Irving Kahn has died at the age of 109. He was a student of Benjamin Graham and later, chairman emeritus of Kahn Brothers Group Inc. He started working on Wall Street in 1928.
Jason Zweig writes:
The crash of 1929, Mr. Kahn told an interviewer in 2012, taught him that “the gambling nature of Wall Street has little or no interest in the serious, underlying nature of businesses.” He described rapid trading, then and now, as “crazy competition that had no connection to the real facts.”
His central goal as an investor, he said, was always “to know much more about the stock I’m buying than the man who’s selling does.”
For Mr. Kahn, the most important quality an investor could possess was patience. “You gain much more by slow investing and concentrating on what you know,” he said in 2012, “than on fast investing, which is nothing more than gambling.”
In an article in the Financial Analysts Journal in 1977, Mr. Kahn set out seven “guidelines for intelligent investing.” Among them: “Don’t depend on recent or current figures to forecast future prices….Capital is always at risk unless you buy better than average values….Don’t trust quarterly earnings….Look beyond the one or two largest companies in a given industry.”
He concluded, “The analyst must both practice, and to his client preach, patience.”
Kahn’s sister also lived to 109. His brother died at 101 and another sister lived to 103.
Asked on Thursday if he had any thoughts on Mr. Kahn, Warren Buffett —who also studied under Mr. Graham—joked, “I’d rather have Irving’s thoughts on longevity.”
Here’s the list of our stocks and their reports for this earnings cycle.
| Stock |
Symbol |
Date |
Estimate |
Result |
| Wells Fargo |
WFC |
14-Jan |
$1.02 |
$1.02 |
| eBay |
EBAY |
21-Jan |
$0.89 |
$0.90 |
| Signature Bank |
SBNY |
22-Jan |
$1.56 |
$1.60 |
| Microsoft |
MSFT |
26-Jan |
$0.71 |
$0.71 |
| Stryker |
SYK |
27-Jan |
$1.45 |
$1.44 |
| Qualcomm |
QCOM |
28-Jan |
$1.25 |
$1.34 |
| CR Bard |
BCR |
29-Jan |
$2.24 |
$2.29 |
| Ford Motor |
F |
29-Jan |
$0.23 |
$0.26 |
| Moog |
MOG-A |
30-Jan |
$0.87 |
$0.86 |
| AFLAC |
AFL |
3-Feb |
$1.29 |
$1.29 |
| Fiserv |
FISV |
3-Feb |
$0.89 |
$0.89 |
| Cognizant Technology |
CTSH |
4-Feb |
$0.65 |
$0.67 |
| Ball Corp. |
BLL |
5-Feb |
$0.85 |
$0.84 |
| Snap-on |
SNA |
5-Feb |
$1.81 |
$1.97 |
| Wabtec |
WAB |
18-Feb |
$0.94 |
$0.95 |
| Hormel Foods |
HRL |
19-Feb |
$0.64 |
$0.69 |
| Express Scripts |
ESRX |
23-Feb |
$1.38 |
$1.39 |
| Ross Stores |
ROST |
26-Feb |
$1.11 |
$1.20 |
Hormel Foods and Ross Stores have quarters that end in January.
It’s hard to explain how dramatic the price plunge has been. This chart helps:
With deflation, here’s the change in real AHE. Workers got their biggest real increase in wages in years.
Still more deflation in the U.S. The latest CPI report showed that consumer prices fell 0.7% in January. Of course much of that is due to the collapse in oil prices. The “core” CPI, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.2%.
Thanks to the lower prices, the real or inflation-adjusted increase in wages was very good. We got the average hourly earnings report a few weeks ago, but now we see that the “real” increase was 1.2% for January. In other words, American workers got their biggest raise in years.
There was also a big jump in initial jobless claims this morning. Jobless claims rose 31,000 to 313,000. That’s huge but I’ll warn you that this series can bounce around a lot. Just a few weeks ago, we had some of our lowest reports in decades. So before anyone worries about weakness in the job market, I want to see if this trend is confirmed by more data.
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Be sure to follow me on Twitter.
With the Nasdaq Composite closing in on a record, I thought it would be a good time to look at how the Nasdaq has performed relative to the S&P 500. The graph below is the Nasdaq divided by the S&P 500.
What catches my attention is how absurd the Nasdaq was in 2000. That line is a complete outlier. While the Nasdaq has outpaced the S&P 500 over the last few years, it’s nothing like it was 15 years ago.
After 10-straight up days, the Nasdaq finally fell today. The index lost a grand total of 0.98 points today which is -0.01973%. I hope we’re able recover from this setback.
Before the 10-day streak, the index had rallied 10 times in 16 sessions. The Nasdaq Composite closed today at 4,967.14. The all-time close was 5,048.62 on March 10, 2000.
I’m happy to be named as one of the 20 Best Investing Blogs of 2015 by the good folks at The College Investor. To celebrate, I’ll be having a kegger at the Delta Tau Chi house.
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Eddy Elfenbein is a Washington, DC-based speaker, portfolio manager and editor of the blog Crossing Wall Street. His Buy List has beaten the S&P 500 over the last 20 years. (more)
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