Jim Slater (accountant)
James Derrick Slater (13 March 1929 – 18 November 2015) was a British accountant, investor and business writer. Slater rose to prominence in the 1970s as a businessman and financier, who was the founding Chairman of Slater Walker, an investment bank and conglomerate which collapsed in the secondary banking crisis of 1973–75.
Jim Slater
13 March 1929
18 November 2015 (aged 86)[1]
British
Chartered accountant
Businessman
Slater Walker
Capitalist column in The Sunday Telegraph
author, The Zulu Principle
Helen (1965–2015, his death)
4, including Mark
Career[edit]
Early career[edit]
Born in 1929 in Heswall – at that time in Cheshire – Slater qualified as a chartered accountant aged 24, and joined the Dohm Group. Quickly promoted, he became a general manager, reorganising all the company's small industrial holdings into one company within the group. After leaving Dohm, he was appointed secretary and chief accountant of Park Royal Vehicles, a wholly owned subsidiary of ACV Group. He was then made commercial director of its subsidiary AEC. After Leyland Motors took over ACV, Slater was later promoted to deputy sales director under Donald Stokes.
Initial investments[edit]
Whilst working for AEC as a director, Slater fell ill and during his recovery became interested in investing, and developed a system for picking stocks which would much later form the basis of his book The Zulu Principle (1992). He then approached his friend Nigel Lawson, at that time the City Editor of The Sunday Telegraph, and was hired to write an investment column under the pseudonym 'Capitalist'. Over the following two years, Capitalist's ghost portfolio appreciated by 68.9%, against the London Stock Market's average of 3.6%.
Author[edit]
Slater's autobiography sets out his early plans and visions regarding company acquisitions, and describes the processes he employed to bring them about. Once companies came under his control his strategy was to maximise the return on those of their assets that he judged disposable—be they property, plant or workforce. These tactics proved to be highly successful and profitable in the short-term, such that "Slater Walker" became a byword for a particularly forceful and financially rewarding form of capitalism.
The acquisition and disposal of company assets in this manner became known as "asset stripping", a phrase term that carries with it connotations of hardship and distress associated with the human costs of unemployment. Some years later, Slater acknowledged the drawbacks that were inherent in the practices he adopted, towards the end of an interview with Hunter Davies in The Independent published on 15 December 1992.[8]
Slater was also the author of a book on investment, The Zulu Principle, which focuses on simple techniques for identifying small dynamic growth companies whose shares are at a low price compared to their future prospects. With Hemmington Scott, he devised a monthly company statistical guide, Company REFS,[9] also available as a daily online service, to make the identification of such shares easier for the private investor. Slater authored several other investment books, and had a side career as a children's author, writing the A. Mazing Monsters series.
Media[edit]
He was featured in the second episode of The Mayfair Set, a series of documentaries by Adam Curtis.
Personal life[edit]
Slater married his wife Helen in 1965. They lived in Surrey and had four children and ten grandchildren.
Slater's hobby was chess. Amongst other sponsorships, he donated $125,000 to help fund the 1972 World Chess Championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in Reykjavík, Iceland, doubling the total prize fund.
Slater died on 18 November 2015 at the age of 86.[1]