Lee Geiger

What kind of a name is Butkus!?!

– It’s a long story

I had to find employment, and fast. The Pretty Blonde was four months pregnant with our first kid, and our financial net worth didn’t warrant a comma. To help my cause, I asked Jeff Markunas, First Vice President of Sovran Capital Management, if he would write a job recommendation for me. He graciously agreed.

“To Whom it May Concern:

RE:  Comment on Lee Geiger

Lee Geiger asked me to write all the good things about him I could.

In the remaining space, I’d like to shift to a cursory overview of his multiple flaws and shortcomings, which are more glaring than Haley’s Comet, and illuminate why I think Lee easily could be regarded structurally unemployable and quite possibly even be adjudged to be morally incompetent, emotionally unstable, and sexually deviant. Basically, Lee is a poor excuse for a human being.”

I had met Jeff a few years earlier, sometime during the spring of 1987. As a junior sales trader based in Atlanta, it was my job to chaperone First Boston’s vaunted research analysts from one Southeastern town to the next (breakfast in Richmond, lunch in Charlotte, dinner in Orlando…you get the idea) so they could pitch their double-secret Strong Buy Ratings to the firm’s institutional customer base. The first meeting I ever hosted was a breakfast presentation at a hotel board room in Richmond, Virginia, and it was here that I introduced myself to Jeff. It was immediately obvious that Jeff was extremely intelligent and perceptive, and he peppered our analyst’s rosy forecast of General Electric’s bulletproof business model with a fusillade of penetrating questions. Jeff was highly suspicious of Wall Street research, and he possessed an innate ability to quickly cut through the sell-side B.S. Jeff was my kind of guy, and we hit it off right away. Fortunately, Richmond became my best market, and I made it a point to visit clients at least once a quarter. Unfortunately, Jeff never let me get over a minor wardrobe malfunction that took place one fateful day.

“Appearance-wise, Lee is a credit to his industry. He dresses like a street person, often traveling hundreds of miles without a suitcoat on his back and with yesterday’s lunch embedded into the crotch of his soiled trousers. Disheveled, rumpled, grimy, unsavory; these are the images Lee conjured up on his annoyingly frequent trips to Richmond.”

Jeff possessed a curious fascination with the intricate art of trading, a rarity since most portfolio managers could care less about how an individual stock is bought or sold. And because I was one of the few traders who possessed an MBA and could hold my own with Jeff’s insatiable curiosity, we were able to establish a line of communication that stretched beyond traditional portfolio manager/sales trader boundaries, which at the time were virtually non-existent. Jeff wanted to know what made stocks move, and my observations confirmed his worst instincts. Our mutual cynicism of everything Wall Street cemented our bond.

“We were sentenced with Lee in retribution for Sovran’s staunch refusal to be sucked into the legion of bogus IPOs First Boston foisted upon the institutionalized market during the 1980’s. I can tell you, with this sentence we did hard time. Lee personifies incompetence, which is positive only in that it prevents his shallow and vacuous personality from otherwise personifying nothing at all. His dull-wittedness and oafish bungling of even the simplest assignments caused us untold anxiety and a reluctance to deal with the firm. In fact, lately we resorted to Lee only after failing to reach our own discount brokerage unit for a trade.”

Our relationship grew beyond broker and customer. We became friends as well. We did the traditional Richmond entertainment ritual whenever I came to town– cocktails at the Tobacco Company, followed by steaks at Travelers. But Jeff was a dedicated family man, and many nights finished at his home, a never-ending remodeling job located along near the banks of the James River, where we would gather with his spunky children and lovely and very tolerant wife Mary Anne. Because Jeff and I shared a common attribute—we didn’t take ourselves, or anyone else for that matter, very seriously—we were able to poke fun at one another. Jeff’s unconventional attitude towards having a good time precipitated what would become known as the Pru/Mont Invitational, a legendary one-day entertainment extravaganza featuring golf, bowling and barbeque sponsored by a salesman from Prudential (hence, ‘Pru’) and me (my paychecks now came from Montgomery Securities, hence ‘Mont’). Every institutional buy-side customer in Richmond was invited, and today a vintage 1993 Pru/Mont t-shirt is arguably worth more than a barrel of Dogecoin. Those days were an absolute hoot. I just wish I could remember them.

“Lee’s idea of magnanimous client entertainment was to treat us to vending machine sandwiches from the Trailways Bus Terminal snack center. His idea of client bonding was to belch robustly in our faces and slap a greasy hand across our backs with inane phrases like “Boy” or “Buy Brunswisk” to top off such bounteous repasts. No surprise though, since his diminutive physical stature if dwarfed only by his minute intellectual stature, which best could be characterized as brick-like.”

Our business relationship ceased several bull markets ago, but our friendship continued to grow. One of my favorite memories of Jeff is a whiskey-fueled tour of his private Man Cave, a virtual aircraft hangar stuffed wall-to-wall with EVERY souvenir artifact produced and sold by the New York Football Giants. And thanks to his son Nicholas working as a community rep for the Oakland Raiders, Jeff made several trips to Northern California, where we spent afternoons traversing up and down Napa Valley’s Silverado Trail in a biblical search for nectars of the gods. Or at least a good cabernet.

“Rarely does he (or could he) speak in complete sentences, as if whole thoughts could seep through the mortar that encapsulates his dense head mass. In short, this guy is a total mess.”

Jeff retires this week after a long and distinguished career as an investment manager, a successful journey that concludes after serving the past eight years as a Portfolio Manager and Principal at The London Company in Richmond. Jeff is one of the brightest individuals I’ve ever had the privilege to meet, and I know he will pursue with the same passion and intellectual mandate any endeavor he puts his mind too.  Jeff is one of a kind. Always had been, and, thankfully, always will be.

“I could go one and on but feel that Lee has been fairly represented by the above comments. I hope you do hire him though, since Lee needs a job. Plus, if you don’t, he eventually might be reduced to wearing his stupid-looking, obnoxious bowling shirt again and frequenting bowling alleys shining shoes, dusting ball racks and muttering, “I used to work at First Boston, but now I want a real job.”

Most Skeptically

Jeffrey E. Markunas

X-Client

 Good luck with retirement, Jeff. Hopefully you won’t spend your golden years wandering the streets of Richmond muttering, “I used to be a portfolio manager, but now I want a real job.”