저자: BillAckman · 외국인
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Ackman는 AI가 많은 투자 전략의 수명을 짧게 만들어, 장기 투자자에게 기회를 만들어 줄 것이라고 말합니다. 그는 여전히 이스라엘과 텔아비브 증권거래소(Tel Aviv Stock Exchange)에 강세 입장이며, 해당 거래소 지분 5%를 매입했다고 밝히면서 밸류에이션이 싸다고 봅니다. 또한 Meta가 매우 저평가되어 있다고 생각합니다. Pershing Square는 영구 자본(permanent capital) 체제로 전환하고 있으며, 여기에는 IPO, 40 Act 구조, Howard Hughes/Vantage 보험 계획이 포함되는데, 이는 Berkshire의 구조와 유사하다고 설명합니다. 인덱스 펀드의 시가총액 가중 방식은 결국 터무니없는 결과로 이어질 수 있지만, 개별 장기 투자자는 여전히 우위를 갖고 있다고 봅니다. 마지막으로 이란과의 분쟁이 수개월 내에 해결되어 평화 배당(peace dividend)과 아브라함 협정(Abraham Accords) 확대로 이어질 것으로 기대한다고 밝혔습니다.
다듬은 글
We we now have somebody who needs no introduction, so I'm not going to give him an introduction. I give you Bill Ackman. The one and only. I've no I've no idea what Bill's going to talk about, but great to see you. Thank you. Uh he's I I'll just say this. Brian is Brian uh Bill has been a great support from a distance in all sorts of ways.
He's an amazing human being on a personal level. You know him in publicly, but he is privately as well, and we can go into that at another time, Bill. Thanks so much. So actually I I have only unprepared remarks. Um so what I'd rather do instead of say stuff is maybe just answer anything that you guys find interesting.
So we allowed to do that? Yeah, that's Okay. even better. So just I have no questions for him. Line up in front of the mics. Yeah. Who wants to be first question? And you can cold call as well, Bill. Ask me anything. Hearing no questions, I'll No. No. Thanks. Hi. Um thanks so much for putting this on, and my question's regarding AI.
If it starts making research breakthroughs on like physics, science, do you think it's going to replace investment management like to 99% or what are your thoughts? So I I think the Citadels, the Millenniums, uh I think that AI is going to make a lot of investing strategies more and more short-term.
Almost like an arms race where, you know, company files a 10K, and the AI can read it and come to a conclusion faster than anyone else. Who's got the fastest model to analyze and come up with a conclusion? That and they'll put a trade in on the basis of that. Um the two biggest forces in markets right now are indexation, right?
I don't know if that is half the company, but some you know, meaningful percentage of companies are getting the float is being taken out of the market by index funds. And the other big force are the sort of pod shops, Millennium and others. Incredibly short-term, you know, they have individual teams, very high compensation, very tight risk limits, which basically means stop loss type sort of structures.
And the effect of those, the float shrinking, and more and more short-term money, and then AI is going to do the same actually presents very good opportunities for probably most of the people in this room if you're kind of if you have a horizon that's longer than a minute, you know, if if you have a horizon if you can take a multi-year view, some really great companies are going to become available at stupidly cheap prices because of some short-term piece of information that anticipates that the stock will go down and you have a whole bunch of people following along.
So, I think AI is is a great research tool. I think the way it's going to be used in markets is going to be used for the kind of very short-term insights. You know, if you think about, you know, Citadel, there're always these stories about, you know, locating the the server within, you know, shortest distance possible with the fastest, you know, fiber, if you will, close to the exchange so they can have a a slight edge over the competition.
So, I think that's where AI I think is a more useful or where where a lot of and they're going to have the resources, you know, just to be the third largest customer or whatever of of Google. But I think the kind of long-term patient investor, I think more opportunities will present themselves. The other thing I would say, AI is at least at this point is about understanding everything in the past and on the basis of that perhaps predicting the future.
And that relies on you know, I think creativity is basically doing stuff that has never happened before. When I look at Pershing Square, many of our most successful investments transactions were things that had never happened before. You know, going short the credit of a triple A rated company, you know, buying the stock of a company going bankrupt.
You know, they're two of our most successful investments, but it hadn't happened before we did it. Now, we just did an IPO, we did it in a completely unique way. I mean, the AI wouldn't have told you to give a gift to IPO investor with their purchase cuz it hadn't happened before. So, I think there's still room for for human creativity.
