Like legendary investor Warren Buffett, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s finance career started in childhood. But in an unusually hands-on fashion, Dimon spent hours playing investment simulation games with his father.
“He would give me an industry you might know something about, like a restaurant,” Dimon said on a recent episode of The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost. “And say, ‘Okay, look at this. Look at the history. Read the annual report. Study the industry if you want. What would you pay for the stock?”
That early training would prove foundational. Dimon, now 70, has run JPMorgan Chase for nearly two decades and built it into the largest bank in the U.S.—but the instinct for pricing a business started at his father’s side, long before business school.
A Wall Street stockbroker, Dimon’s father, Theodore, encouraged all three of his sons to learn more about the markets, but only Jamie leaned in. While his brothers showed little interest, Dimon gravitated toward big business bets and used the simulation games to learn the fundamentals of stock picking and decision making.
“It is brutally hard,” Dimon said. “Then you learn the ‘why.’”
