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By George Rowand
Rappahannock News Staff Writer ■
Robert Engel goes back a long way in the investing business.
“When I was 20,1 got a job in Washington, DC,” Engel remembered. “I was making $1 an hour. I was working for the Orvis Brothers, the last of a partnership that started in Louisiana in the cotton business. I started out as a chalk boy, putting up the highs and the lows of the day on a chalkboard.”
Fast-forward about 40 years and now Engel is running his own independent stock brokerage firm on Culpeper Street in Warrenton.
“I do trading,” he said, “but today I tend to get more people that are retirement-oriented. My focus now is on easing the pain that’s going to happen in the future for college and retirement.”
Seen it all
With his history, Engel said he’s seen it all, from a stock market that was going nowhere in the 1970s to the go-go days of the late 1990s.
“In 1974 you couldn’t give away (stock in) RCA, and that was yielding 8 percent in dividends,” he said.
Engel said he came by his interest in stocks at an early age. “My mother slipped on a stoop in 1954 and she was laid up,” he remembered. “She was bored and started to look for something to do.
“One day at a cocktail party, someone . asked, ‘By the way, what are you doing for investments?’ We do savings bonds,’ my mother said. What about stocks?’ the person asked. ‘Aren’t they risky?’ my mother replied.
“Then she started getting the annual reports from a number of companies, and at the age of 15, I put aside the comic pages and bought Barron’s.
“Then I started buying mutual funds, which were new to the investment business, and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice for me to do that for other people?”
According to Engel, the brokerage business was a different animal indeed in those days. Most people — like his mother — thought of stocks as risky
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