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In 2019, Lance Dwight founded Dwight Investment Counsel, LLC, out of Boston, Massachusetts, under the same name and logo of his late father's company. Dwight Investment Counsel specializes in preserving, managing, and growing the investment portfolios of individuals, trusts, and estates.
Dwight Investment Counsel is not a bank nor a private equity firm. The company does not provide financial planning services, sell insurance products, or specialize in tax advice.
My name is Lawrence Edward Dwight III, but you can call me Lance. I was born in October 1990 to Lawrence “Jay” E. Dwight Jr. and Sandra Luce. They raised me and my sister, Avonlea, in Kennebunk, Maine, during the early years of our childhood and later in the western foothills of Maine.
I currently reside in the historic city of Boston in the neighborhood of Roxbury. I'm a husband to my lovely wife, Aberdine, and a father to my son, Lawrence IV. Through my company, I manage the investment portfolios of my family, friends, and clients, primarily investing in securities and stocks. My clients bestow a fiduciary responsibility on me which creates a solid legal and ethical foundation of trust. This relationship and bond help guide me in making prudent decisions to meet the individual needs of my clients.
I am the third generation of registered investment advisors, following my father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. When I was a boy, my father gifted me two of his favorite investing books. At the time, these books were not of much interest to me and were beyond my comprehension. As the years went by, I sat down to read each book. Those books accompanied my education on investing, namely “The Intelligent Investor” and “The Interpretation of Financial Statements” by Benjamin Graham.
Tragically, in 2012, my father unexpectedly took his life at the young age of 54 at our horse farm in Wilton, ME. His death was a complete shock.
In the years that followed, I spent significant time with my paternal grandparents, getting to know them and their habits. I took up residence in a small shack, known as “Pat’s House,” attached to the garage of their home in Kennebunk, Maine. From that shack, when not weeding the garden beds of the Colony Hotel, I began reading some of the finance books that had once occupied my father’s library.
Sometimes great gifts come in unexpected forms; from my Dad, one of those gifts was directing me to the wisest investment literature of our time, which guides me to this day. In part, the desire to gain my father’s financial wisdom fueled my reading. As I immersed myself in his books, I developed a serious interest in investing and set my sight’s on creating my own investment advisory company, which in 2019 came to fruition.
I like to invest in businesses that allow me and my clients to sleep easily at night, and I want to buy them for a reasonable price. A good company creates value as a nature of its operation. In contrast, many assets might be of value, but they do not create value without human intervention, which a business has in abundance by its very nature.
If the business is sustainable through its operations and is good to its shareholders, it will have the potential to grow. Among many things, from an investment standpoint, a good company has revenue and a board of directors and managers of upstanding character who are a proper fit to its shareholders.
There is no shortage of companies to buy on Wall Street; however, the surplus of mediocre companies far outweigh the exceptional ones. The rising price of a stock does not reveal a good business, nor should the investor consider it an assurance that they have made an intelligent investment. I do not fancy buying a lousy business for a great price, nor an excellent company for an exorbitant price.
Through brains or lack thereof, there will be other investment advisors that outperform Dwight Investment Counsel. Significant risk creates the opportunity for great reward, and some who take it will make an enormous fortune. However, the risk level that will produce the grandest returns is a risk to which prudent investors should not expose themselves. Some outlying advisors will get very lucky with their purchases, which is the nature of speculation and probability.
On the bookshelf beside my desk, I keep a vintage pin-back button of my grandfather's that reads, "Don't confuse brains with a bull market." I keep this pin as a reminder that a stock's rising price does not determine my skill as an advisor. There will be other advisors and investors, particularly in times of a bull market, whose returns will outperform mine. That acknowledgment is appropriate to help prevent an intelligent investor from jumping on a moving train without knowing where and when the journey will end.
Overall, I expect to achieve returns for my clients commensurate with the level of risk taken when purchasing securities. Through educated decisions and intelligent analysis, I anticipate an outstanding return for my clients measured over many decades. There will be years of negative growth, but if the past performance is any indication of trends still underway, I expect the relatively consistent years of growth, over time, to dwarf the years of decline.
So long as other buyers in the market base their opinions of a stock's value on rational and tangible financial fundamentals, I will use my skills to buy and sell stocks in the market successfully.