So, I think AI is more like an accelerant. Um but I think I think there's still room for us for now. Thank you. Yes. Uh practical question. You hold the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and the pricing is rather high. How do you How do you see it now? So, uh the question is I own I own a stake in the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and you think the the the price is higher or the valuation is high?
The valuation. Ah. So, um a couple months after October 7th, uh the management team of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, I got a call from Rich Handler of Jefferies. He says, "Bill, you have to meet this team." I said, "Tell me about it." He says, "Tel Aviv Stock Exchange." I said, "Well, we we actually haven't invested in Israel before." He says, "Just take a look at this." He says, "Well, how big is the investment?" He says, "The most you can invest is 25 million." I said, "It's just hard in the context of Pershing Square to make a $25 million investment." He says, "Bill, take the meeting." Fine.
Met these guys and I thought, "Wow, this is pretty interesting." Uh the problem is that it was too small for Pershing Square. But I pitched the team and the team said, "Bill, we can't make a $25 million investment cuz it's going to take time and energy. Doesn't fit into a $12 stock portfolio and $20 billion of assets." Uh so, I uh I said, "You know what?
I want to be supportive of Israel. Uh what better way I had been supportive philanthropically. Uh what better way to be supportive actually with support capitalism in Israel. Investing in exchange." And so, I'm going to make this investment. I did The only due diligence I did is I met the team. And I I had to get approval from my compliance officer and she said, "You know, it's not a it's not a competitive threat to Pershing Square." So, I bought 5% with my wife of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
But, part of the theory and is I'm very bullish on Israel from an economic perspective. What is Israel? It's like Silicon Valley. Imagine if Silicon Valley was a country. That's what Israel is. Okay, you have this incredible density of talent and IP and IQ in a very small country. And you have now a generation of 24, 25, 28-year-old people that went through a pretty brutal war.
Right? What what happens when you go through that and you survive it, you develop grit. And also, the Israeli military is very technologically uh savvy. They have all these different divisions. All the top venture capital firms have opened offices uh in Israel. And um what the mistake Israeli entrepreneurs used to make was they would sell their companies, you know, when Google showed up and offered a hundred million or two hundred million.
Now, Waze sold for 32 billion. So, the entrepreneurs realize now we can build big companies there. So, I think you're going to see trillion-dollar company come out of Israel in the not-too-distant future. It'll probably be an AI company or a cybersecurity company. And the value of that company will and be amortized over this relatively you know, small economy, which means it's one of the best economies in the world.
And so, owning a piece of a stock exchange is like owning a royalty on on the success of capitalism in a country. Um so, I'm very bullish on Israel. And if you want a a good way to make that bet is to own a piece of the exchange. And I think it's cheap. The value of something is not A lot of people say something's expensive based on it's trading at a multiple of X versus current earnings.
What value of financial asset is the present value of the cash the business generates over its life. And I think the Israeli economy's going to grow, the number of companies that are going to list in the exchange is going to grow, uh and the exchange itself is structured as like almost like a mutual, and it charge below market fees versus all the other exchanges around the world.
Those prices will come up. It's And exchanges are inherently monopolistic kind of businesses. So, I I I I wouldn't go short. Okay, next next line. Ah, the back. Yes. Hey hey Bill, Divya Narendra from SumZero. Have a bit of a mag seven question for you. There seems to be um a situation where markets are willing to give companies that are selling compute through uh you know, like an Amazon or or Microsoft or or now even a Google with with kind of at least recently their stocks done extremely well.
Um to the tune of like 30 times earnings, right? So, you see a lot of these big hyperscalers trading at multiples that you know, you could argue were fair maybe aggressive, certainly not cheap or on any kind of standard metric. On the other hand, you've got Meta which is spending very aggressively on CapEx on on building out these data centers.
I think that they've got like 30 in the works or you know, some have been completed, some are on in plans. And they get zero credit for building out all this capacity. And the difference is they're using that capacity for themselves and not to resell out to um tech companies and third parties. Do you see this valuation gap converging at some point?
