As the head of CBS News, Neeraj Khemlani kept looking for stories that would snare the interest of large crowds. Though he left more than two years ago, he hasn’t given up the search.
Khemlani, a former producer for “60 Minutes” and a former executive at Yahoo and Hearst, believes he has found a tale that most people will find fascinating — a sure-fire way to make money. But it’s a get-rich-slow scheme and requires patience and discipline.
In “The Coffee Can Investor,” a new book from Columbia Business School Publishing, Khemlani analyzes the investing stratagem of someone he has known for decades: Matt Ankrum, a midwestern investor who looks out for “100-baggers,” or stocks that multiply in value a hundred times over several decades. Ankrum studies financial arcana such as the Journal of Portfolio Management and seeks out stocks — not sexy highfliers — that are bound to increase in value over the longer haul. Khemlani has long talked to Ankrum for background on the movements of financial markets, and when he heard the investor was going to create a “coffee can” of money spread over multiple “100 bagger” stocks that he could give to his children, he realized he had a story that the average investor would want to hear.
“The discipline to do this is real, but it’s a lot easier if you can hear these stories and see the people who’ve done it in the past succeed,” says the author, during a recent interview. To make things more interesting, Khemlani brings his own family into the story, and starts a coffee can for them as well.
He hopes the story of patient, studious investing resounds among a growing community of retail investors. This group is “moving the markets, buying the dips, forcing the market,” he says and “only getting bigger. The amount of money going into 401K’s is only getting bigger.” And yet, he found statistics showing the average hold time on a stock was just five and a half months, and that the average retirement nest egg for Americans is between $300,000 and $400,000. And so, he and Ankrum felt they should share his research with more people and “talk about the fundamentals of value investing.”
Readers may be surprised to find that many of the stocks chosen for Ankrum’s coffee can are those of business-to-business companies. Khemlani was not. During his time at Hearst, he saw the company, known for its backing of magazines and newspapers as well as TV networks such as ESPN and Lifetime, put more emphasis on owing b-top-b companies, such as Fitch Group and QGenda. He felt Ankrum was on to something in public markets. One of the choices is Bio-Techne, a maker of diagnostics. Another is Fastenal, a maker and distributor of industrial fasteners, tools and equipment. People searching for the next Nvidia, Alphabet or Apple are advised to look elsewhere.
Khemlani was inspired by “Investment Biker,” the memoir by legendary investor Jim Rogers, who tells readers of a 22-month motorcycle odyssey across 52 countries, as well as his thoughts on global markets. “The idea of taking the investing adventure, another step, was an interesting thought for me, meaning, could you find someone who has really interesting research, or a really interesting method. with proven success over time?” he asks.
He thinks readers will have a craving for more “investing adventures” that allow them to see people following a strategy and “really sweating it out” as they lock on to research and unique methods. Now that he has offered the world the chance to incubate a fortune in a coffee can, real or imagined, Khemlani has started a new project — trying to find someone who can do something similar with real estate.
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