Kahn Brothers Group
Kahn Brothers
Irving Kahn, who died in 2015 at 109, was for years the world's oldest active investor and spent most of that long life working within a few blocks of Wall Street. He began in the markets in 1928 as a runner at the brokerage Hammerschlag, Borg & Co, and the next summer, just before the October crash, he borrowed money to sell short 50 shares of Magma Copper, a copper miner whose stock had been bid up to irrational heights. The trade tripled his money when the market collapsed. Kahn then became a teaching assistant to Benjamin Graham at Columbia Business School in the 1930s, sitting alongside the man who would later codify value investing in Security Analysis, and carried Graham's lessons with him for the rest of his career. In 1978, at the age of 73, Kahn founded Kahn Brothers Group in New York with his sons Thomas Graham Kahn and Alan Kahn. The firm has stayed a family operation ever since, with Thomas serving as chairman and president for decades until his death in 2026, and Thomas's son Andrew, on the research team since 2006, now among the executives carrying the work forward. The firm runs a registered investment advisory and a broker-dealer member of the New York Stock Exchange, serving institutional and high-net-worth clients. The investing style descends directly from Graham's original "discount to net asset value" model, evolved into a contrarian value approach: the firm buys solid businesses cheap on a bottom-up reading of their assets and long-term prospects, holds for the very long term, and would rather sit in cash than overpay for an overpriced stock. The Kahns put their own money alongside clients, a habit that reflects a belief shared since Irving's first trade: wait for the margin of safety and let time do the work.
$632.67M
7.0%893.2K shares