Investing Legends Buffett, Whitman, Icahn, Kahn and Soros Still Going Strong
Irving Kahn
Irving Kahn has seen it all. At 108 years old, his career predates the Great Depression. In fact, he made his first trade — a short sale of a copper mining company — in the summer of 1929, was just months before the Great Crash. Like Warren Buffett, Kahn studied under Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing as a discipline. He was also one of the first professionals to earn the CFA designation.
If I am lucky enough to still be alive at 108, I probably won’t still be running money. Frankly, it’s a stressful job. The fact that Kahn is still actively managing portfolios is testament both to incredible genes and to the emotional detachment he brings to his value investing methodology. Per the Kahn Bother’s website,
Kahn Brothers thinks of a portfolio as an orchard of fruit trees. One cannot expect fruit every year from each species of tree. Investments can and often do have varied and unpredictable timetables to maturity. We believe a suitable time horizon for investment fruit to ripen for harvest can be three to five years or longer. Indeed, a key factor in realizing outstanding performance is having the discipline and patience to maintain time-tested principles and not abandon the orchard before the fruit has ripened.
At 108 years old, Kahn has no doubt learned a thing or two about patience.
