Investing

Months Before The 1929 Crash, Floyd Odlum Quietly Sold Half His Stock Portfolio And Raised $14 Million In Cash. While Other Investors Were Wiped Out, He Spent The Next 6 Years Buying Distressed Companies At Sixty Cents On The Dollar. By 1935 He Was One Of The 10 Richest Men In America.

Most investors in 1929 had no idea the crash was coming, yet one obscure former attorney positioned himself to profit from the wreckage in a way that made him one of the richest people in America before the decade was…

By AJ Tiarsmith
Published October 4, 2026, 12:31pm ET · 2 min read

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A black-and-white photograph shows a man in a suit and bowler hat standing beside an antique car. He is looking down, with one hand near his ear and the other resting on the car's open window. A handmade sign is attached to the windshield, stating: '$100. WILL BUY THIS CAR. MUST HAVE CASH. LOST ALL ON THE STOCK MARKET.' The car is a polished, older model with wire-spoke wheels, parked on a wet street. Other cars and buildings are blurred in the background, suggesting an urban setting.
While some investors like Floyd Odlum were poised to buy, many others faced financial ruin, as depicted by this man forced to sell his car for a meager sum after losing everything in the stock market crash. © Bettmann / Bettmann via Getty Images

In the summer of 1929, Floyd Bostwick Odlum sold off half of Atlas’s holdings and sold $9 million in new securities to investors. Wikipedia reports that when the crash hit, he held $14 million in cash and short-term notes.

Investors who stayed fully invested faced steep losses. Odlum had cash ready to deploy.

A Former Attorney’s Small-Stakes Start

In 1923, Odlum, a former corporate attorney, pooled $39,600 with partner George Howard and their wives to launch the United States Company. By 1925, the fund had grown 17-fold, to about $660,000 to $700,000. By 1928, assets reached $6 million, and Odlum incorporated Atlas Utilities Company to manage them, according to macro-ops.com.

Buying Dollars for Sixty Cents Built the Fortune

After the crash, Odlum bought investment trusts trading below their liquidation value.

An investment trust holds other securities and cash. When panic selling pushes the share price below the value of holdings, a buyer pays less than a dollar for a dollar of assets. Atlas Corporation bought at sixty cents on the dollar across about 22 transactions, according to macro-ops.com.

Arbitrage requires three things: a discount, patience, and cash. The cash came from the pre-crash sale. The returns came from the discount.

The structure remains: closed-end funds still trade at discounts to their net asset value today.

Among America’s Richest During the Depression

By 1933, Odlum ranked among America’s ten wealthiest individuals, with stakes in RKO Studios, Convair, Northeast Airlines, and Bonwit Teller. His controlled assets reached $150 million by 1935, about $2.2 billion in today’s dollars, according to macro-ops.com.

He married pioneering pilot Jackie Cochran in 1936, sold RKO to Howard Hughes in 1948, and died June 17, 1976, at age 84.

This record rests on encyclopedia entries and financial research.

What Transfers From Odlum, and What Stays With Him

macro-ops.com calls him the greatest value investor you’ve never heard of. He was among the country’s richest people during the Depression, yet his name carries little of the recognition his contemporaries’ names do.

Holding cash gives you options, invisible until they matter. Buying assets below their contained value works without a forecast. His timing stays with him. The capital came from a sale whose reasons nobody can piece together. (The bubble playbook has two halves, riding it up and knowing when to step aside, and we covered both in a free handbook here.)

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AJ Tiarsmith

AJ spent 10 years writing about financial markets at The Motley Fool. His coverage centers on technology stocks and the broader macroeconomic trends, from interest rates to geopolitics,  that shape where markets are headed next. AJ is drawn to the stories where big-picture economics and individual companies collide.

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