Um Yeah, I think I think Meta is extremely cheap. Like I'm just curious what you think. Yeah, I think Meta is very cheap. I think Look, I think shareholders are nervous about Mark Zuckerberg cuz every once in a while he goes off on a journey and and they worry that he's going to spend a ton of money on something almost like a hobbyist and it's a controlled company and I think that makes that's unsettling for investors.
But I think the the long-term track record of Mark Zuckerberg shows that he's rational. And so I I I agree with the basic thesis. I like I like Meta. Yes. I think um building a permanent capital vehicle has been on your mind for quite a while now. Um I would be just interested in maybe if you could comment on your journey towards that.
Obviously, you've had the IPO a couple of days ago. Then you have another horse in the race with the Howard Hughes story that you're doing. Maybe you can share a little bit of of from transitioning from just a fund manager to towards yeah, the goal of having permanent capital. So so the two reasons why people want permanent capital.
One reason is well, people can't take their money back when they're amazing business. But the reason why we wanted permanent capital is our strategy really requires it. When we started Pershing Square, you can't launch a fund at you know, 37 years old and say, "Okay, just hand me your money forever." It's not a great pitch.
So you you have to start out if you're lucky as a traditional hedge fund manager. We had an offshore or onshore fund. But we knew we had to get to when we got to scale, it becomes dangerous in our strategy not to have very stable money. Why? Because we buy large stakes in companies. We're concentrated.
We join boards of directors. We recruit management teams. We make commitments to CEOs. You know, we do transactions that can happen well out into the future where we're committing capital. You can't do that if your money can go away. But we we had to live with what we had. And we launched our first permanent capital vehicle October 2014.
We launched it offshore. And that was the beginning. Within a year, we had made the worst investment mistake in the history of the firm. Company called Valeant Pharmaceuticals. Our first large passive investment. We lost 90%. You know, stock was down 90%. Uh and then we we had you know, amazingly positive press for the first whatever number of years of Pershing.
We gave it all back with all the press then. And then our friends in the hedge fund industry started shorting all of our stocks. They went long the one stock we were short. Company called Herbalife. There's a movie. I recommend it. Um By the way, when they do a movie about your short position, that's when you get out of short selling.
Okay, that was that was the moment for me. Um and uh that's when I had I said, "You know what? Let's This is a great moment for us. Let's give back all the open-ended money. Let's focus on permanent capital. That was 8 years ago. We've had the best 8 years in our history and and you understand why the competitive advantage that Warren Buffett's had over very long period of time.
And he recognized this also. He ran a act Buffett ran an activist hedge fund started in 1956. He wound it up in 1969. And why did he wind it up? Because he he realized as you get to scale in this strategy, you cannot have money that can leave overnight. Uh and that's why Buffett went the route that he did.
And we've done something analogous um in the but you know, what we did recently is there's an entity called a 40 Act closed-end fund and everyone kind of thinks these are bad things and they are because the average closed-end equity fund underperformed the stock market over the last 8 years by 7% per annum, right?
These are not great vehicles, but the problem is with the people running them and the strategy, not with the entity itself. And I actually uh we were trying to figure out a way to take our London listed vehicle and and bring it to the US. And we kept going down a path where the lawyers kept saying, "Bill, if you do this, you're at risk of becoming an inadvertent investment company." And they said this again and again and again.
I said, "Well, I don't know if this is a word, but what if I want to be a advertent investment company? It doesn't make sense. You know, send me the book." And I'm I'm probably the only person who's read this book, but there's a book on investment companies, you know, and I read it like uh you know, the Bible.
It was amazing. And what a 40 Act investment company is, it's a corporation that has only one layer of tax. So, it's not a typical corporation, you pay corporate tax and the shareholders pay a dividend tax. Uh it's a corporation where you can buy minority stakes in companies, but you can also buy controlling stakes in companies.
You can't buy minority stakes in uh in a traditional corporation, you can't have a meaningful amount of your assets in minority stakes public companies. And it's a vehicle where you you actually invest in derivatives and or big hedging and other gains. So, it was like a perfect fit uh for our our strategy.
And so, we now have an onshore and offshore entity. Now, if you're an American, you can invest with us, you know, for $43, you can buy one share. Um and we're going to turn it, I think, into a pretty interesting company. Takes me to Howard Hughes. What we didn't have um was a Berkshire Hathaway-like entity.
