Irving Kahn brag post

[buffett]

I'm so excited. Tonight I'm attending a New York Society of Security Analysts dinner which is a tribute to Irving Kahn (100-year old investor who was a colleague and biographer of Ben Graham and a founding member of NYSSA). I got my ticket via a rich friend (I've heard they were $300 each).

Louis Lowenstein is the speaker. If he says anything interesting, I'll post it here if people are interested.

[DesertCat]

[ QUOTE ]
I'm so excited. Tonight I'm attending a New York Society of Security Analysts dinner which is a tribute to Irving Kahn (100-year old investor who was a colleague and biographer of Ben Graham and a founding member of NYSSA). I got my ticket via a rich friend (I've heard they were $300 each).

Louis Lowenstein is the speaker. If he says anything interesting, I'll post it here if people are interested.

[/ QUOTE ]

Congratulations, looking forward to "anything interesting". Isn't Irving the guy who was still working on wall street in his 90's and would walk to work every day?

[buffett]

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the guy who was still working on wall street in his 90's and would walk to work every day

[/ QUOTE ]
My first reaction was that you might be thinking of the late, great Phil Carret, but in the bio material they handed out last night (which I just read) I see that Mr. Kahn usually walks to work, too. 100 years old and still working 40 hours a week. Wow.

Here's some quickie bullet points from last night:

* After they wheeled out his cake (I've never seen so many candles on one cake), Mr. Kahn didn't have the energy/desire to make a speech. He turned to the young whippersnapper seated next to him, told him what to say, and sent him to the podium. And who was this guy? ~86-year old Walter Schloss, he of the >15% cagr over 45 years. By the way, Messrs. Buffett, Schloss, and Kahn were the 3 main speakers at an event almost exactly 10 years ago marking the would-be 100th birthday of Ben Graham.

* Lowenstein's talk was called "Graham and Doddsville Revisited," and it was an update (through Aug05) of his recent paper (http://www.law.columbia.edu/center_program/law_economics/wp_listing_1/wp_author?exclusive=filemgr.download&file_id=95198 &rtcontentdisposition=filename%3DWP255.pdf) (which had data through Dec03). Some snippets:

- In 2001, a certain growth fund run by MFS had $17B in outflows, $16B in inflows, and assets under management of about $14B. The turnover of the stocks in the fund was about 175%, so "management got the shareholders they deserved."

- Fidelity has ~20 large cap growth funds. "What's the point?!" Obviously, it's not earning good returns, but just growing AUM...."salesmanship versus stewardship."

- As opposed to growth/momentum investors thinking about the potential upside in an investment, value investors in general have a "deep, abiding, almost pathological fear" of loss of capital.

- The market didn't return to its 1966 level (in real terms) until 1992.

- Insisting on a margin of safety for an investment is what makes the fear/uncertainty of the future manageable.

* We were just speaking of Jim Chanos in another thread, and he was there (seated at the same table of 8 as Kahn, actually). I didn't see too many other luminaries, but Jean-Marie Eveillard was sitting just behind me. Mario Gabelli and Bruce Greenwald were a few tables over. Mason Hawkins had bought an entire table, but he couldn't make it (which was lucky for me and 7 others to whom the tickets eventually filtered down (it's fun to think that I'm somewhere, though much much lower down, on the same Plinko board as Mason)).