저자: BillAckman · 외국인
요약 보기
Ackman은 투자는 독학 가능하며 수동적 자본 확산으로 주주행동주의가 중요하다고 주장. 캐나다퍼시픽(CP) 철도에 지분 14% 확보 후 헌터 해리슨을 CEO로 영입, 16개월 만에 주가 46→151달러(시총 약 8조→25조 수준)로 상승 사례 제시. MBIA 공매도 사례(주가 73→3달러, 약 6~7억 달러 수익)와 JC페니 손실(5억 달러, 자본 4%) 등 과거 사례를 회고. 리더십은 인재 채용, 인센티브, 극단적 솔직함이 핵심이라고 강조.
다듬은 글
You can learn investing by reading books, by reading annual reports. You can have a portfolio and invest $100 and you can learn the business unlike many other businesses which require a lot more. My approach in business, in my personal life, in a management role is extreme cander. And I think it's how you deal with adversity that determines your ultimate success as opposed to how you deal with success that determines your ultimate success.
So I went to business school to learn how to be a good investor. And I learned the first rule of investing, which is you do your due diligence before you wire in your your money. And uh when I got to HBS, I actually opened the course catalog for the first time. And there wasn't a class on investing.
Now, there were classes on accounting. There were classes on finance. So, I decided I had to develop my own little self-study program. And I wanted to uh so I I opened a Fidelity brokerage account. And I said this I had some money I'd made in the real estate brokerage business. This was my tuition uh in the investment business.
And it was about a year of tuition. And if I lost it, it was as if I had gone to business school for you know two years but paid for three. So I figured it wasn't it's like the the inverse of the Oxburg one plus one program. But um and uh you know I the first stock I bought went up and I said okay I found what I want to do.
a little more involved than that. But I I uh actually my father who's here, he he he came with us uh he told me it was a really dumb idea to start an investment fund right out of business school and he recommended that I go work for Michael Steinhard or you know George Soros or one of the other famous investors at the time.
But I figured that I knew enough. This is the the the perils of youth. Um but uh the answer is I was an entrepreneur and uh I felt that I wanted to approach investing my own way as opposed to uh learn from someone else. And it's one of the few things you can really learn on your own. You can learn investing by reading books, by reading annual reports, by having a you can have a portfolio and invest $100 and you can and you can learn the business.
Uh unlike many other businesses which require a lot more uh at least that's what I thought at the time. Um so the vast majority of capital invested in the markets today is passive. So if you think of index funds or ETFs or even the big uh kind of long only institutions the vast majority of that capital is by charter passive.
Passive means you you do your research or in some cases you don't do the research. You sort of just blindly follow an index and you're you judge based on how closely you follow the index. If you think about investing a 100 years ago though, investing, you had Andrew Carnegie owning 20% of US Steel or you had JP Morgan as a as a large owner of various companies over time.
And in the old days of investing, an owner would act like an owner. So if they were unhappy with the performance of the business, they would replace the CEO. If they were unhappy with the board's judgment, they would make changes to the board. And as capitalism sort of democratized the investment process and as any kid in business school can open a brokerage account and as uh in you know the uh the owners of many of these great businesses over time you know gave the shares away to a university or their heirs and the ownership was you know spread out you know the Sam Walton of the world uh kind of passed away and the boards became to be managed by professional owners and so uh what we do is we look for situations where a business has lost its way uh where an otherwise great company with in a in a business that we would define as one that has significant barriers to entry that Warren Buffett would describe as having a mode around it.
A business that is simple, predictable, generates cash, and we can be confident will be here 50 years from now. A good example is we own a stake in Canadian Pacific, which is a a railroad in Canada. Um, and if you think about the railroad business, you know, it's not it's a business where they're not going to build a new one across the street.
you know, you can have absence some fairly dramatic changes in technology, you can be pretty comfortable that, you know, goods will be shipped on rail for a very long time to come. So, we it's a business we can predict. We can think about it from a very long-term perspective. We can buy it at a price that's interesting and in the case of CP, uh, this was the worstrun railroad in North America.
