Master's Biographies

Irving Kahn

1905 – 2015 · Graham's first assistant · the analyst who lived 109 years

Irving Kahn

He learned value investing from Graham himself — and then practised it for nine decades.

Irving Kahn was Benjamin Graham's teaching assistant at Columbia, helped research the books that founded the discipline, and was among the very first to make securities analysis a profession rather than a guess.

He kept working past his hundredth birthday, running Kahn Brothers with his sons. When he died at one hundred and nine, he was very likely the oldest active investor in the world — a living thread back to the birth of value investing.

1905

Born in New York

Irving Kahn was born in New York City, one of four siblings, into a Manhattan that still ran on horse-drawn carts. He would live to see the city, the markets, and the whole machinery of finance reinvented many times over.

1928

Assistant to Graham

Kahn became Benjamin Graham's teaching assistant in the famous investment course at Columbia Business School — a front-row seat as Graham worked out the ideas that would become Security Analysis. He would help check the figures behind the founding text of the field.

1929

Short before the crash

In his first significant trade, Kahn sold short the shares of a copper-mining company, convinced the boom had outrun reality. The Crash of 1929 proved him right and roughly doubled his stake — a vivid early lesson in the gap between price and value.

1930s

Building a profession

Through the Depression and after, Kahn worked as an analyst when the title barely existed. He was among the founders of the body that became the New York Society of Security Analysts and helped shape the standards that turned analysis into a chartered profession.

1940s–1970s

Decades at the desk

He spent the middle of the century as a working analyst and adviser, riding out wars, booms and busts, never deviating from the Graham creed: insist on a margin of safety, and let the market's moods be your servant rather than your master.

1978

Kahn Brothers

At an age when most men retire, Kahn co-founded the investment firm Kahn Brothers with his sons Thomas and Alan. It became the family's enduring vehicle for patient, deep-value investing — and Irving's office for the rest of his very long life.

1990s–2000s

Still reading the reports

Well into his nineties and beyond, Kahn came to the office, read annual reports, and looked for sound businesses selling below their worth. He distrusted excitement and leverage, and credited his calm — and perhaps his longevity — to never needing to be in a hurry.

Irving Kahn

2015

A century and nine years

Irving Kahn died in 2015 at the age of one hundred and nine, still a chairman of the firm he had built. He had known Graham personally and outlived nearly everyone who came after — the last direct link to the founding of the discipline.

“I'm a Graham-and-Dodd value investor. I look for value, and I have the patience to wait for it.”

— Irving Kahn