Irving Kahn Quotes
108 Irving Kahn Quotes
1 2 3
Lemmings always lose.
Irving Kahn
Any market mania comes up against hard reality in the end.
Irving Kahn
Real investors should never feel bearish because the time to buy value is when markets go down!
Irving Kahn
[Born in 1905 to parents who immigrated to New York from Russia and Poland and still going strong in 2012 actively investing at age 108] My mother, Esther, and my father, Saul, were willing to drop the language, religion, and friends of their own countries and come to America to look for a new life. My respect for their courage and determination prompted me to study very hard from a young age because I wanted to find a well-paid job one day to support them.
Irving Kahn
Figures can lie and liars can figure.
Irving Kahn
[Irving Kahn’s motto] There is always something to do. You just need to look harder, be creative, and be a little flexible!
Irving Kahn
[On investing in the great depression] You didn’t have to be very smart to find value. All you needed was the right investment model.
Irving Kahn
The Depression taught me what frugality means and the importance of not losing money.
Irving Kahn
Because I was so frugal, I walked home to my apartment in lower Manhattan for lunch so that I could save on expenses. My kids must have thought they had a wealthy father because I could always come home in the middle of the day.
Irving Kahn
Many students took his [Benjamin Graham’s] class year after year because they got many stock ideas from him and profited from them.
Irving Kahn
Ben didn’t care if students made money from his ideas because he was more into analysis as an intellectual exercise than for the financial reward.
Irving Kahn
Ben [Graham] always believed in the Socratic approach. He never provided students with a ready answer, believing that through thorough discussions and rational deductions, solid conclusions would be reached.
Irving Kahn
Ben [Graham] believed that if he told me the answer right away, I would forget it, but if I took the initiative to look it up myself, then I would always remember it.
Irving Kahn
If you complain that you cannot find opportunities, then that means you either haven’t looked hard enough or you haven’t read broadly enough.
Irving Kahn
Reading about science gives me an open mind!
Irving Kahn
[At age 105] Many scientific ideas that sounded unbelievable in the early days of my life have now become reality, so it is important to read science books and to learn about the future.
Irving Kahn
Sometimes company executives did not treat shareholders as if they were business owners.
Irving Kahn
Prices are continuously molded by fears, hopes, and unreliable estimates…
Irving Kahn
I feel that people should learn to be optimistic because life goes on, and sometimes favorable surprises come out of the blue…
Irving Kahn
Stop buying things that you don’t need, and start focusing on the essentials; then you will live long and be happy.
Irving Kahn
In life, the goal is to achieve happiness, so start thinking about the things that count!
Irving Kahn
Conventional bias dooms performance to an approximation of the averages…
Irving Kahn
A good analyst needs no salesman.
Irving Kahn
You don’t have to be fully invested all the time. Have patience, keep your standards.
Irving Kahn
When the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 85 percent – from 350 to 50 points between 1929 and 1933 – the Great Depression became very real to me.
Irving Kahn
[In the great depression] When my boss reduced my salary from $100 to $60, he asked me why was I smiling, and I said, ‘I thought you were going to fire me!’
Irving Kahn
[On dropping out of university after two years to go in 1928 to Wall Street] Like most kids, I wanted to get a well-paid job, but I didn’t know where to find one. At the time the stock market was hot, and there were a lot of advertisements and public relations items in the newspapers about Wall Street, so I walked into a Wall Street firm, Hammerschlag, Borg, and asked if they were looking for a boy. They gave me a job right away.
Irving Kahn
My first job was at 11 Wall Street, which is the New York Stock Exchange building. After one week of working there, I decided to quit because I thought the people were crazy. They were running around and screaming at each other during trading hours, and they were like clowns! I felt that I wasn’t learning anything, and so I went to my boss. He convinced me not to quit, and he sent me to the main office where I became a broker’s assistant, doing securities research.
Irving Kahn
The real estate bust in Florida showed me that any market mania comes up against hard reality in the end. Since stock prices were trading at extremely high levels in 1929, I really couldn’t assign a number to what companies were worth, and so I thought of shorting the market.
