Bill Ackman : Why Do Only a Few Investors Achieve Massive Wealth?

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Ackman는 수동적 대형 투자자들이 많아 경영 개선 기회가 생긴다고 보고, 해당 전략으로 캐나다퍼시픽 철도(CP)에 행동주의 투자해 CEO 교체·주가 상승(약 $46→$151)을 이뤘다고 설명. 반면 JC페니는 CEO 론 존슨의 가격 정책 실패로 고객 1/3 이탈·손실을 겪었다고 회고. 단기 예측 발언은 없고 실패에서 배운 교훈과 거버넌스 중요성을 강조.

다듬은 글

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01. what's the general investment style and and why did you set it up that way 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're judge based on how closely you follow the index if you think about investing 100 years ago though investing you had Andrew Carnegie owning % 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 the way 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 uh 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 we'll 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 you can have absent 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 worst run 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% so about 14% of the stock we recruited a guy named Hunter Harrison who is uh widely considered the best railroad executive over all time you know certainly in in North America he had retired at 65 he was 66 and a half he had signed a 2-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 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 Canan 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 sunor energy the former head of the steel business you know 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 3 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 identify 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 $8 billion market cap to a $25 billion market cap that's kind of the perfect example now it doesn't always work that way and I have a feeling that Peter might ask me about one of those cases that so I used to cold call Bill as a student so this is going to be fun um so it's very clear you've had notable successes Bill's only own uh estimation is 232 and one is that do I get the numbers right 242 and one 24 wins to not wins one tie something like that um and Canadian Pacific is clearly a win I think you just monetized 800 million that's what I read in the pap sold about a billion dollars um and then MB is another one where Bill was pressing about you know the fact that the financial markets were going to well that mbia which is a large Insurance uh uh Bond insurer was in for a bad ride and you figured that out but there are some the two and one where I think what you've said in in some of your recent things where you've had some things that you've learned from those experiences they might include for examp example JC Penney that's been in the news this summer so what have you learned from the successes and then maybe what have you learned from the ones that haven't been successes you know again as I said at the beginning experience is making mistakes and learning from mistakes and uh unfortunately as students you haven't made many mistakes yet you know you've got into Oxford at this point in your career the biggest risk is you probably haven't screwed up a lot and so you know the risk of that is when data comes across your desk that's inconsistent with your being successful you're less likely to pay attention to it than if you've made a few mistakes so encourage you to make some mistakes um and actually I I've made plenty over the course of my career and I think I've been very successful uh over time but it's not been a straight line up in fact I had if if I were a stock it would look something like this after business school you know and then and so the concern is whether this is coming you know but but so far you know we we you know the overall trend has generally been positive but you know there there are certainly bumps along the way and uh JC Penney is a company uh that we invested in that we knew on on the way in was a much higher risk situation than a Canadian Pacific so JC Penney for those of you are not familiar is 112 year-old American sort of iconic retailer that's certainly way past its prime it probably peaked 25 or 30 years ago again another example you had James cash Penney who founded the company he died I think in the early 70s and there's a pretty good correlation between when the founder goes and when the company goes um and part of that has to do with governance which is a topic I'm sure we'll get to um but the time we invested JC Penney stock was down from 80 to about2 a share uh it was trading at about four times operating income it had lots of assets lying around in the company that were non-core assets it had a very bloated expense uh base and it was generating very little sales per square foot it was a very underachieving retailer and part of that is the brand had become somewhat tired and they had gone to a very highly discount oriented model where they'd Mark a address at $40 and they wouldn't sell any at that price and a week later they mark it to 20 and they probably wouldn't sell many at that price and then they would send you a coupon where you got $10 off and then they start to sell a few and then if you Ed your credit card you got $4 off and if you bought this moment you get another $5 off and eventually it was you know eight bucks or whatever and they sell a lot of them at that price and um but this was undifferentiated merchandise and the thesis was um this company has actually still a brand while faded uh restorable and uh because they were created over the last 112 years they actually own about 112 million square ft of some of the best real estate in the shopping mall in the shopping malls uh the shopping uh real estate industry they own or have very long-term leas holds at very low rents and we said look this is a great platform to rebuild the company and we bought a 16% stake in the company uh we I was invited to join the board I I joined the board with uh a friend who bought 10% along with us so we owned together 26% of the company we both joined the board we were two of 11 directors um and the CEO was 64 uh and uh the board was very much focused on succession as any board should be generally but particularly when they're CEOs in his mid-60s and uh we helped the board with succession and there was a candidate uh that kept surfacing as the best guy in retail and this guy's name is Ron Johnson and he had an ideal background he didn't go to the Oxford business school but he got say he went to