Biography
Damon Vickers was born in 1964 in New York City. He grew up in Kew Gardens Queens, New Haven Connecticut, and spent several of his childhood years living in the Buddhist monastery Odiyan in Sonoma County, California.
Vickers grew up living with his father, who rebelled against the wealthy New England background he was bred into. So Vickers was raised a non-conformist; a rebellious child who got kicked out of many schools. The father and son lived out of their car for a period of time, and Damon completed his homework assignments under the bright lights of supermarket parking lot streetlamps.
Vickers now runs his successful hedge fund NPM from Seattle, and lives just outside the city with his wife and three daughters.
Early career
When Vickers was 18, he got a job a Manny’s Music, a New York music institution. A top synthesizer salesman, he sold equipment to Will Smith, Cuba Gooding Jr, [
[http://en. .org/wiki/Usher_(entertainer) Usher], Pauly Shore, Annie Lenox, Carly Simon, and Iggy Pop to name a few.
It was while working at Manny’s that Damon had an epiphany: he wanted to get into the investment business. He was dating Russell Wight’s daughter, and while borrowing Wight’s car discovered a stack of stock confirmations from E.F. Hutton in the backseat. This was when he decided to take on the stock market. Vickers cut his teeth in the aggressive, rough and tumble world of Wall Street. After three months as a broker, he moved from a flophouse to a pent house.
He worked in a number of investment houses in the late 1980’s, when the NASDAQ was in its infancy, specializing in growth investing. He co-created the firm Parker Anderson, doing arbitrage and invested in takeovers and buyouts.
Current career
Damon Vickers has worked as a growth investor for more than two decades.
He was an early investor, building profitable positions in stocks like Cisco and Applied Materials. He invested in Starbucks when the coffee giant had a mere 150 stores, compared to today’s 16,000. He was an early investor in Amazon.com, Outback Steakhouse, Whole Foods and Timberland. By the time the Internet blasted into popularity, Vickers’ was already invested and making money.
Damon Vickers was one of the very few to call the top of the bull market in March 2000. He predicted the dot-com collapse. He warned investors about Enron. Sensing a topping market, he went on to call the second market top in 2008.
He launched his hedge fund, Nine Points Capital Management Partners (NPM) in 2008. The fund was up 63?ts first year, profiting from the financial meltdown by shorting companies like GM, Lehman, AIG, and Countrywide. His investment style can best be described as “adaptive trend following” and he coined the phrase “Placing Capital in the Path of Social Change.”
Influences
Damon Vickers’ has been heavily influenced by William O’Neil, Peter Lynch and Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking. He was a member of the Marble Collegiate Church for 16 years, where Peale once served as minister.
Radio Days
Damon Vickers was the host of The Damon Vickers Show, a nationally syndicated five-day-a-week financial radio program on-air from 2001 to 2004, broadcast from Seattle. Before having his own show, he was a frequent guest on the Business Talk Radio network, with Bill Bresnan and The Dolans.
The Media Personality
Vickers has been a guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNBC Asia, Business News Network, Japan Public Television, and The Today Show. He has been quoted in The New York Times, Barron’s, and Investors Business Daily and interviewed by several Seattle news outlets.
Family History
Damon Vickers’ father, John Vickers, was a floor trader for Goldman Sachs. His grandfather, Jack Vickers, worked for Kidder Peabody and was a broker during the crash of 1929. Damon’s great grandmother, Katharine Angell, cofounded the Culinary Institute of America. His great grandfather, James Rowland Angell was president of Yale University between 1921 and 1937. His great great grandfather, Stuart Cramer, invented air conditioning in 1906.