Jack dreyfuss biography

Dreyfus, who has been described as a jack of all trades, was.
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John J. Dreyfus Jr. (August 28, 1913 – March 27, 2009) was an American financial expert and the founder of the Dreyfus Funds.

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Market Meditations

Jack Dreyfus (1913 – 2009) is a market legend who headed a mutual fund which outperformed all other mutual funds by a large margin for the 12 years Dreyfus was in charge. In 1995, Jack authored an autobiography which profiled his life including his Wall Street experience and related accomplishments. Several of his thoughts on success in markets are shared in the book and echo commentary from other market legends. As such, this post shares some of those comments below as they may be worth consideration in your own process.

Before moving to the commentary, a few points deserve mention:

First, when Dreyfus retired, he hired Howard Stein as his replacement. Howard Stein in turn hired a young Stan Druckenmiller in the 1980s to run funds for Dreyfus. If you read the commentary below and compare it to Stan Druckenmiller’s approach, similarities emerge. The similarities in method combined with the related and respective success of Dreyfus and Druckenmiller indicate these methods are worth exploring.

Second, another big market success, William O’Neil, studie

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Jack Dreyfus was born in 1913 in Montgomery, Alabama. After graduating from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania he worked on Wall Street in relatively junior positions until a friend loaned him the money to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. His brokerage boomed, boosted by aggressive advertising, and in 1951 he took over the small Nesbett Fund, changing its name to Dreyfus. He ran it until 1965, before selling in 1970. He died in 2009 at the age of 95.

What was his strategy?

Dreyfus was a market timer and adopted a "contrarian" strategy that put the majority of his funds' assets into stocks during times of great pessimism and converted money into cash during times of great optimism.

Did this work?

Between 1953 and 1964 the Dreyfus fund returned a total of 604% (19.4% a year), compared with 346% (14.6%) for the Dow. Not only was it the best-performing mutual fund, but its returns were 102% higher than the fund that came in second place. He retired in 1970 with a personal fortune that was estimated at $100m (around $610m in today's money).

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Jack Dreyfus dies at 95; ‘lion of Wall Street’ founded the Dreyfus Fund

Jack Dreyfus, the pioneering money manager who built one of the largest mutual fund investment firms in the country, died Friday. He was 95.

Dreyfus died at New York Presbyterian Weill-Cornell Medical Center, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The cause of his death wasn’t immediately known, but he had been ill for some time, said Arnold Friedman, treasurer of the Dreyfus Charitable Foundation, the financier’s philanthropy.

As the creator of the Dreyfus Fund and its parent Dreyfus Corp., Dreyfus built one of the first mutual fund firms to actively court everyday individuals rather than just professional financiers and institutions.

The fund’s lion symbol -- introduced in a cheeky ad that showed the big cat striding out of a subway station and down Wall Street -- became a familiar mark of success and power to generations of Americans.

During the 12 years he ran the Dreyfus Fund, it returned 604% -- more than 100 percentage points better than its closest competitor, according to a 2004 Investor’s Business Daily