Value Investing Community Loses a Legend: Irving Kahn (1905 2015)

Irving Kahn, co-founder of Kahn Brothers Group and one-time teaching assistant to Benjamin Graham at Columbia Business School, has died at the age of 109.  I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Kahn in 2012.  Ill never forget Mr. Kahns first words. a profuse apology for not standing to greet me.  He had fallen on a step and hurt his back.  Irving Kahn, a successful investor who was 106 at the time and still worked in the office 3 4 days a week was apologizing for not giving me a proper greeting?!

We had a wonderful lunch.  If I am half as lucid at 80 as he was at 106, I will be a happy man.  More than once during our meeting Mr. Kahn urged me to read Storage and Stability by Benjamin Graham.  Embarrassingly, I never got around to it.  I think Mr. Kahn would happy to know that I just placed an order on Amazon and the book is next in my queue.  We may not all be blessed with as many years as Irving Kahn, but at least we have something and someone to aspire to.

Winter 2015 Issue of Graham & Doddsville

Fall 2014 Issue of Graham & Doddsville

An Honor, A Dilemma, and A Reboot

A few weeks ago, I noticed a sudden increase in the number of people who follow me on Twitter .  The reason, I soon discovered, was an article titled Read Em and Reap by Jason Zweig that was posted on the Wall Street Journals Total Return Blog .  For those of you who have never heard of Jason Zweig (I doubt that includes most readers of this blog), he is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and writes the weekly Intelligent Investor column.  In fact, Jason Zweig edited one of the most widely read editions of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham.   Jasons post was a follow-up to another article he wrote, Can Peers Burn Holes In Your Portfolio?

My “Intelligent Investor” column this weekend  discusses new research on what psychologists call “shared attention”—the state of paying heed to an object or event at the same time your peers are also focusing on it. Believing that other people like you are paying attention to the same thing you are can make you more likely to remember it, to take action on it and to experience more intense emotions about it, the research finds.

In my column, I encouraged investors to socialize “only with investors who are calm and methodical.” Here’s a small selection of websites, blogs and Twitter feeds that I think pass that test.  It is far from complete; there are other sites I like for other reasons, but the sources I’ve listed here all encourage investors to ignore the markets’ momentary twitches and spasms and, instead, to focus on the long term.

GrahamAndDoddsville.net was one of the websites on Jasons list.  To say it is an honor to appear on Jasons list, alongside some of my favorite websites, would be a major understatement.

When the proverbial apple fell on my head and I discovered value investing (a term I now believe to be a proxy for all intelligent investing), I wanted to read and learn as much as I could.  There were several websites and blogs that helped me navigate the vast number of available resources.  While many of the websites that were helpful to me no longer exist, these resources were invaluable to my own investing journey.  Over time, however, I realized that many aspiring analysts / investors, including myself, fell into the pitfall of spending too much time reading about investors and not enough time investing.  Once you have covered the basics (and it is my opinion that studying The Intelligent Investor. Warren Buffetts Letters to Berkshire Shareholders. and Joel Greenblatts You Can Be a Stock Market Genius  will get you 99.9% of the way there), there is no better way to learn how to invest than by taking your hard earned money and investing it.  I have often heard people reply, I dont have enough money to invest in stocks on my own.  Hogwash!  I may have accepted that reply prior to the turn of the century, but in 2014, anyone can open an online brokerage account with almost no minimum account balance.  In most cases, this ease of access proves to be very bad for investors.  But if you are truly learning how to be an intelligent investor, it is wonderful!

This brings me to the dilemma.  At a certain point, my recommendation to aspiring analysts and investors is to spend their non-investing time delving into case studies and hunting for undervalued securities.  Some of my favorite places to do both are on your left right there in the margin or on the Valuable Investing Resources page .

I am amazed how many visitors the GrahamAndDoddsville blog receives, especially in light of how infrequently it is updated.  I am humbled by number of analysts and investors who have told me that they used this site as a lunching point for their own journey to become an intelligent investor.  My original motive for starting the site was to have a place where I could store all of the resources I have found.

With all of this in mind, I plan for the site to become a bit more active.  A reboot, if you will.  The number of posts may not dramatically increase, but in the coming days, weeks and months, you will start to see fixed links, updates to the hunting grounds, research essentials and top blogs, and additions to the SuperInvestor Resources .  Hopefully this will serve as a compromise.  By not dramatically increasing the number of posts, my hope is that I will not draw aspiring analysts / intelligent investors away from the sites where they should be spending most of their non-investing time websites and blogs filled with case studies and discussions of current investment ideas.  At the same time, GrahamAndDoddsville.net will hopefully become an even better tool for those who continue to use the site as either a starting point or as an ongoing resource in the never-ending journey to become a more intelligent investor.

I receive many e-mails want to sincerely apologize to those who have received a reply.  I do enjoy hearing from likeminded investors and can be reached at admin@grahamanddoddsville.net .  I will do my best to respond.

Spring 2014 Issue of Graham & Doddsville

The students of Columbia Business School just released the Spring 2014 Issue of Graham & Doddsville .

The new issue features Arnold Van Den Berg and Jim Brilliant of Century Management, Philippe Jabre of Jabre Capital, Eric Rosenfeld of Crescendo Partners, and CBS Alum H. Kevin Byun of Denali Investors. This issue also covers the 17th Annual CSIMA Conference and includes ideas from the 2014 Pershing Square Challenge.