Glenn Martin (OK 1966)

Glenn Martin (1949 – 2018 )

After King’s, Mr Martin attended Wadham College, Oxford, before beginning a career in the City. He worked for a number of financial institutions in the decades that followed, the latter part his career  spent as Chief Information Officer for investment banks. In 2004 he won the Banking Technology Award for the Best IT Operational Achievement. As a successful private investor, in 1994 Glenn developed a system for calculating the intrinsic value of the FTSE 100 and of individual UK shares. When the system proved reliable, he established ShareMaestro Limited in 2006 to package and promote the system. His book How to Value Shares and Outperform the Market was published in 2011.  Glenn’s main interests were his family, tennis, travel and drumming.

Glenn Martin joined KCJS in 1957 at the age of 8 and was at King’s for ten years, progressing to the Senior School in 1962. Already learning Latin in Form 1, he expanded his interest in the ancient world when his teacher B. G. Last suggested, four years later, that he should try his hand at mastering Ancient Greek. Parental permission was required for that, and Glenn’s parents (his father was a Governor of Tiffins) duly gave the nod. There was a downside – doing Greek meant an abandonment of History and Geography, which he loved, and it also denied him the chance to learn German at school, since all three were timetabled in those days at the same time as Greek. But Glenn’s love of the Classics was forged, and when later it came to choosing A levels, Greek, Latin and Ancient History were the only ones in the frame.

In 1967, Glenn won a scholarship to Wadham College Oxford to read Literae Humaniores, as Classics was then called, but on achieving his BA in 1971 he decided that further education was not for him, and he embarked on a career in Finance in the City of London. Here he worked with increasing success for the next thirty-four years. He was employed first at Williams and Glyn’s Bank (now the Royal Bank of Scotland), where he rose to be Deputy Head of Corporate Planning, before moving on to the Swiss Banking Corporation (now UBS). In 1996 he was appointed Chief Information Officer at Salomon Brothers, and then in 2001 took a similar role at J. P. Morgan Cazenove. The high esteem in which he was held for his expertise in banking technology was recognized by awards from a number of national bodies, such as his receipt of the Best IT Operational Achievement Award for the whole banking sector in 2004.

Eventually tiring of the corporate world of finance, he left the City at the age of 56 and started his own company, called Share Maestro, which he launched in 2007 and ran with enormous success until he was forced by the onset of his final illness to wind down operations. This was basically an equity investment software, with a model, constantly updated, which monitored trends in the equity market and advised clients how best to invest their money. It was greeted with great critical acclaim by the financial press. He also found the time to write a couple of books, How to Value Shares and Outperform the Market(2011) and Successful Stock Market Strategies (2015). In these he combined his long experience of finance with a clear and lucid style of writing, which made these books very accessible to those not well versed in the intricacies of the world of finance. Not surprisingly, in view of their alluring titles, they sold well.

Outside work, Glenn was a devoted drummer, a passion he started in his school days and which stayed with him all his life. He was also an enthusiastic tennis player and a popular member of his local tennis club. A devoted family man, he met his wife Beryl at Oxford, and they had four children. They and Beryl all survive him. Quietly spoken, thoughtful, amusing, and intensely loyal to his friends, Glenn was cruelly struck down by Parkinson’s disease, which he bore with fortitude. He is much missed by his family and friends, indeed by all who had the privilege of knowing him.

BY ROGER WILSON (KCJS/KCS 1957–1967)