Eduardo Elsztain pores over a graph resembling a cardiogram during a heart attack. It shows how gross domestic product in his native Argentina has gyrated during successive crises over the past decades.
“The worst moments are here and here,” Mr Elsztain, one of Latin America’s leading real estate developers, says. Then he points to the depths plumbed in 2002 and 2008. “Now look what happens in the 12 months after the fall.”
His numbers show the country’s Merval stock index rallied 700 per cent in the years after the 2002 devaluation and 294 per cent after the 2008 financial crisis.
“Argentina has been volatile for 40 years and in every cycle we incorporate more assets,” Mr Elsztain, 60, explains. “So in one it was real estate, in another it was housing, in another it was shopping centres . . . It is about taking advantage of cycles.”
Such acumen helps explain Mr Elsztain’s success in building a multibillion-dollar property and agricultural empire that stretches far beyond Argentina across South America to the US and Israel.
Or as the financier George Soros put it, when asked by the Jerusalem Post why he had given Mr Elsztain $10m to invest in 1990 when the Argentine entrepreneur was barely 30: “He knows when to sell and when to buy.” (Mr Elsztain grew the value of Mr Soros’s cheque several times over).
Despite his prowess in buying and selling, Mr Elsztain is no swaggering trader. Dressed in a black suit and white shirt, with a long white beard and a kippah [skullcap] his style is sober and religious, an impression reinforced by the reverence with which he speaks of his hero, the late Jewish religious leader Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who persuaded him to switch from stock investing to real estate when they met in New York.