Keynes, the investor

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/your-money/john-maynard-keyness-own-portfolio-not-too-dismal.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1

"In addition to focusing on bargain-priced small and midsize stocks, Keynes carefully evaluated managements. Could they prosper long term? Did they have a plan for when the economy turned around? “I get more and more convinced that the right method in investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes,” Keynes wrote in 1934.

Shades of Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett, and the whole school of value investing. Keynes also loved dividend payers, some of which were paying up to 6 percent during the deflationary 1930s. His portfolios were full of old-line companies in mining, railroads and shipping. Although they were perhaps boring and suspect choices at the time, he bought more shares when they became cheaper and predicted they would be worth more when the general economy recovered.

Ultimately, Keynes was vindicated, building wealth for all of his institutional clients, and he built a personal fortune worth more than $30 million in 2013 dollars at the time of his death, which did not include a tally of his extensive collection of artwork and rare manuscripts. Keynes was not only an investment innovator, but one of the richest economists ever."