Kansas City analyst builds a coffee can stock fund for daughters

Matthew Ankrum is betting that patience can beat almost everything else in investing. The Kansas City financial analyst has been building a stock portfolio for his three daughters, Peyton, Morgan and Pierce, with a goal so large it borders on the surreal: he says it could someday be worth half a billion dollars.

Ankrum’s method is built around “100-baggers,” companies whose shares have multiplied 100 times over multiple decades. He studied what those businesses had in common, then started buying what he believes could become tomorrow’s breakout names. The core of the strategy is compounding, and Ankrum’s rule is simple enough to fit on a shelf: keep the stocks in a coffee can and do not touch them for at least 30 years after purchase.

That long horizon is what makes the idea powerful, and what makes it hard to copy. For families already juggling housing costs, childcare bills and debt payments, setting aside money for three decades is far from automatic. The approach works best for households that can leave capital untouched through layoffs, recessions and every other pressure that pushes people to cash out early. It is a wealth-building plan, but also a test of discipline that many middle-class budgets may not survive.

The strategy drew in Neeraj Khemlani, the former president of CBS News and Stations, who turned it into his first book, The Coffee Can Investor: A Stock-Picker’s Journey to Build Generational Wealth. Published in April 2026 by Columbia Business School Publishing, the 280-page book focuses on long-term investing, compounding and the process Ankrum used to identify potential 100-baggers. The book’s description says many of those rare winners are business-to-business companies, not the consumer brands most investors recognize.

Khemlani and Ankrum met in 1999 and stayed friends. Khemlani said the appeal of the story was following someone making real-time decisions about which stocks deserved a place in the coffee can, and he framed the project as a lesson in financial literacy as much as investing. He has also said the average stock holding period is about five and a half months, a figure that underlines how sharply this strategy runs against market habits.

The book also folds in Khemlani’s own family. He told his twins, Ian and Samantha, about their coffee-can portfolios the day after Thanksgiving in 2024, after learning the idea from Ankrum. For Ankrum, the lesson has always been bigger than stocks. His daughters say they are proud of him for setting them up for success and for the way he shows up in everyday life, from watching Barbie with them to listening to their boy drama and giving them room to choose their own paths. One daughter is studying nursing, a reminder that generational wealth may begin with investing, but family security still depends on more than the market.