As head of CBS News, Neeraj Khemrani continued to look for stories that would interest a large audience. Although he left more than two years ago, he hasn’t given up on the search.
Mr. Khemrani, a former “60 Minutes” producer and former executive at Yahoo and Hearst, believes he has found a story that most people will find appealing: a surefire way to make money. However, this is a get rich slowly plan and requires patience and discipline.
In his new book, The Coffee Can Investor, published by Columbia Business School, Khemlani analyzes the investment strategies of people he’s known for decades. Matt Ankrum is a Midwest investor who focuses on “100 baggers,” or stocks that increase in value by 100 times in a few decades. Ankrum studies financial mysteries such as the Journal of Portfolio Management and looks for stocks that should increase in value over the long term, rather than sexy high flyers. Mr. Khemrani had long talked with Mr. Ankrum about his background on financial market movements, but when he heard that the investor was going to create a “coffee tin” 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 wanted to hear.
“The discipline to do this is real, but it becomes much easier when you hear these stories and see people who have done it in the past succeeding,” the author said in a recent interview. To make things even more interesting, Khemlani brings her own family into the story and starts making canned coffee for them as well.
He hopes his story of patient and hard-working investing resonates with the growing community of individual investors. The group “moves the market, buys the market, pushes the market up,” he says, and “it’s only going to get bigger. More and more money is going into 401Ks.” Despite this, they found statistics showing that the average holding period for stocks is only five and a half months, and that the average American retirees with a nest egg of $300,000 to $400,000. So he and Ankrum felt they needed to share their research with a wider audience and “talk about the fundamentals of value investing.”
Readers may be surprised to learn that many of the stocks chosen for Ankrum coffee cans are from B2B companies. Khemrani was not like that. During his time at Hearst, he saw the company, known for supporting magazines, newspapers and television networks such as ESPN and Lifetime, focus more on lending to business-to-business companies such as Fitch Group and QGenda. He felt that Ankrum was after something on the open market. One option is diagnostics maker Bio-Techne. Another company is Fastenal, a manufacturer and distributor of industrial fasteners, tools, and equipment. Anyone looking for the next Nvidia, Alphabet, or Apple may want to look elsewhere.
Khemrani was inspired by legendary investor Jim Rogers’ memoir “Investment Biker.” This memoir tells readers about his 22-month motorcycle journey through 52 countries and his thoughts on the global market. “The idea of taking another step in the investment adventure was an interesting thought for me: why not find someone who has really interesting research or really interesting methods that have proven success over time?” he asks.
He thinks readers will be hungry for more “investing adventures” where they can see people “doing some serious sweat” by following a strategy and sticking to their research and unique methods. Now that he has offered the world the chance to amass a fortune, real or imagined, in a coffee can, Khemrani is starting a new project, seeking to find others who can do the same in real estate.
