Missouri father stashes stock certificates in a coffee can for his 3 daughters. He believes leaving them to brew for decades could net $500 million

He calls them “100-baggers”: companies whose share prices multiply a hundredfold or more over time. And he’s been systematically stashing physical stock certificates into a coffee can, with a plan not to touch them for at least 30 years.

“When you actually start thinking about creating a legacy, or kind of generational wealth, for your kids ... you don’t think about it as in quarters or even years,” Ankrum told CBS News. “You start thinking about it in the decades.”

His strategy — now documented in a new book, The Coffee Can Investor, written by former CBS News and Stations president Neeraj Khemlani — rests on a simple idea: identify exceptional companies, buy shares, and resist every impulse to sell. If he picks correctly and lets compounding do its work, Ankrum believes the portfolio could eventually be worth half a billion dollars, he told CBS News.

Origins of the coffee-can investing strategy

The coffee can concept has a long history. It traces back to an experience investment manager Robert Kirby had in the mid-1950s with a client, which he wrote about in a 1984 paper published in The Journal of Portfolio Management.

A client’s husband had followed Kirby’s stock picks, but completely ignored his advice on when to sell — putting $5,000 into each recommended stock, then doing nothing.

When the man died, Kirby found a portfolio that dwarfed the actively managed account: some positions had declined to under $2,000, but several exceeded $100,000 — and one, a small stake in a company called Haloid, which later became Xerox, had grown to over $800,000 — more than the entire value of his wife’s managed portfolio, purely because it was never sold.

The lesson Ankrum drew from that history: Most investors destroy returns by trading too often. The real edge comes from identifying outstanding companies and then doing almost nothing.

“The real story behind the book is about patience, and it’s about actually finding outstanding companies and being able to allow the power of compounding to do the heavy lifting,” Ankrum told CBS News.

Why now, and why this matters

Ankrum’s approach taps into something much broader than personal ambition. The United States is in the midst of what researchers call the Great Wealth Transfer — in which the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers are expected to pass on around $84-$90 trillion to younger generations by 2044.

Yet according to SmartAsset’s analysis of Federal Reserve data, millennials and Gen Zers currently hold only about 10.7% of total U.S. wealth.