You know, what what is Berkshire Hathaway? It was a dying textile company that Buffett liquidated over time, reinvested the capital in insurance. And and really Berkshire is about a well-managed insurance operation where the assets, you know, the float was invested in short-term treasuries and the surplus was invested in common stocks.
And Buffett did a very good job picking common stocks. And there really hasn't been an- another one of consequence since Berkshire. And the reason for that is that insurance comp- the best investors generally don't go to work for an insurance company. They go to work for a hedge fund or a private equity fund or a a traditional asset manager.
And so, what we're doing with Howard Hughes is uh we have a company that uh bit like Berkshire, it's undervalued. It's traded at a significant discount to the value of its assets over its life. Uh it's got a 100 110 plus dollars of sort of liquidating value in a very interesting business, but one that Wall Street doesn't care much about, which is it's a business of owning these small cities where we sell lots to home builders.
Uh we build apartments and office buildings. Uh we develop condominiums in Hawaii. Um we own Summerlin in in in Las Vegas, the Woodlands in Houston. Um but it's a C corp, it doesn't pay a dividend, and half the value is, if not more than half the value, is land. And so, what we're doing instead of what the company's done over the last 15 years, as it generates cash from real estate, it reinvests in real estate.
What we're going to do going forward is we're going to reinvest in real estate as much as necessary to keep building these communities, but we're going to take the excess cash, which was multi-billion dollars over the next, you know, number of years, and reinvest in much higher return businesses. We're starting with insurance.
And so, we bought a company called Vantage. The transaction will close in 2 months. Pershing's going to manage the assets. We're going to take the float, put the float in short-term US Treasuries. We're going to take the surplus. We're going to invest in common stocks. We're going to take a page from Mr.
Buffett. And we're going to build this into an interesting company. And today you can buy it at, you know, uh we paid $100 a share to buy 15% of the company. We own a total of 47%. We have the The attributes we need. We have 47% of the stock, about what Buffett had. We have a specialty insurer and reinsurer.
We just recruited a guy named Mark Grandison, who many people consider to be the best insurance executive uh of our, you know, kind of our generation uh to help us uh both at Pershing and and at Howard Hughes. And we're going to build this into an interesting company uh over time. And the power of compounding, combined with capital that you don't have to worry about leaving, is a very powerful thing.
So, who's got the best question? Why don't I take three and I'll try to give a one-word answer. I'm a little too long-winded. I'll take three and I'll give very quick answers. How about that? Oh, okay. Let's I'll take one then. I don't want to have a problem. There's a lot of people. Thank you for for taking our questions.
My question is, as index funds become increasingly driven by capital flows rather than valuation, as assets in passive investing have surpassed those in active investing, and as commentators raise raise concerns on weakening US institutions, would you still still recommend a non-professional investor to regularly invest in something like the S&P 500, or they would be better off investing in, of course, Pershing Square or something, an active investor?
Index funds have proven to be a very good place to invest money. They're very low cost. Um I do think there's an argument that eventually we get to a place that, you know, the the problem with an index fund is that, you know, the you keep reinvest disproportionately invest with companies with the the highest market cap.
Your market cap weighted and you would you would think at some point that would lead to absurd outcomes. But I think individual investors have a huge advantage. Generally, they have permanent capital after investing money they can you know, don't need to live on and they can take a long-term view and they don't have to worry about people pulling the money.
Let me take one last question because this gentleman's waited very patiently. I'll take yours. I was I was just wondering with the geopolitical and the Iran war like do you see things coming to a resolution in a disruptive or non-disruptive way and I I think the most likely outcome is very successful resolution of Iran in a relatively short period of time.
You know, hopefully a few months or less and I think it leads to a massive sort of peace dividend in the world. Iran has been one of the grave threats to the world. It's a sponsor of global terrorism. It's created you know, massive disruption in the Middle East and and in other parts of the world. I think the administration's done and the military's done an amazing job quashing the regime.
They're they're choking them now by effectively shutting off their their resources. So I think this comes to a head in the relative short term and I think the outcome of that is I think the Abraham Accords expand and I think it's very good for the world. So I'm I'm an optimist. Anyway, thank you for my brief uh
Thank you so much. I you have a busy schedule so you have to go but um I am going to ask one thing. If you were if you were invited to be Treasury Secretary right now, would you say yes? No. Okay, there we go. There you have it. Thank you so much, Bill.
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