Jul 26, 2026
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In his kitchen, a U.S. financial analyst is building something bigger than a college fund. Matthew Ankrum wants to hand his three daughters a fortune they’ll never have to work for, and he’s convinced the trick is doing almost nothing at all.
For years, Ankrum has hunted for what he calls “100-baggers”: companies whose share prices multiply a hundredfold or more over decades. Rather than parking his picks in an ordinary brokerage account, he’s been slipping the physical stock certificates into an old coffee can, with a plan to leave them untouched for at least 30 years. If he’s picked correctly and compounding does the rest, he believes the stash could eventually be worth as much as US$500 million (~C$700 million).
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Asked what changed his thinking, Ankrum said that the moment he started planning for his daughters’ futures, his own time horizon stretched out: “You start thinking about it in the decades.” That mindset is now the subject of a new book, The Coffee Can Investor, written by Neeraj Khemlani, the former president of CBS News and Stations. Khemlani, a longtime friend of Ankrum’s, became fascinated watching the strategy unfold in real time and decided the story was worth telling. He argues that the coffee can is really designed to hand the three girls something no lump sum can buy: The freedom to change their minds later without financial consequence.
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Origins of the coffee-can strategy
This idea is decades older than Ankrum’s daughters. It traces back to an experience investment manager Robert Kirby had with a client in the mid-1950s, which he wrote about in a 1984 paper for the Journal of Portfolio Management.
A client’s husband had followed Kirby’s stock recommendations but ignored his advice on when to sell. Instead, he put about US$5,000 (~C$7,000) into each pick and filed the certificate away. When the man died years later, Kirby found a portfolio that dwarfed the actively managed account it was meant to mirror. Some positions had shrunk to under US$2,000 (~C$2,800), but several had grown past US$100,000 (~C$140,000) — and one small stake, in a company called Haloid that later became Xerox, had ballooned to more than US$800,000 (~C$1.1 million), worth more on its own than the professionally managed portfolio Kirby had built for the man’s wife.
The takeaway Kirby drew, and the one Ankrum has built his own approach around, is that investors tend to destroy their own returns by trading too often. The edge comes from investors picking outstanding companies, then getting out of their own way and letting the magic happen.
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Why this is landing at a significant time for Canadians
The instinct to think in decades rather than quarters is arriving at a loaded moment for Canadian households. Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada estimates that more than $1 trillion will move from baby boomers to their Gen X and millennial children between 2023 and 2026 alone, with other estimates putting the full transfer as high as $2 trillion over the next two decades.
Yet the generation set to inherit most of that wealth is starting from a thin base. Despite making up the largest share of Canada’s labour force, millennials hold only 10% of the country’s total wealth, while baby boomers control almost half, according to TD Asset Management. Plenty of younger Canadians also aren’t using the tools already sitting in their own accounts: a 2025 TD survey found that 41% of Gen Z and millennial Canadians who hold a Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA) aren’t investing the money inside it at all, leaving it parked in cash.
That’s precisely the gap a coffee-can mindset is built to close. It isn’t really a stock-picking strategy — it’s a patience strategy, and patience is available to anyone with an open account.
What a coffee-can strategy looks like north of the border
Few Canadian investors will ever hold an actual paper stock certificate anymore. Most shares in Canada are now held electronically, either in a brokerage’s “street name” through the Canadian Depository for Securities, or registered directly in an investor’s own name through the Direct Registration System offered by a company’s transfer agent. The paper itself was never really the point. What matters is the account the shares sit in, and in Canada, that choice can matter as much as the stock picks themselves.
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A parent building a coffee can for their own kids also has options. Contributions to a Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP) earn a 20% top-up from the federal Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG), worth up to $500 a year and $7,200 over a child’s lifetime — a guaranteed return before a single dollar is even invested. For money meant to stay invested for 30 years rather than fund tuition, a TFSA offers something Ankrum’s actual coffee can can’t: shares bought, held for decades and eventually sold or passed on without a cent of capital gains tax owing, since all growth inside a TFSA stays tax-free.
Outside a registered account, the tax treatment is still relatively forgiving. Canada’s capital gains inclusion rate sits at 50% — meaning only half of any gain gets added to taxable income and taxed at the investor’s marginal rate.
The human side of the strategy
What Ankrum is really building, by his own account, isn’t a stock portfolio so much as a set of open doors. One daughter is currently drawn to nursing, but he’s said that she may feel differently in a decade — and he wants the freedom for her to change course by the time she needs the funds.
That flexibility, more than any single 100-bagger, is the actual point. The coffee can is just how he’s funding it.
Lessons for Canadian families
Building a coffee can of your own doesn’t require a book deal or a lucky stock pick. A few takeaways translate directly:
- Open the account before you pick the stock. An RESP’s 20% government match, or years of tax-free room inside a TFSA, do more more for a child’s long-term wealth than any single stock chosen inside it.
- Decide what you won’t sell. Kirby’s 1984 discovery wasn’t about which stock to buy — it was that the client who traded the least ended up with the most.
- Treat patience itself as the strategy. A holding period measured in decades is available to any Canadian investor with a TFSA or RESP already open — no coffee can necessary.
- Know the tax bill before you need it. Because TFSA growth is entirely tax-free, and only half of capital gains outside a registered account are taxable, the account a stock sits in can matter as much as the stock itself.
-With files from Melanie Huddart
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With a writing and editing career spanning over 15 years, Emma creates and refines content across a broad spectrum of industries, including personal finance, lifestyle, travel, health & wellness, real estate, beauty & fitness and B2B/SaaS/tech.
