저자: BillAckman · 외국인
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2008 금융위기 당시 General Growth Properties(쇼핑몰 리츠)가 단기 부채 상환 불능으로 주가가 폭락(약 $63→$34→$0.34대)하자, 파산법상 자산가치가 부채를 초과하므로 주주 지분이 보존될 것이라 판단해 25%를 저가 매입. 이사회 진입 후 챕터11 구조조정으로 주가가 약 $31까지 회복하며 큰 수익을 거둠. 자산가치 대비 과도한 할인, 파산법 해석, 투자 원칙(비전문가 시각, 사실 재검토)을 강조. 현재 시점의 투자 권유는 없고 과거 사례 회고임.
다듬은 글
I read somewhere called arguably one of the best hedge fund trades of all time so uh I guess it went from $60 million to over three billion uh it was it was a good one all right but it wasn't a trade I wouldn't describe it as a trade a trade is something you buy and you flip this is something where we made the investment initially in November of 2018 uh and uh we still own a company we spun off of General growth and it's now 15 years later so can can you describe what went into making that decision to actually increasing the value of the company sure so this was at the time of the financial crisis uh Circa November 2008 what real estate's always been a kind of sector that I've been interested in I began my career in the real estate business working for my dad actually uh ranging mortgages for Real Estate developers so I I have uh kind of deep deep ties and interest in the business and general growth was the second largest shopping Mall company in the country uh Simon properties many people have heard of General growth was number two they own some of the best malls in the country and at that time people thought of shopping malls as these non-d disruptable things again we talk about disruption malls have been disrupted in many ways uh and general growth stock uh the general growth the company the CFO in particular was very aggressive in the way that he borrowed money and he borrowed money from a kind of Wall Street uh not long-term uh mortgages but generally relatively short-term mortgages he was pretty aggressive as the value went up he would borrow more and more against the assets and that helped the short-term results of the business the problem was during the financial crisis the the market for what's called cnbs commercial mortgage back Securities basically shut and the company because its debt was relatively short-term had a lot of big maturities coming up that they had no ability to refinance and the market said oh my God the lenders are going to foreclose and the shareholders going to get wiped comes is going to go bankrupt and going to get wiped out the stock went from $63 a share to 34 so and there was a family the buck bound family owned I think about 25% of the company and the they had a $5 billion five billion of stock that was worth 25 million or something by the time we bought a stake in the business and what interested me was uh I thought the assets were worth substantially more than the liabilities the company had 27 billion of debt and had a $100 million value of the equity down from like 20 billion okay and one that you know sort of an interesting place to start with a stock down 99% but the fundamental drivers of the mall business are occupancy how occupied are the malls occupancy was up year on-ear between 07 and 08 interestingly net operating income which is kind of a measure of cash flow from the malls that was up year on-ear so kind of the underlying fundamentals were doing fine the only problem they had is they had billions of dollars of debt that they had to repay they couldn't repay and if you kind of examine the bankruptcy code um that it's precisely designed for a situation like this where it's kind of this resting place you can go uh to kind of re re uh restructure your business now the problem was that every other company that had gone bankrupt the shareholders got wiped out and so the market seeing every previous example the sholds get wiped out the assumption is the stock is going to go to zero that's not what the bankruptcy code says the bankrupcy bank code says is that the value gets apportioned based on value and if you could prove to a judge that there was the assets worth more than the liabilities then the shareholders actually get to keep their investment in the company and that was the bet we made and so we stepped into the market we bought 25% of the company in the open market for we had to pay up it started at at 34 cents I think there were 300 million shares so it was at a $100 million value by the time we were done we paid an average of we paid 60 million for 25% of the business so about $240 million for the equity of the company and then we had to get on the board to convince the director is the right thing to do and the board was in complete Panic didn't know what to do spending a ton of money on advisers and you know I was a shareholder activist you know four years into persing square and no one had any idea what we were doing they thought we were crazy every day stock every day we'd go into the market and we'd buy this Penny Stock and we'd fire what's called a 13d every 1% increase in our stake and people just thought we were crazy we're buying stock in a company that's going to go bankrupt Bill you're going to lose all your money you know run okay and I said well wait you know bankrupcy code says that there more asset value than liabilities we should be fine and the key moment if you're looking for uh fun moments is there's a woman named Maddie Buck bound uh who was from the buck bound family and uh her cousin John was chairman of the board CEO of the company and I said as she calls me after we disclose our stake in the company she's like Billy Amman I'm really glad to see you here and I met her like I don't think it was a date but I kind of met her in a social context when I was like 25 or something and she said look I'm really glad to see you here and if there's anything I can do to help you call me I said sure uh we kept trying to get on the board of the