저자: BillAckman · 외국인
요약 보기
Ackman의 두 가지 저평가 투자 사례 소개: Wendy's의 Tim Hortons 분사로 주가 두 배 상승(가치 숨은 자회사), Chipotle 식품안전 위기 때 매수해 약 9배 수익(일회성 위기로 인한 PE 착시). 핵심은 PE 같은 표면 지표 대신 자산의 독립 가치와 정상화된 장기 이익력을 평가하라는 것. 근거 수치: Wendy's 시총 45억달러, Tim Hortons 영업이익 4.5억달러, Chipotle 2016년 순이익 2,300만달러→2022년 약 9억달러.
다듬은 글
What if you could buy a Ferrari for the price of a Toyota? How do billionaire investors find fortunes hiding in plain sight? Bill Ackman, founder of Pershing Square Capital, a $20 billion hedge fund, has built his career and billions doing exactly that. He looks past lazy Wall Street shortcuts like the PE ratio and finds invisible money that others miss.
The result? Deals that double his money while everyone else is distracted by the wrong numbers. Today we break down Ackman's two favorite hidden value plays, from a burger chain windfall to a bold crisis bet, and what they mean for your investing. First up, listen for how Ackman essentially got Wendy's for free by spotting a hidden gem inside it.
shareholders. So basically the first activist investment of Pershing Square was Wendy's. Uh actually there was an article in Barron's saying how cheap Wendy's stock was and it owned a company called Tim Hortons. And at the time, we bought 10% of Wendy's for a valuation about 4 and 1/2 billion for the whole company.
And they owned 100% of Tim Hortons that generated about 450 million of operating income. We thought Tim Hortons was worth a lot more than all of Wendy's. And our thesis was split the two. And so we bought a stake, called the management, and they wouldn't take our call. Sent an email, they didn't respond.
So I had a friend who worked at Blackstone and I said, you know, would Blackstone do a fairness opinion and in fact what Wendy's would be worth if they spun off Tim Hortons. How did you get Blackstone to take you seriously? Just a friend who worked there, you know, wanted to do business. He was a Blackstone had an investment bank at the time.
And Steve Schwarzman actually signed off on the fairness opinion for Wendy spinning off Tim Hortons, and we mailed it in, filed it in a 13D, and 6 weeks later they split the company. Stock doubled. And that was the beginning of our activist career at Pershing Square. Ackman just revealed a low-risk win.
Wendy's owned Tim Hortons and Tim Hortons alone was worth more than Wendy's entire market cap. Ackman realized he was buying Wendy's burgers for nothing once the coffee and donuts chain's value was counted. So he pushed management to spin off Tim Hortons. Six weeks later, Wendy's stock doubled. Let's run the math like Ackman did.
Wendy's whole company valued at $4.5 billion. Tim Hortons earning $450 million yearly operating profit. Coffee chains typically trade at 15 times earnings. That's $6.7 billion for Tim Hortons alone. Subtract that from Wendy's market cap and the burger business was being valued at negative $2.2 billion.
The market was literally paying Ackman to take Wendy's off their hands. This isn't a one-off fluke. Wall Street routinely undervalues conglomerates because most investors won't bother to do the extra math. One study found that corporate spin-offs beat the overall market by roughly 10% in their first 3 years.
Why? Because once the parts are separated, their true worth shines and forced selling mispricings correct. In the late 2000s, Yahoo stock was so cheap relative to its Alibaba stake that investors joked you could buy all of Yahoo and get the core business for free. What should you watch for? Companies with a hidden gem inside.
A subsidiary or asset that could be worth as much as the entire parent. If the market cap is $5 billion, but one division could IPO at 5 billion on its own, that's a giant neon sign of hidden value.
Now a reality check. Sure, Wendy's stock doubled on the Tim Hortons spin-off, but after Ackman took profits and moved on, Wendy's struggled without its fastest growing arm. The burger business alone initially floundered. Ackman blamed new management, but it does highlight a risk. What if the part you got for free was actually propping up the whole?
This is why it's crucial not to discount assets, but to judge their stand-alone strength. So far, we've seen one way Ackman finds hidden value, digging into the balance sheet. But he has another trick that doesn't involve hidden assets at all. Instead of looking inside a company for value, he looks ahead in time.
