Yahoo Finance How a 13-year-old girl got to talk stocks with Warren Buffett and golf with Rory McIlroy
Meghna Mazumdar made Warren Buffett her pen pal
The Wells Fargo Championship golf tournament tees off on Thursday in Charlotte, N.C., and Irish sensation Rory McIlroy, last year’s winner, will look to defend his title. But first, on Wednesday, he’ll play a round with a 13-year-old from Connecticut.
Meghna Mazumdar is the grand-prize winner of the Succeeding Together contest, in which Wells Fargo (WFC) solicited essays from the 30,000 teenagers in The First Tee, a nationwide youth golf program. Mazumdar has been golfing since she was a toddler, but it was her interest in trading stocks that won her the contest.
Two years ago, Mazumdar took a 10-week class offered in her town of South Windsor for kids to learn about the stock market. “At first I wasn’t too excited about it, because what kid likes waking up early on a Saturday,” says Mazumdar, “but I really ended up enjoying it. It got me started on stocks.” In the class, she and others researched stocks (on business sites like Yahoo Finance, she says), watched a lot of CNBC, and invested fake money. Soon after the class ended, she asked her father Manu, who works in finance, for some real money to invest. “I think he thought I’d want $5,” she says, and laughs. She asked for $5,000.
Over the course of the class, she had heard a lot about a certain investor named Warren Buffett. “I found out he started investing when he was 11, and that’s how old I was when I took the class,” she recalls. “So I wanted to write to him.”
She sent the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) CEO a letter about investing, and to her surprise, he replied, in September 2014, with a handwritten response that got right to the point. “Hi Meghna,” he wrote. “Thanks for your letter. Come to our annual meeting on May 2… We will send you whatever tickets you need.”
That’s how Mazumdar ended up at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting last year, the company’s 50th. “I missed a couple of days of school,” she says, “but I think if Warren Buffett calls, you should answer.” She didn’t get to meet Buffett face to face, but says she exchanges emails regularly with his secretary. Her favorite stocks? She likes Apple, Facebook, PepsiCo, and Wells Fargo, in which Berkshire is a major shareholder.
She was invited back to the annual meeting this year, but the date was too close to the golf tournament. This is one busy 13-year-old.
Mazumdar used the story of her correspondence with Buffett as an answer for the essay contest. The three prompts asked about the importance of having a “go-to team,” and about someone she “worked closely with” on a project. Mazumdar wrote about golf, her parents, and Buffett, marrying her love of stocks and golf. “I call my team my board of directors,” she says. “My mom’s the chairman and my dad is CFO.”
For winning the Wells Fargo contest, Mazumdar was allowed to choose any golfer who would be competing at the PGA Tour event, and the decision wasn’t easy. She had a top five in her head of McIlroy, Jason Day, Jordan Spieth, Phil Mickelson, or Bubba Watson — the latter two are lefties, like her — and she didn’t settle on McIlroy until the night before her round.
She and McIlroy will play on Wednesday afternoon, and later that day Scott Langley, the first participant in the First Tee program to make it onto the PGA Tour (and the first golfer to sign a deal with athlete stock-platform Fantex), will host a separate youth program.
What’s next for Mazumdar? Collegiate golf, she hopes—but not if it interferes with trading stocks.
“Even if I become a professional on the LPGA Tour,” she says seriously, “that would be great, but I’m also just as interested in stocks and computer science.”
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Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering sports business and technology.
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