A Nice Little Place In The Sun

You might think the epicenter of the closed-end-fund world lies in lower Manhattan, near Broad and Wall Streets, where most of them trade. Nope. You'll find it instead 13 miles south of Miami in a big, three-story house behind a thick white wall with no sign, not even an address. Inside, past a late-model Cadillac and an orange Corvette, is the workaday lair of Thomas J. Herzfeld, Mr. Closed-End Fund.

Herzfeld personifies these eccentric little investments not just by virtue of his longevity--he has been trading them going on 33 years--but by his ubiquity. One of his firms was the first broker explicitly to focus on closed-ends. Another manages its own closed-end, Herzfeld Caribbean Basin. A third runs private accounts (current minimum: $1 million) while also publishing a newsletter, the closed-end bible. It posts the Herzfeld Closed-End Averages.