It had the lowest profit margins. It was trading at the lowest valuation relative to earnings and had a very unhappy shareholder base. But there was nothing they could do about it because they were inherently again the biggest investors tend to be very passive. And we saw an opportunity and the opportunity was if you could replace the worst CEO in in uh the railroad industry with the best CEO in the railroad industry, a lot of money could be made.
And we bought uh first 12% of the stock and then another 2% about 14% of the stock. We recruited a guy named Hunter Harrison who is uh widely considered the best railroad executive of all time. You know, certainly in North America. He had retired at 65. He was 66 and a half. He had signed a two-year non-compete with his employer.
And I think the biggest mistake they made was a two-year non-compete because he was running the the other Canadian railroad, Canadian National. And we hired him as a consultant. He helped us study the railroad. And he had plenty of fire in his belly. And we said, "Look, would you be interested in a day job?" And he said, "Let me check with my wife." And she said, "You know what?
it's time to get you out of the house again. And uh my wife says that all the time and and uh we recruited him and then we had to simply put him in place. Now the problem was Can Pacific has one of the most sort of esteemed and illustrious boards in Canada at least at the time and it was the former head of the Royal Bank of Canada, the former CEO of Suncor Energy, the former head of the steel business, you know, it was very very important board and um they didn't like the idea that this idea was coming from outside the company.
So they said no. Um, so we went to the shareholders and we ran an election, you know, proxy contest. We put up seven directors for, uh, seven seats on a 13 seat board. Uh, and the shareholders voted with us, uh, 90% of the time and voted against the other guys, uh, and they got between three and 11% of the vote.
We put our directors on. Uh, we did a review of the best CEOs in the world. Turns out the guy we identified was the best guy. We put him in a CEO. That was 16 months ago. Uh, and it's almost the most profitable railroad in North America after 16 months. That's how quick this guy goes to work. Stocks gone from 46 uh to $151 a share.
You know, a little under eight billion market cap to a $25 billion market cap. That's kind of the perfect example. Now, it doesn't always work that way. So, about uh 11 years ago, uh I came out with a white paper called is MBIA AAA where I questioned the AAA rating of a company called MBIA. I disclosed on page one of that report that I had shorted the stock and bought CDS, a kind of an uh insurance product betting on the company's uh credit deterioration and uh caused a bit of a stir with this paper.
Uh the company did not like the paper uh and they as the largest guarantor of New York State and City Bonds decided they wanted to get back at me and they called up Elliot Spitzer who was the then presiding attorney general in New York and said look there's an evil guy saying that we don't deserve our AAA rating and you know Moody's and S&P say we're AAA.
who is this guy and uh Moody's and S&P would later lose some credibility after this but the this was a 150 to1 levered company uh it was guaranteeing a a whole sort of very risky subprime CDO CDO squared co so on and so forth and it was insolvent uh based on the exposures and a a good analyst digging deeply could determine that um and I came public with this and I was largely ignored and I kept at it because I'm a persistent guy and I made a series of presentations uh I'll see if I remember some of the names of them.
But anyway, so I made a series of presentations and no one was really paying attention. The stock was 73. The the credit the insurance just kept getting cheaper and cheaper, meaning no one believes that we were right. And one day at my last presentation, I said, "Oh, by the way, no one ever believes me on this one." They say, "Well, you're short, so how can we believe you because you're going to profit if it declines." So I sat at at a conference, I said, "Okay, I hereby commit to give away 100% of any personal profit I make from this investment." That was that day was the high for the stock and it went from 73 to $3 a share and the credit protection went from 13 basis points to 2500.
We made a billion6 or $700 million. I personally made $150 million and the $150 million uh seated uh was really the maybe the second or third uh grant but the big grant that created the Purging Square Foundation. So the Oxford uh program is a indirect beneficiary of the failure of MBIA. Um, the key to successful leadership is one, hiring the right people.
Uh, I have the benefit of not inheriting anyone because I hired everyone in the company. I interview every receptionist. I interview every secretary. I interview every investment person. Um, and so I get to pick ultimately everyone that I work with. And that helps leadership a lot because if you hire the key behind leadership, if you hire super talented people, you don't need to do that much leadership because they're going to do the right thing.
