Kansas City investor's coffee can strategy aims to build generational wealth

Matthew Ankrum’s pitch to his daughters is not about chasing the next hot trade. It is about buying a few outstanding companies, leaving them alone and letting time do the work, even as child care, housing and debt keep squeezing middle-class family budgets.

The Kansas City, Missouri, financial analyst and portfolio manager is the center of The Coffee Can Investor: A Stock-Picker's Journey to Build Generational Wealth, a 280-page book published in April 2026 by Columbia Business School Publishing, an imprint of Columbia University Press. The story follows Ankrum’s research into so-called 100-baggers, stocks that have multiplied in value 100 times over multiple decades, and the traits those rare winners share.

At the heart of the strategy is a simple but demanding rule: do not touch the stocks for at least 30 years after purchase. The idea is to keep the certificates in a coffee can, a deliberate constraint meant to block short-term tinkering and force investors to think in decades rather than quarters. Ankrum has said the real story behind the book is about patience, and about letting compounding do the heavy lifting.

That long horizon is what gives the project its appeal and its limits. For families trying to build wealth while paying for rent or a mortgage, daycare, college savings and credit card balances, the coffee can approach offers a discipline that is easy to admire and hard to execute. It assumes spare cash that can sit untouched for decades, and it requires the emotional restraint to ignore every market swing along the way.

The book also has a personal dimension. Ankrum wanted to build wealth for his daughters and teach them financial stability. According to the publisher, he is planning to gift his children a coffee can portfolio that could someday be worth half a billion dollars. That figure makes the strategy sound almost mythic, but the mechanics behind it are familiar to any serious long-term investor: identify durable businesses, buy them at reasonable prices and stay invested long enough for compounding to matter.

Former CBS News and Stations president and co-head Neeraj Khemlani co-authored the book after first hearing about Ankrum’s approach. The two met in 1999 and remained friends over the years, turning a long-running personal connection into a book about one of investing’s oldest and most unforgiving lessons: wealth is usually built slowly, and the families most likely to benefit are the ones that can afford to wait.