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