Second thing is setting up the incentives correctly. So in Persian Square, everyone is incentivized by how the overall firm does which I think is a good dynamic because it creates uh teamwork. Uh I follow the same extreme uh cander uh approach in uh evaluation evaluating people. Um and I care about everyone I work with uh as I do family members.
So we look out for each other and if someone's going through a difficult health issue or personal issue, uh financial issue or uh you know I have the benefit of having a lot of relationships and whether it's the medical community or in the uh business community or or in the political community and so we we help our people and uh we don't tolerate uh insincerity.
Uh I you know people are encouraged to admit their mistakes immediately uh before they figure out a solution to the problem. So my when when I hired my CFO um in the first year of working with him, he would approach me with a mistake he had made after he had figured out how to solve the problem. And I would get angry with him every time.
I said, "No, no, I don't want to hear about the mistake after you figured out the solution. I want to hear the mistake now and then we can work together on solving the problem." So I think if you have an organization where people very quickly admit mistakes um and where you're candid with them and they're not punished for making a mistake um that is a very good uh uh dynamic and uh it's worked very well.
We have almost no turnover even in the reception desk at Purging Square um and and that's worked uh it's been a good model. I think you have to uh you know you have to set an example uh in terms of the way you live in terms of the way you behave because that affects how other people uh will watch you.
So my other key success factor for being a leader in the 21st century in the era of everyone having a video camera on their cell phone is assume that everything you're doing is being videoed and recorded uh at all times and that will you know and consider that the video ends up as a top video on on YouTube and then adjust your behavior accordingly.
So fair, [snorts] you know, my approach in business, in my personal life, in a management role is extreme cander. And I think that, um, if you live that way, um, you know, you'll run the risk of offending various people over time. Um, but you'll have much better relationships because, um, you know, if you tell people the truth, first of all, it's not typical.
You know, a lot of people uh in the interest of politeness or fear of confrontation or it's just uncomfortable don't speak the truth. And that goes for people on boards. You know, there are lots of examples of super talented people sitting around the room as an institution is failing. Think of all the the banks during the crisis where people were not willing to confront the CEO.
So, I'm willing to confront the CEO. Uh and uh but I'm completely candid with him about his successes and his failures. I'm failure just for a second. I don't know. There are very few people uh you look at the most successful people in the world. I I know very few of them that haven't had a major failure.
You know, if you read through the uh they're not the financially most successful people. If you read through the Forbes billionaire list and you read their stories, you know, they've had failed businesses and they've lost everything and they've hung on the you know, they've almost died holding on to the ledge.
You know, what's his name? Uh some Redstone. Redstone. Yeah. Um, so there are lots of examples of people who had huge adversity. And I think it's how you deal with adversity that determines your ultimate success as opposed to how you deal with success that determines your ultimate success. So, so that's one of the things I've learned.
Good lesson from C. Penney and otherwise. Okay. You know, every day, you know, in over the course of your existence, you make various mistakes, whether it's socially or whether it's in business. Um, but the ones you really remember are kind of the bigger ones. So, the J C Penney one certainly got a lot of uh, you know, the problem with our strategies.
were very concentrated. We managed 11 or 12 billions of capital. So when we make a mistake, it's going to be really big, right? The numbers are, you know, we lost $500 million on J C Penney. Well, that was 4% of our capital. Now, that that sounds a little smaller, but that's not how the press is going to present it.
But it's very very helpful to have mistakes that you notice. Um, and so I wouldn't run around engineering mistakes. What I would do instead is be ve, you know, is to uh value them, right? Right? I think the natural tendency when you make a mistake is to try to forget it as quickly as possible when the uh what you should do is the opposite.
Uh you should study it and you know business schools you know the case method is largely about that. Uh a lot of cases are you know what should you do in light of a failure or a mistake. Uh and that's why it's um the best kind of mistakes are ones that you can practice with you know theoretically. Um, but the ones you really really learn are the ones where you feel, you know, something in your stomach or in your wallet or some combination of the two.
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