Convertible bonds, which can be exchanged for common stock, were Glickenhaus’s investment of choice, and they provided him a fortune early in his life.
AT&T Trade
Throughout 1958, Glickenhaus and his partner, Lawrence Lembo, accumulated a large stake in American Telephone & Telegraph Co. convertible bonds yielding 4.25 percent. They sold the bonds in April 1959 after AT&T split its shares 3-for-1, making their position equivalent to 330,000 shares. At about $85 a share, they sold for about $28 million -- giving them a profit of $8 million before taxes, equivalent to $65 million today.
BusinessWeek magazine reported their coup in a story headlined, “Job’s Done -- $8 Million Killing.” Lembo, then 57, said he planned to spend time traveling. Glickenhaus, then 45, decided it was time to become a doctor.
He completed pre-medical classes at Columbia University, and won admission to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, before choosing to remain in finance.
“The lure of Wall Street was too great,” he said in a 1994 interview.
He formed Glickenhaus & Co. in 1961. The firm began managing assets for clients, including pension funds, in 1974 and had $1.3 billion under management at the start of 2010.
“In the middle of the night, I wake up and I’m thinking of stocks,” he said in 1996, according to the New York Times. “I’m reading newspapers. I’m reading magazines. I’m reading annual statements. We have the world calling us with what they think are cheap stocks. You would not believe the number of companies that have come into this office to make presentations. We are inundated with ideas. Ours is an editing job.”
Seth Morton Glickenhaus was born March 12, 1914, in New York City, the son of an insurance broker. As a teenager he held a summer job as a messenger for Salomon Brothers that ended just two months before the Black Tuesday market crash of 1929.
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