Irving Kahn
From some of the financial history books I read that discussed the market cycle, I learned that stocks in certain industries were especially volatile, and copper was one. I looked at the stock index list, and decided to short a copper company called Magma Copper. Because I had little money, I had to ask my brother-in-law, who was a lawyer, to open a brokerage account for me. With $50, I shorted the stock in the summer, and my brother-in-law said it wouldn’t be long before I lost all my money because the market was going up, and I was telling it to go down. In October 1929, when the stock market crashed, my $50 became nearly $100. That was the first trade of my life.
Irving Kahn
[On President Franklin D Roosevelt’s decision to make a bank holiday from March 5 to 12, 1933 closing every bank in America for eight days] It was a shocking moment for me because after eight days, many banks would never be able to reopen their doors. I remember the whole trouble began months earlier when many people initiated a run on the banks. When President Roosevelt took office, he announced a nationwide bank holiday to shut down the banking system. In the next eight days, he passed the Emergency Banking Act to restore confidence by guaranteeing deposits 100 percent. The deal was well received, and so when the stock market reopened on March 15, it went up 15 percent. Those eight days of uncertainty as a nation were the gloomiest of my career!
Irving Kahn
The Depression taught me what frugality means and the importance of not losing money. Because I was so frugal, I walked home to my apartment in lower Manhattan for lunch so that I could save on expenses. My kids must have thought they had a wealthy father because I could always come home in the middle of the day. But obviously, I wasn’t rich.
Irving Kahn
[On enrolling in Benjamin Graham’s security analysis class] It was a two-hour course one evening a week. Ben used examples of both popular and unpopular securities to illustrate the application of security analysis. Many students took his class year after year because they got many stock ideas from him and profited from them. Ben didn’t care if students made money from his ideas because he was more into analysis as an intellectual exercise than for the financial reward.
Irving Kahn
Before the crash in 1929, a student asked Ben if he should buy the warrants of utility company American and Foreign Power Co. – the Internet stock of the day. Ben asked the student to calculate the total market value of Pennsylvania Railroad, a blue chip company. This exercise showed the whole class how distorted the market had become, and, of course, Ben was right because American and Foreign Power soon tumbled following the crash.
Irving Kahn
Ben [Graham] always believed in the Socratic approach. He never provided students with a ready answer, believing that through thorough discussions and rational deductions, solid conclusions would be reached. I remember asking him about the word ‘tranche’ as it applied to finance. Instead of providing the definition right way, Ben asked me to look it up in the dictionary. I discovered that it means ‘slice’ in French. Ben believed that if he told me the answer right away, I would forget it, but if I took the initiative to look it up myself, then I would always remember it.
Irving Kahn
I had the honor of working for Ben [Graham] until 1956, when he retired. Not only did I come to truly understand the essence of security analysis by serving as his teaching assistant, but I was also able to earn some extra money. My duties were to prepare statistical analyses for class discussions and to mark case studies and exams.
Irving Kahn
The Great Depression was like a big storm that sank every ship. It was easy to make money if you had the right approach and knew where to look because some companies were in good shape and had nothing but cash. For example, some export companies were not severely affected by the Depression, but they were beaten down and had net cash per share that was much greater than their stock price. You didn’t have to be very smart to find value. All you needed was the right investment model.
Irving Kahn
[On leaving Abraham & Company and setting up his own firm with his two sons to form Kahn Brothers & Co in 1978] In 1975, Lehman Brothers acquired Abraham & Co. The firm became too big, and I didn’t really enjoy the environment. Since my two sons, Alan and Thomas, and my colleague, Bill, were also working at the firm and felt the same way, we decided to start something of our own.
Irving Kahn
Net-net stocks were easy to find in the early days. All I had to do was to look over annual reports and study balance sheets. I tried to find companies that had dependable assets such as cash, land, and real properties. Then I made sure they didn’t have too much debt and had decent prospects. If these stocks traded at below their net working capital, then I would be interested in buying them.
Irving Kahn
1 2 3
Return from Irving Kahn Quotes to Quoteswise.com