Harvard Business School uh and he graduated he went to work for mvin his dream in life was to reinvent the department store and mvin was kind of a Dying department store it was acquired by Target so he spent a few years at mvin he spent 10 or 11 years at Target which is probably the bestr Run us discount department store and then he was hired by Steve Jobs uh to build the Apple Store from a blank sheet of paper and he did an absolutely incredible job and we said look you couldn't ask for a better background to do what we're trying to do here reinvent the department store um combine the Apple customer store experience with uh you know kind of some of the target uh brand excellence and cost management and the problem was recruiting him he's very happy living in you know Atherton California he had uh three $400 million of restricted stock in Apple 100 million of which he was going to lose if he left and he had kids who were in you know 13 15 years old in the middle of their you know a time when parents don't like to move but I managed to convince him this take the job and uh he walked away from 100 million restricted stock uh we gave him 50 million to make up for it but he still took a loss when he took the job and then he invested $50 million in 7-year options that he bought with his own money that he couldn't sell for 6 years I thought this is the absolute perfect thing we have the best guy we got a great platform at a really cheap price we had the perfect alignment of incentives and I thought it's done but it didn't work but it didn't work and uh and so Ron got started in November of uh 2011 and he proceeded to make a series of changes um many of them very favorable among them took a very hard look at the cost structure and found about a billion dollars that he could take out of the cost structure of the business we took a hard look at all the non-core assets and we monetized about $600 million with the non-core assets so far so good and then he launched a business plan to convert the JC Penney store into basically a mini shopping mall uh a selfridges type model where there were a series of uh Brands Each of which would have their own kind of presence in the store and then you'd have a Consolidated checkout you know with a wireless experience and sort of this apple like uh customer service experience and he sold this idea to brands that here to for wouldn't be willing to go into JC Penning and the guy's very charismatic it was a great idea he had a whole bunch of brands that he got from around the world who were excited about opening up inside JC Penney and he went to work but he made one very significant strategic mistake this whole notion of what he almost called fraudulent pricing this overpricing an item and then marking it down and marking it down in coupons he said look this is a waste of time let's just mark it at the price the consumer knows the fair price because when you looked at those $40 dresses and $40 shirts they all sold it for something like $12.30 but you got on average and very little sold at any other Price He said let's just Market at 12 bucks the consumer understands value we can save aug amount of you know the company had spent an enormous amount of man hours actually changing signs if you think about how often they're constantly repricing and reticketing and changing signs it made the stores look really cluttered and you know that sounded like a brilliant idea and Apple the Apple experience was not about testing so instead of trying this out in one or two stores or in a region he rolled it out across the country and it failed and the customer who had become accustomed to getting coupons in their Sunday circular all of a sudden the coupons weren't there and so they decided not to come and we lost about a third of our customers after about 12 months and the great thing about a retail business if you get it right is this business has enormous operating leverage right because you've got a substantial fixed cost base but once you start generating additional sales it almost all drops to the a lot of it drops to the bottom line well only problem with leverage as you learn in Business Schools it works in reverse and so all of a sudden the company was losing huge amounts of money after having spent a ton of money on Capital rebuilding and redesigning these stores and we found oursel in a turnaround 15 months after he retied and we had to replace them and the lesson there are many um so number one this was what I call an Extreme Makeover of a company and when you do an Extreme Makeover it requires perfect board alignment uh and backing for the CEO and uh we didn't have that number one we were one of 11 directors on the board and there was still a uh while it had it worked perfectly from the beginning there wouldn't have been a problem as things got dicer there was a Divergence of opinion on the board what to do and when to do it and who to hire so I think that's one interesting lesson I don't think I'll ever go on a board and be one of 11 anymore I like going on with a mandate like in Canadian Pacific um two you know I think Ron is an incredible talent but I don't think like the students in the room uh he'd ever made a mistake before and I think it was as the data kept coming back you know Ron still had a lot of confidence it was going to work and you've got to back your CEO and give and and give him and give him robe and I think uh Ron will be and I think he'd say this today he'll be a much better CEO the next time because having had a big negative experience like this I think third retail is one of the businesses where you can really test right you can take a region you can take a store uh and you can try things out and rejigger them and test them and I think you know the Apple experience Steve Jobs was all about the customer doesn't know what he or she wants I know what the customer wants and and Steve Jobs you know got it right I think in retail you know there's a kind of a saying the customer knows what he or she wants and I think you really have to listen to that um so while I actually I still love the vision for JC Penney I think it was right I think the execution was difficult um and uh you know to do something like that in also in the public domain right this is a major change and the company was constantly being harassed by the press and Ron was attacked I think it makes it difficult to make decisions in that kind of a public context there's