Word: cornfeld
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ONETIME poor boy from Brooklyn, 5-ft. 5-in. Bernard Cornfeld causes quite a stir in almost everything he does. Despite the persistent antagonism of conservative European moneymen, some foreign governments and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he has built his Investors Overseas Services into one of the 20th century's great financial empires. Geneva-based I.O.S. has prospered primarily by selling mutual funds outside the U.S., and Cornfeld has proved himself to be a master salesman. Today he manages some $2.2 billion of other people's money, and his personal fortune amounts to about $140 million...
High-Voltage Sales. Cornfeld started I.O.S. 14 years ago as a one-man firm in a Paris flat. Today it has grown into the world's largest financial sales organization, with 16,000 salesmen and 800,000 clients in 110 countries. Despite the natural resistance created by falling stock and mutual-fund prices, the high-voltage organization last year almost doubled its sales, to $3.1 billion. Just under $1 billion in cash flowed into the company's coffers. I.O.S. not only manages eleven mutual funds of its own but has spread into almost every major field of finance...
...Cornfeld always moves fast-critics might say too fast-but during 1969 he toppled his own expansion records. He launched two big new international investment companies, the go-go I.O.S. Venture Fund (assets: $170 million) and Investment Properties International, a real estate development concern that is starting a chain of luxury resort hotels in Jamaica, Mexico and Portugal. He spread into Australia, France and Sweden with "national" mutual funds -funds that invest some or all of their assets in local projects in order to overcome government reluctance to let their citizens send money abroad. Last week, in another precedent-breaking...
Dime a Week. Even as a youngster, Cornfeld showed some of the hustle that has become a major ingredient of I.O.S.'s success. He was born in Istanbul to a Rumanian father and Russian mother, who brought him to the U.S. when he was four. Growing up in Brooklyn during the Depression, with a 10?-a-week allowance. Bernie worked nights and weekends to earn trolley fare to school. Later he attended tuition-free Brooklyn College, where he turned socialist and gathered thousands of signatures on Norman Thomas-for-President petitions in 1948. After taking a master...