company they wouldn't invite us on couldn't really run a proxy contest that you know not with a company going bankrupt and there advisers actually were Goldman Sachs and they're like you don't want the fox in the hen house MH and they were listening to their advisors so I called Maddie up and I said Maddie I need to get on the board of the company to help and she says you know what I will call my cousin and I'll get it done uh like you know she calls back a few hours later you'll be going on to the board I don't know what she said to her cin but she was convincing next thing you know I'm invited on the board of the company and the board is talking about the old Equity of General growth old Equity is what you talk about the shareholders are getting wiped out I said no no no this board represents the current Equity of the company and I'm a major shareholder John's a major shareholder there's plenty of asset value here this company should be able to be restructured for the benefit of shareholders and we let a restructuring for the benefit of shareholders and it took let's say uh eight months and the company emerged from chapter 11 we made an incremental investment into the company and the shareholders kept the vast majority there investment uh all the creditors got their you know face amount of their investment par plus a c crude interest and it was a great outcome all the employees kept their jobs the mall stayed open there was no liquidation the bankruptcy system worked the way it should uh you know I was in court you know all the time and the first uh meeting with the judge the judge is like look this would never have happened were it not for a financial crisis and once the judge said I knew we were going to be fine because the company really not done anything fundamentally wrong maybe a little too aggressive in how they borrowed money and uh stock went from 34 cents to $31 a share and actually fun little anecdote um we made a lot of people a lot of money who followed us into it uh I got a lot of nice thank you notes which you get on occasion in this business believe or not and then one day I get a voicemail this is when there was something called voicemail probably a few years later and it's a guy with a very thick Jamaican accent leaving a message for bill akman so you know return my calls call the guy back he's like hi it's Bill Amman I'm just returning your call he's oh Mr Amman uh thank you so much for calling me and I said oh how can I help he says I wanted to thank you I said what do you mean he said I saw you on CNBC you know a couple years ago and you were talking about this General growth and the stock I said where was the stock at the time he said it's 60 cents or something like this and I bought a lot of stock and I'm like well how much did you invest oh I invest all of my money in the company and he was a New York City Taxi Driver and he invested like $50,000 or something like this at 60 cents a share and he was still holding it and he went into retirement and he made you know 50 times as money and uh you those are the moments that you feel pretty good about investing what gave you confidence through that went to Penny Stock and I'm sure you were getting a lot of naysay and people saying that this is crazy it's the same thing you just do the work like we got a lot of push back from our investors actually because we had never invested in a bankrupt company before it's a field called distressed investing and they're dedicated uh distressed investors and we weren't considered one of them so Bill what are you doing you don't know anything about distressed investing you don't know anything about bankruptcy investing um but I can read I can you learned and I learned and it sometimes it's very helpful not to be a practitioner an expert in something because you get used to to the conventional wisdom and so we just you know abstractly read the uh step back and look at the facts and and it was just a really interesting setup for uh one of the best investments we ever made how hard is it to learn some of the legal aspects of this like you mentioned bankruptcy code like I imagine it's very sort of dense language and dense ideas and the loopholes and all that kind of stuff like if you're just stepping in and you've never done distressed investing how hard is it to figure out it's not that hard no it's not that hard okay I literally read a book on distress investing okay Ben Branch or something something on distress and so you were able to pick up the intuition from that just all the uh the basic skills involved the basic facts to know all that kind of stuff most of the world's knowledge has already been written somewhere you just got to read the right books and uh also had great lawyers uh you know built up some great relationships we we work with Sal Cromwell and the lawyer there named Joe Shanker who I met earlier in my career Persian square is actually my second act in the hedge fund business I started a fund called Gotham Partners when I was 26 one of my early Investments was a company called Rockefeller Center properties that was heading for bankruptcy and uh the lawyer on the other side representing Goldman Sachs was a guy named Joe Shanker so he was like an obvious phone call because had yet another real estate bankruptcy and that one we we did very well but I missed the big opportunity and uh I I suffered psychological torture every time I walked by rockfeller Center because we could have made we knew more about that property anyone else but I knew less about deal making and didn't have the resources and I was 28 years old or 27 um and they hired a better lawyer than we did and uh they outsmarted us on that one in a way so I said okay I'm going to go hire this guy the next time around so
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