Seth Glickenhaus, a bond trader turned money manager whose studies of law and medicine failed to lure him away from Wall Street, his professional home for more than eight decades, has died. He was 102.He died Saturday at home in New Rochelle, New York, his daughter, Nancy Glickenhaus, said by telephone. He worked until the day of his death, managing his investments.
Friday afternoon, “at 4:15, I told him the P&L for the day,” his daughter said. “He kept insisting there was some news on some of the shipping stocks.” Later, “he went to bed and he didn’t wake up,” she said.
From his start as a messenger at Salomon Brothers & Hutzler in the run-up to the 1929 stock-market crash, to his stewardship of Glickenhaus & Co. well into his 90s, Glickenhaus witnessed ups and downs that younger colleagues learned about from books. As senior partner and chief investment officer, he reported daily to his firm’s midtown Manhattan office and oversaw four other money managers, including his son, James.
“The thing that keeps me young is coming down here and managing money for my clients and for the firm,” he told CBS News in 2008. “I love the challenge and I love the stress involved. I think that’s what’s kept me alive and kept me at the point where I’m now approaching middle age, at the age of 94.”
Making Change
In October 2012, Glickenhaus & Co. announced it was moving its $900 million in client investments to Neuberger Berman’s Straus Group.
“When you get older, your vision and hearing isn’t what it was, and that makes it tougher to manage money,” said Glickenhaus, then 98.
In bull and bear markets, he took a long view. An avowed value investor, Glickenhaus largely sat out the boom in Internet stocks, losing money in 1998 as Yahoo! Inc. and others surged.
“Sure, it was frustrating,” he said in January 1999. “But people who buy stocks are too interested in how much money they’ll make. That’s stupid. It’s risk-reward we look at.”
In October 2008, during the financial crisis that imperiled banks and sent equity markets plunging, Glickenhaus sounded an optimistic note, predicting “a new boom market” within weeks. His timing was off, his sentiment spot on: a prolonged bull market began four months later, in March 2009.