He'll buy a stock that looks expensive by conventional metrics because he knows the current numbers lie. Up next, Ackman shares a one-line test for true value. Listen for how he justifies paying 50 times earnings for a company in crisis.
So you've made the point, these are things that aren't easy to replicate. Yes. No one's going to reinvent Amazon anytime soon. That's right. And sometimes you don't buy what's cheap. You think it's a good value, but it doesn't look cheap. Chipotle. Yeah. So Chipotle didn't look cheap. People use kind of a rubric for valuing businesses, right?
The PE ratio. It's kind of a very simple way to think about a business, but a stock can be expensive at 10 times earnings and it can be cheap at 50 times earnings. What matters is not next year's earnings. What matters is the present value of the cash over the life of the business. At the time we bought Chipotle, they had a food safety crisis.
Sales were getting crushed. People thought the company was going out of business and on it didn't look cheap, but if you believed you could change the course of Chipotle's history, fix the food safety issues, it was extremely cheap. And the stock is up, probably ninefold from the time we bought it.
It's amazing. Chipotle's now going into Mexico. Everyone sort of assumed it was from Mexico, but did you catch that? A stock can be cheap at 50 times earnings and expensive at 10 times. That flips your most basic valuation rule in the book. The one your finance professor taught you. The one CNBC flashes on screen.
Ackman's point? Context is everything. Next year's earnings might be temporarily crushed, so a raw PE can lie. In Chipotle's case, the company had just become a punchline. E. coli headlines everywhere. Empty restaurants that used to have lines out the door. Sales plunged, profitability cratered, and the stock's PE ratio shot up because earnings were temporarily tiny.
Most investors ran away, but Ackman ran toward the fire. He looked at Chipotle's long-term earning power, the durable cash this beloved burrito chain could make once the crisis passed. Fast forward and Chipotle fixed the safety issues. Customers came back and Ackman made about nine times his money.
Let's translate that into something concrete. Imagine Tom owns a rental property that usually pulls in $100,000 a year. Until a storm damages the place and this year's profit is only 10,000. If someone values the property at $1 million, its current PE looks like 100 times. Insanely expensive. But Tom knows this was a one-time bad year and rents will bounce back to 100K after repairs.
He's effectively paying 10 times normalized earnings, not 100. Chipotle's situation in 2016 was just like this. Net income plunged to $23 million during the E. coli crisis, but by 2022, after the overhaul, Chipotle earned nearly 900 million. Ackman's buying price was dirt cheap relative to those future earnings.
So how can we spot these situations? Look for a strong business hit by a one-off crisis, something fixable. It could be a scandal, a product recall, a temporary consumer boycott. The key is a durable brand. If earnings are way down and the PE ratio has shot up, ask why. Is it a permanent decline or just a bad year?
If customers still fundamentally love the product, the business might roar back once the issue has resolved. But here's the caution. Not every crisis has a happy ending. Sometimes that earnings power doesn't come back. Maybe the damage to the brand is lasting or management can't execute a fix. If Chipotle hadn't truly overhauled its safety protocols and won back customers, it could have languished or failed.
Ackman mitigated this by actively getting involved. He persuaded Chipotle to bring in a new CEO from Taco Bell, Brian Niccol, known for turning around brands. What we can do is study the problem. Is it fixable? Is it temporary? If yes, you might have an opening to buy a great company when it's on sale due to fear. If not, stay away no matter how cheap it looks.
Bill Ackman's two plays teach a simple lesson. Don't trust surface numbers blindly. Whether it's spotting a hidden asset waiting to be unlocked or recognizing that a crisis has an end, the real skill is valuing a business like a business, not like a stock ticker.
The more you train yourself to find that hidden value, the more you tilt the odds in your favor. So next time you see a stock that looks oddly cheap or pricey, take a page from Ackman's playbook and dig deeper. You might be looking at your own turnaround jackpot.
Now, to keep improving your investing game, check out this video next where investing legend Peter Lynch breaks his retirement silence to help us prepare for the next market crash. I will see you over there.
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