Headed for Depression? 105-Year-Old Investment Banker – There Were a Lot of Valuable Buys

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Aug 19, 2011
I had stumbled across this interesting and motivational article, which may be of interest to value investors who may aspire to live through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but live to ripe age and reap the benefits of long term value investing. What is your position in the market now? Take a vote here and you can view your fellow voters’ results on the same page.


Here is the article:


The stock market is imploding, Europe is on the brink and, if the doomsayers are to be believed, we could be headed for a double-dip recession.


None of that worries Irving Kahn, perhaps the world’s oldest working investment banker. “There are a lot of opportunities out there, and one shouldn’t complain, unless you don’t have good health,” says Kahn. At 105, Kahn might well be the last man on earth who can speak authoritatively on both longevity and making money amid a historic market meltdown. In 1928, at the age of 23, he went to work on Wall Street as a stock analyst and brokerage clerk. By the tail end of the Great Depression, in 1939, he’d made enough money in the market to move his wife and two children out of public housing and into their own house in the suburbs.


Kahn is still in the game, waking every morning at 7 a.m. and going to work as chairman of Kahn Brothers, the small family investment firm he founded in 1978. Until a few years ago, he took the bus or walked the 20 blocks from his Upper East Side home to his midtown office. “For a 105-year-old guy, it’s pretty remarkable,” says Thomas Kahn, Irving’s 68-year-old son and the company’s president. “I get tired just thinking about it.”


Read more: Depression-Era Banker: Economic Worries Overblown