In his kitchen, Matthew Ankrum is building a college fund. But he hopes he will eventually cook up generational wealth.

The Kansas City, Mo. financial analyst and father of three daughters has spent years hunting for the kinds of stocks that don't just grow, but compound into life-altering wealth over decades.

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He calls them "100-baggers (1)": companies whose share prices multiply a hundredfold or more over time. And he's been systematically stashing physical stock certificates into a coffee can, with a plan not to touch them for at least 30 years.

"When you actually start thinking about creating a legacy, or kind of generational wealth, for your kids ... you don't think about it as in quarters or even years," Ankrum told CBS News. "You start thinking about it in the decades."

His strategy — now documented in a new book, The Coffee Can Investor, written by former CBS News and Stations president Neeraj Khemlani (2) — rests on a simple idea: identify exceptional companies, buy shares, and resist every impulse to sell. If he picks correctly and lets compounding do its work, Ankrum believes the portfolio could eventually be worth half a billion dollars (3), he told CBS News.

The coffee can concept has a long history. It traces back to an experience investment manager Robert Kirby had in the mid-1950s with a client, which he wrote about in a 1984 paper published in The Journal of Portfolio Management.

A client's husband had followed Kirby's stock picks, but completely ignored his advice on when to sell — putting $5,000 into each recommended stock, then doing nothing (4).

When the man died, Kirby found a portfolio that dwarfed the actively managed account: some positions had declined to under $2,000, but several exceeded $100,000 — and one, a small stake in a company called Haloid, which later became Xerox (5), had grown to over $800,000 — more than the entire value of his wife's managed portfolio, purely because it was never sold (6).

The lesson Ankrum drew from that history: Most investors destroy returns by trading too often. The real edge comes from identifying outstanding companies and then doing almost nothing.

"The real story behind the book is about patience, and it's about actually finding outstanding companies and being able to allow the power of compounding to do the heavy lifting," Ankrum told CBS News.

Ankrum's approach taps into something much broader than personal ambition. The United States is in the midst of what researchers call the Great Wealth Transfer — (7)in which the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers are expected to pass on around $84-$90 trillion to younger generations by 2044 (7).

Yet according to SmartAsset's analysis of Federal Reserve data, millennials and Gen Zers currently hold only about 10.7% of total U.S. wealth (8).

That gap is part of what drives parents like Ankrum to think in multi-decade time horizons. A survey by Fidelity arm ipx1031 found that 80% of Americans wish they had started investing earlier, and that the average American doesn't make their first investment until age 27 (9).

Ankrum's daughters have a strong head start.

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Khemlani, who first heard about Ankrum's approach through their decades-old friendship, told CBS News he was immediately captivated: "Following someone who is, in real-time, making decisions on which stocks to put into a coffee can for his daughters was riveting. That's the ultimate lottery ticket, and I knew I had to write his story and his family's story (3)."

Above all, the coffee can is designed to give the girls something money can't buy outright: options.

"Today, (my daughter) loves nursing," Ankrum told CBS News. "But at some point in the future, she might decide that she wants to do something different."

That flexibility and ability to change course without financial pressure are ultimately what Ankrum is building toward. The coffee can just happens to be how he's paying for it.

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Yahoo Finance (1); Neeraj Khemlani (2); CBS News (3); Rationalwalk (4), (6); Plindia (5); KTVZ(7); Smart Asset (8); Ipx1031 (9)

This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Missouri dad stashes stocks in a coffee can for his 3 daughters. He says with time, they'll grow to $500 million

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