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KIRK KAZANJIAN<br />
overlooks the Statue of Liberty. Instead, he and wife Gale are on the<br />
road most of the year, working from one of their three other homes<br />
in Northeast Harbor, Maine, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Jupiter Island,<br />
Florida. All have fully equipped offices, with <strong>com</strong>puters, fax<br />
machines, and Bloomberg stock market information terminals. Davis<br />
has access to First Call earnings estimates, his electronic calendar,<br />
and is increasingly <strong>com</strong>municating with his associates by E-mail. This<br />
way he can keep a constant pulse on the market and stay in regular<br />
contact with Chris, Andrew, and his other analysts and fund managers.<br />
Davis is greeted by the FedEx delivery driver each morning, who<br />
shows up at his door with a package containing brokerage reports<br />
and other research material. When Davis has free time, he spends it<br />
skiing, hiking, fishing, swimming, or sailing in his Hinckley sailboat.<br />
“On a typical day, I’m on the phone with Chris at least five times,”<br />
he says. “I also talk to Andrew once or twice a day, because he more<br />
or less runs his own show, picking the convertibles and researching<br />
real estate. I also have discussions with our five analysts in New York,<br />
to see what they think about the various ideas I throw out to them.<br />
For example, today I was watching my quote machine and noticed<br />
IBM opened down two points. I called and said, ‘Shouldn’t we be<br />
buying more IBM in here? The group’s strong, so let’s pick up more.’”<br />
Now that the next generation is in place, Davis insists he has no<br />
plans ever to sell his firm, even though there are plenty of would-be<br />
acquirers out there. “I manage $7 billion,” he points out. “If my performance<br />
continues at just half the rate it has over the next 30 years,<br />
that number will grow to $140 billion from the magic of <strong>com</strong>pounding<br />
alone. Why should I sell out if this next generation can look forward<br />
to that kind of asset base? I know it sounds preposterous to have<br />
these kinds of expectations, but I have a vision. I was around when<br />
T. Rowe Price was at $1 billion and Fidelity only had $3 billion.”<br />
Today, Price manages $56 billion and Fidelity more than $270 billion<br />
in mutual funds alone.<br />
THE BULLISH SURPRISE<br />
The strength of the 1990s bull market admittedly caught Davis off<br />
guard. When you look back on some of his past writings, you’ll notice<br />
he wasn’t expecting anything even resembling the incredible performance<br />
investors have enjoyed in recent years. In July 1994, he told<br />
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