PREV ARTICLE
NEXT ARTICLE
FULL ISSUE
PREV FULL ISSUE
V11 2008 INDEX
E-SYLUM ARCHIVE
TOP INVESTOR STARTED BY BUYING SILVER DOLLARS
In a recent issue Joe Levine related stories of the great
U.S. Treasury silver dollar release. The June 9, 2008 issue of
Fortune magazine has an article about Ken Heebner of Capital Growth
Management, one of the best money managers of our time. Back in the day
Heebner was cashing in on the silver dollar release as well. I don't know
if he ever took on numismatics as a hobby, but it's interesting to see how
one of today's top investors capitalized on the opportunity. Here's an
excerpt from the article. -Editor.
At an age when most of his
contemporaries have either retired or given up the daily grind of running
publicly traded funds, the 67-year-old Heebner is putting up the best
numbers of an already exemplary 30-year career.Just how good has Heebner been? We may well be witnessing the most dazzling run of stock picking in mutual fund history. Since May 1998, Focus has an average annualized return of 24%, the best ten-year record of any U.S. mutual fund...
Even more remarkable than the raw numbers is how Heebner has earned them. Heebner is a true contrarian, who says he's most confident as an investor "when everyone else thinks I'm nuts." He works long hours trying to identify emerging trends in the economy. When he finds a promising one, he'll go all in, making huge bets on the stocks poised to benefit. Asked how long it takes him to identify those stocks, Heebner answers, "About ten minutes. I've been at this a long time." It's an investing style that will never be taught in business schools and is definitely not something any amateur should try at home. But Heebner, blessed with uncanny instincts, has managed to see around just about every corner in a market that has befuddled just about everyone else.
"Ken did march to his own drumbeat, but he was absolutely brilliant. I never, ever doubted that he was going to be a great investor." Henry, himself a long-time shareholder in Heebner's funds, says what first impressed him about Heebner was a little gambit he had going in finance class. Classmates would bring him silver dollars, which Heebner would exchange for dollar bills. Says Henry: "Ken was hoarding silver dollars on the idea that silver was going to keep appreciating, which would eventually force the Treasury to stop issuing new silver coins." And that's exactly what happened. "It was funny as hell - he'd be sitting there with piles of silver dollars on his desk - but Ken had it nailed," Henry says. "He saw something the rest of us didn't. That's Ken - that's always been Ken."
Asked about the silver dollars, Heebner smiles and reveals that it was more than a lark for him. At one point he'd accumulated 13,000 silver dollars and had even taken out a bank loan to help finance his little venture. "The Treasury had these uncirculated silver dollars in bags in vaults. You could walk in with a thousand dollars, and they'd give you a bag of 1,000 silver dollars." It's still the best deal he's ever seen, he says: "You couldn't lose, but you could make a lot." Heebner figures he eventually netted around $15,000, but he was less successful when he tried to parlay his experience into a term paper about why silver prices were going up: "I didn't get a very good grade."
To read the complete article, see: America's hottest investor
Wayne Homren, Editor
The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org.
To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com
To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum
All Rights Reserved.
NBS Home Page
Contact the NBS webmaster
