year. The other major change: "The freedom to do things without regard to what they cost." The things include frequent trips abroad with his wife Monique, a twelve-cylinder Jaguar and a new-found taste for Laphroaig, a Scotch malt whisky that sells for $11 a fifth. "Five years ago," he says, "I didn't know what this stuff was."
The Diligent