February 15, 2013
>David Einhorn’s latest 13D filing shows that he loaded up on shares of Apple – raising his stake by 50% – just before bringing a lawsuit demanding some kind of convoluted preferred dividend scheme. I must have had the abridged version of Graham and Dodd because I can’t remember the chapter in ‘Security Analysis’ that teaches Lawyer Selection in value investing.
Actually it’s in Chapter XLIV. The 1940 Edition.
April 18, 2012
His favorite investment right now is natural gas. He says it’s like buying gold in 1997….
Buy stocks when they’re in the single digit PE range.
QE3 is already underway in operation twist.
Still worried about the national debt….
Europe remains the biggest risk to the equity markets.
The biggest risk to his funds and outlook is surging interest rates.
The Fed won’t raise rates unless inflation kicks up further.
Believes rates will remain low to stable.
April 4, 2010
If you’ve ever thought about trying to open a Hedge Fund, and why not if you have a good track record, here are some of the factors Hedge Fund investors look for.
March 11, 2010
1. Carlos Slim ~ $53.5b
2. Bill Gates ~ $53b
3. Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway ~ $47b
35. George Soros of Soros Fund Management ~ $14b
45. John Paulson of Paulson & Co ~ $12b
59. Carl Icahn of Icahn Partners ~ $10.5b
80. Jim Simons of RenTec ~ $8.5b
113. Steven Cohen of SAC Capital ~ $6.4b
171. Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone Group ~ $4.7b
212. Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates ~ $4.0b
212. Daniel, Dirk & Robert Ziff of Och-Ziff ~ $4.0b
258. Bruce Kovner of Caxton Associates ~ $3.5b
258. David Tepper of Appaloosa Management ~ $3.5b
287. Daniel Och of Och-Ziff ~ $3.3b
297. Paul Tudor Jones of Tudor Investment Corp ~ $3.2b
316. Eddie Lampert of RBS Partners ~ $3.0b
374. David Shaw of DE Shaw Group ~ $2.5b
437. Julian Robertson of Tiger Management ~ $2.2b
488. Philip Falcone of Harbinger Capital Partners ~ $2.0b
488. Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group ~ $2.0b
488. Bill Gross of PIMCO ~ $2.0b
582. Izzy Englander of Millennium Partners ~ $1.7b
582. Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway ~ $1.7b
655. Stephen Mandel of Lone Pine Capital ~ $1.5b
655. Louis Bacon of Moore Capital Management ~ $1.5b
655. Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors ~ $1.5b
721. Marc Lasry of Avenue Capital ~ $1.4b
828. Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital ~ $1.2b
880. Nelson Peltz of Trian Partners ~ $1.1b
880. T. Boone Pickens of BP Capital ~ $1.1b
February 5, 2010
From The Economist
SELDOM has a school of thought fallen from grace as fast as that of “efficient markets”, the concept that asset prices already reflect all available information. Yet despite the crisis, the ideas of the Chicago School are still at the centre of a row over the management of the world’s second-largest sovereign-wealth fund.
The Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, which is more commonly known as Norway’s petroleum fund, looks after some 2.6 trillion Norwegian krone ($444 billion) in savings from royalties on the country’s oil and gas reserves in the North Sea. The fund, which Norway is saving for a rainy day, is already about the size of the national economy and will probably double within about a decade.
For most of the past ten years it has hummed along happily. As Europe’s largest shareholder it has taken its ownership responsibility to heart with typical Nordic earnestness. It regularly writes letters to companies urging them to improve their corporate governance. It also blacklists firms that it thinks are not well-behaved. Among them are tobacco companies and arms producers.
In the years before the crisis, making the world a nicer place was not at odds with making money. The fund comfortably beat the investment benchmarks set for it by Norway’s government. But that all came to a crashing halt in 2008, when the fund’s value slumped by almost a quarter; its equity holdings dropped by around 40%. The absolute fall was no worse than those of many other large investors, yet it prompted soul-searching in Norway. This was partly because losses were far larger than expected for what was thought to be a low-risk investment strategy, and partly because the fund had made some ill-timed bets on banks, including Lehman Brothers.
Shocked, the government asked for a review of the fund’s active-management approach by Mercer, a consultancy, and for a report by three business-school academics—Andrew Ang, William Goetzmann and Stephen Schaefer from Columbia, Yale and London respectively. The three professors found that for all their stock-picking and do-gooding, the fund’s managers could just as well have thrown darts at a board. Taking the crash into account, the oil fund’s performance was essentially indistinguishable from that of a passively managed index fund. “The evidence points to the fact that over time, managers do not provide extra profits,” says Espen Sirnes of the University of Tromso.
How then did the fund manage to beat its benchmarks before the crisis? The professors argue that this was not because of clever share selection but because it took on extra risk by, for instance, investing in securities that are not easily traded or buying bonds of companies that might go bankrupt. They argue that instead of trying to beat the markets, the government should simply have the fund track an index tweaked to take on a bit more risk because of its very long investment horizon.
The fund’s managers have fired back with a 96-page rebuttal of passive investing. Among other things, they say that only fools would buy corporate bonds based on nothing more than their credit ratings. The fund bounced back sharply in 2009, posting a 22% gain in the first nine months of the year. That should help their cause when the Norwegian parliament debates the issue in the spring.
October 19, 2008
Year…………..P/E start/Finish……Inflation start/finish…..%gain in +…..%gain in -…..End
1901-1920……..23………5…………….[-2%]……..16%………………30%………[-17%]……….2%
1921-1928……..5……….22…………..[-11%]……[-2%]……………..24%………[-2%]………317%
1929-1932…….28………8……………….0%……..[-10%]…………..0%………..[-34%]…….[-80%]
1933-1936…….11……..19……………[-5%]……….1%…………….34%………….0%………..200%
1937-1941…….19……..12……………..4%…………5%…………….28%………[-16%]…….[-38%]
1942-1965…….9………23……………..11%………..2%……………..16%………[-8%]………774%
1966-1981……21……..9……………….3%…………10%……………13%………[-15%]…….[-10%]
1982-1999……7………42……………….6%…………2%……………..18%………[-4%]……..1214%
2000-2008…..42……..19………………3%…………5%………………………………………….[-37%]
What can easily be discerned is that for the market as a whole, starting P/E’s have historically been reliable indicators of likely returns to be enjoyed from buying the market and holding.
Currently, at a P/E of 19, the market is historically expensive, and would not be indicitive of attractive returns going forward. Rather, poor returns going forward would be the historical expectation.
All the various ratios provide similar metrics, dividend yields, book values, Q ratios, all tell a similar story, that this market is likely for a buy and hold strategy, to yield sub-par returns.
