| Notes |
The Road Not Taken
Hostetter might have seemed destined for a career in finance when he was growing up in Short Hills, New Jersey, the son of a very successful stockbroker, Amos B. Hostetter Sr. By the time the younger Hostetter was at Amherst, his father had switched his focus to the commodities markets, where he achieved near-legendary status.
Hostetter briefly followed in his father’s footsteps. He and Helmut Weymar, a high school friend, decided they would find a way to profit from 1962’s freeze in the Florida citrus crop. At the time, there were no futures contracts tied to the citrus markets, so they went to Quincy Cold Storage in Boston and arranged to buy 1,000 oversized cases of the actual commodity—frozen orange juice. To finance the purchase, they convinced Arthur Snyder, an aggressive 40-year-old officer at New England Merchants Bank, to lend them $10,000. They asked Quincy Cold Storage to keep the frozen juice and paid the storage fee. Six month later, with the freeze having decimated the orange crop and sent orange juice prices soaring, they sold the same cases back to Quincy Cold Storage, repaid Snyder, and made a $10,000 profit on their investment without ever “taking delivery.”
Amos B. Hostetter Sr., one of the initial investors in his son’s cable television company, helped hone the skills of a generation of commodity traders and hedge fund managers as a founding director of Commodities Corp.
Fairly certain that he would never escape his father’s shadow if he continued in commodities, Hostetter turned his attention to creating Continental Cablevision. Weymar, on the other hand,
had found his calling. He created Commodities Corp., and Amos Hostetter Sr. served as one of his founding directors. The trading firm built one of the most successful track records in the commodities field, based largely on the trading methods of the elder Hostetter. Some of the most successful multibillion-dollar hedge fund managers of the modern era, including Bruce Kovner, Paul Tudor Jones, Louis Bacon, Mike Marcus, and Jim Simons, got their start at Commodities Corp.2
Co-founder
Amos Hostetter is co-founder and trustee of the Barr Foundation and chairman and CEO of Pilot House Associates, LLC. He co-founded Continental Cablevision in 1963 and served as its chairman and CEO from 1980 to 1996. That company grew to become the third largest company in the cable television business. Renamed Media One in 1996 when acquired by US West, it was subsequently sold to AT&T, then to Comcast. |