‘Obscure and Murky’
Klarman said during those days, Price and Heine were active in railroad bonds, which were complex investments. Klarman said it taught him that “the more obscure and murky the security sounds, the higher the chance it will be interesting.”
Under Price’s leadership, the firm grew to more than $17 billion under management by the time he sold it to Franklin Resources in 1996 for more than $600 million. He had an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
His alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, named its business school for Price in recognition of a 1997 gift of $18 million. In 2005, the university dedicated a new learning space at the business school as Michael F. Price Hall.
In a statement on Tuesday, the university’s president, Joseph Harroz Jr., called Price “an extraordinary friend and benefactor.”
“His generosity transformed OU -- both at the College of Business, which bears his name, and all across our campus,” Harroz said. “He has left an indelible impact from which generations of Sooners will benefit. We grieve with the Price family today, but we know that Michael’s remarkable legacy won’t soon be forgotten at OU.”
First Stock
Price was born in 1951 and grew up in Roslyn, on New York’s Long Island.
In an interview for the 1999 book “Investment Gurus: A Road Map to Wealth from the World’s Best Money Managers,” by Peter J. Tanous, Price said he was in junior high school when he bought his first stock, Bandag, through his father’s broker, and watched it almost triple in value.
He said another of his father’s friends got him interested in risk arbitrage, or investing in companies ahead of possible mergers and acquisitions.
“I spent a summer observing a small arbitrage department -- a woman and three guys sitting around two desks joined together with wires to the floor of the stock exchange and proxies on their desks,” he told Tanous. “They were just trading in the stocks of companies that were about to merge, taking advantage of small discrepancies in the price spread between the two companies. I said, here are three guys -- and I knew one of them was making a million dollars a year, and this is the late 60s -- and I said, ‘If these guys can sit on their butts and make a lot of money by reading various things, there’s something to this.’”
After earning a bachelor’s in business administration from Oklahoma in 1973, he joined Heine Securities.
He gave up day-to-day management of Franklin Mutual Advisors in 1998 when he started MFP Investors, primarily to oversee his own fortune. He also ran money for the endowments of Yale University and Middlebury College. He stayed on as chairman and director of Franklin Mutual until 2001.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.