Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

ONE-ON-ONE
SHELBY DAVIS
If true investment genius is an inherited trait, the requisite genes
for such brilliance clearly run deep within the Davis family bloodline.
Shelby Davis is a legend in the mutual fund business. Over a 28-year
period, he achieved one of the best and most consistent performance
records in the industry as skipper of the Davis New York Venture
Fund. In 1997, he turned the reins of this fund over to son Christopher,
although he remains actively involved with it. But there is more to
the story. Another Shelby Davis walked onto the investment scene
decades earlier, in the late 1940s to be exact. He’s Shelby’s dad, a
man who turned $100,000 into a fortune now valued at more than
$800 million. He did it primarily by investing in insurance stocks.
SHELBY, SR.
Shelby Cullom Davis Senior was born in Peoria, Illinois, back in
1909. He was a private person, whose dress and demeanor remained
understated even after he amassed his enormous wealth. He earned
an undergraduate degree at Princeton, his master’s at Columbia, and
a Ph.D. at the University of Geneva, all in political science. At Columbia,
he fell in love with another graduate student, Kathryn, a beautiful,
petite blonde woman of German descent from Philadelphia. Although
the two attended the same school in the United States, they actually
met on a train bound from Paris to Geneva during a spring break trip
to Russia. They later studied together at the University of Geneva,
where both earned doctorate degrees. They were married in January
of 1932.
Davis and his wife graduated in the midst of the Great Depression,
when jobs in the United States were hard to come by. He took a job
in Europe working as a radio correspondent for CBS. Davis always
had an affection for good journalism and, as an undergraduate, had
been managing editor of the Princeton University campus newspaper.