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Amos Hostetter Jr. Biography
Amos Hostetter Jr. (Amos Barr Hostetter Jr.) is an American businessman, who was the founder, chairman, and CEO of Continental Cablevision.
He has also served as the chairman of C-SPAN and is ranked by Forbes as the 521st richest person in the world as of 2012.
Amos Hostetter Jr. Age
Hostetter Jr. was born on January 12, 1937, in New Jersey, US.
Amos Hostetter Jr. Family
Hostetter Jr. is the son of Amos Hostetter, a prominent trader at Commodities Corporation and Hayden Stone.
Amos Hostetter Jr. Wife
Hostetter Jr. married his wife Barbara Lynn Walsh of Lakeville, Connecticut in 1982. They have three children Caroline, Elizabeth, and Tripp Hostetter. The couple founded the Barr Foundation in Boston and still remain Trustees.
Amos Hostetter Jr. Career
After Hostetter graduated from Amherst College in 1958 with a B.A. in Economics, he obtained a M.B.A from Harvard University in 1961. In 1963, he and his college roommate and fraternity brother, H. Irving Grousbeck, founded Continental Cablevision in Fostoria, Ohio and Tiffin, Ohio. At the time of the company’s sale in 1996 to US West, it was the largest privately owned cable company.
Hostetter is currently chairman of Pilot House Associates, LLC.
In 1999, Hostetter and his wife, Barbara Walsh founded the Barr Foundation which has given out over $710 million in the 29 years since. In 2016, the foundation had assets totaling 1.6 billion and focuses its philanthropy in the Boston region.
Amos Hostetter Jr. Net Worth
Hostetter’s current net worth is estimated to around 3.4 billion U.S dollars.
Amos Hostetter Jr. Trading Dont’s
- Don’t sacrifice your position for fluctuations.
- Don’t expect the market to end in a blaze of glory. Look out for warnings.
- Don’t expect the tape to be a lecturer. It’s enough to see that something is wrong.
- Never try to sell at the top. It isn’t wise. Sell after a reaction if there is no rally.
- Don’t imagine that a market that has once sold at 150 must be cheap at 130.
- Don’t buck the market trend.
- Don’t look for the breaks. Look out for warnings.
- Don’t try to make an average from a losing game.
- Never keep goods that show a loss, and sell those that show a profit. Get out with the least loss, and sit tight for greater profits.
Amos Hostetter Jr. Dangers in Trading caused by Human Nature
- Fear: fearful of profit and one acts too soon.
- Hope: hope for a change in the forces against one.
- Lack of confidence in ones own judgment.
- Never cease to do your own thinking.
- A man must not swear eternal allegiance to either the bear or bull side.
- The individual fails to stick to facts!
- People believe what it pleases them to believe.
Amos Hostetter Jr. News
The Trustees of Reservations (The Trustees) recently honored Amos B. Hostetter, Jr. with its prestigious Charles Eliot Conservationist of the Year Award at the nonprofit’s 127th Annual Meeting held in the State Room in Boston. Mr. Hostetter’s Barr Foundation office is in the Pilot House in the North End.
Hostetter has been a friend and supporter of The Trustees for many years, serving as a Corporate Trustee since 1991, and as a longtime member of the Nantucket Property Committee. He is a passionate advocate for conservation, the environment, arts, and education in Boston and beyond through his work as co-founder and trustee of the Barr Foundation, which also seeks solutions to protect Boston’s waterfront from the increasing threats of our changing climate. Through his work with the Barr Foundation, he has also been a supporter of The Trustees’ One Waterfront Initiative designed to seek and create climate resilient, accessible open spaces and parks along Boston’s vulnerable waterfront.
“We were honored to celebrate Amos Hostetter for his incredible legacy of leadership and advocacy around conservation and climate action in Boston and beyond,” says Trustees President & CEO Barbara Erickson. “His long-term vision to create a vibrant, livable, and environmentally healthy city and resilient waterfront is awe-inspiring. We are grateful for his tireless dedication, contributions, and commitment.”
Lessons From Commodities Corporation Founder & Trader Amos Hostetter
Amos Hostetter cofounded Commodities Corporation (otherwise known as CC) along with Helmut Weymar back in 1969. CC is the trading shop that produced more legendary trading talent than the Yankees have All-Stars. Alumni include: Bruce Kovner, Michael Marcus, Paul Tudor Jones, Ed Seykota and more…
He was considered the wise sage and mentor of the group. He’s credited with imbuing many of these trading greats with the wisdom and knowledge they used to achieve their grand heights.
Upon his untimely death in a car accident in 1977, the directors of Commodities Corporation commissioned one of their traders, Morris Markovitz, to gather and record Hostetter’s timeless philosophy on markets and trading. The goal was to ensure future CC traders could benefit from his invaluable teachings. The resulting work was an internal booklet titled Amos Hostetter; A Successful Speculator’s Approach to Commodities Trading.
Hostetter’s trading philosophy could be boiled down to the following (in Hostetter’s own words):
Try to acquire every bit of fundamental information available. Read extensively.
Simultaneously, post daily charts on commodities and develop a feel for trends.
Follow the fundamentals in your trading but only if and as long as the charts do not cast a negative vote.
He regarded money management as the first priority for any serious market speculator. From Markovitz (emphasis mine):
Sound money management is crucial to successful trading. The best market analysis won’t get a trader to the bottom line consistent profits unless he has a sound money-management policy. This is an area where Mr. Hostetter excelled.
Sometimes it is hard to draw a sharp line between trading principles and money-management principles. If I were to paraphrase a famous saying, I think it would provide an accurate summary of one of Mr. Hostetter’s most important trading and money-management principles: the market, to be commanded, must be obeyed. As a trader, Mr. Hostetter was aware of his own fallibility. He tried to protect himself from errors by the trading rules he used and by trying to anticipate areas of potential surprise. This alone, however, was not enough. If the market moved against him for a reason he did not understand, he would often exit without waiting for a trading rule to take him out: as a money manager, he knew he could not afford the luxury of a prolonged argument with the market.
Perhaps his most important money-management principles was “Take care of your losses and the profits will take care of themselves.” This means that a trader should place strong emphasis on keeping his losses small, because two or three large losses in succession would be a crippling blow.
Amos Hostetter Jr. twitter
Hostetter is not active in social media.