저자: BillAckman · 외국인
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Bill Ackman의 2022년 10월 인터뷰로, 상반기 실적과 포트폴리오 전략을 설명하고 있다. 2022년 들어 헤지 수익을 크게 내 연초 대비 약 13% 수익률로 S&P 지수를 소폭 상회했다고 밝혔다. 보유 기업들의 실적은 양호하며, 금리 상승으로 밸류에이션이 낮아진 점을 오히려 매력으로 봤다. 주력 보유 종목인 Universal Music Group(유니버설뮤직)은 실적이 견조하고 스트리밍 성장이 계속될 것이며, PER 19배 수준은 말이 안 될 정도로 싸다고 주장했다. 다만 상장 장소(유로넥스트 암스테르담) 탓에 주가가 저평가되고 있고, 유로 기반 자산이라 달러 강세가 주가에 아직 반영되지 않았다고 설명했다. Pershing Square Holdings는 순자산가치(NAV) 대비 35% 할인 상태에서 자사주 매입을 공격적으로 진행 중이며, NAV 대비 적정 가치는 주당 70달러 이상, 현재 주가는 약 32~33달러라고 언급했다. 최근 가장 큰 수익원은 금리 헤지(약 27억 달러 수익, 투입 약 4억 달러)와 신용부도스와프(CDS, 2020년 약 26억 달러 수익)였다. 최근에는 비대칭적 매크로 헤지 계약을 여러 건 새로 맺었으나 구체적 내용은 공개하지 않았다. 금리 관련해서는 연준이 인플레이션 억제에 본격 나선 점을 긍정적으로 봤으며, 과거 트위터에서 밝힌 금리 관점을 따랐다면 수익을 냈을 것이라고 언급했다. 개별 종목 추천이나 대상 자산에 대한 명시적 1~3개월 방향 예측은 없었다.
다듬은 글
Congratulations. With me today is star investor Bill Ackman, CEO of FTSE 100 company, Pershing Square Holdings. Hello, Bill. Thank you for joining me. Nice to chat again. Of course, I'm glad to see you. A lot has happened since our last conversation at the end of last year. Pershing Square's share price has been on a roller coaster ride, and you recently released your half-year results.
Is the business where you want it to be ? And how would you summarize the portfolio's performance in 2022 so far? In fact, I am quite positive about 2022 . We made significant profits from hedging. A significant part of which we have already recorded. This provided us with cash for investment. This offset some weakness in stock price dynamics.
I think the last reported year-to-date profitability figure was about 13 percent. We are slightly ahead of the S &P index. But we focus on the performance of the companies we own. In almost every case— except for one short-term shining example, Netflix, which we can talk about— we are very happy with our businesses.
Universal Music continues to deliver exceptionally strong results, and we expect this to continue for decades to come. In fact, every company we own has reported good, even quite strong, results. Management is taking the right initiatives . We are very happy with the businesses, and what happened was that the change in interest rates led to a reassessment of the multipliers and a decrease in the market value of these companies.
We liked them on January 1st at those prices, and we like them even more today at lower valuations, and I think the Fed is finally starting to actively fight inflation, which is important for the long-term value of these businesses. So as long as we don't live in a world with uncontrolled inflation forever.
Even in such a world, we own mostly those companies that can protect themselves from inflation. So, we like the companies we own. We like the prices they are trading at. As for Pershing Square Holdings itself, the discount to net asset value increased during the year. So, you know, the share price dynamics are disappointing to us because they include a further widening of the gap between the net asset value (NAV) and the share price, and we have launched a fairly aggressive share buyback program.
We buy as much as we can on the open market every day . And the advantage for the long-term investor is obviously that canceling shares at a 35% discount to net asset value is a pretty efficient use of capital, especially when the net asset value is made up of businesses that we really like and that are themselves trading at low prices.
So we are buying back shares today. When we last counted, we estimated that if we took the fair value of everything we own, and if it were trading at a fair price, that number would be well over $70 per share. And we're buying back shares today at $32 or $33 a share, and I think that in the long run it's going to benefit us.
So, you know, obviously, it's been a very interesting and challenging year for the whole world. We try to own businesses that can stand the test of time, and I think we've made the right choices. Regarding Universal Music Group, which you mentioned: this is your largest position, and this stake was a burden on the performance in the first half of the year.
Has your view on this business changed? Are there any improvements you would like to see from the company, and what is your relationship with the board of directors? The relationship is wonderful. My first in-person board meeting , since I joined relatively recently, will be this October. I met with directors via Zoom.
But we have a great relationship with management. We like this business. I think this is a new board of directors. But, you know, it seems like good advice. There are no problems with what the company is doing. I think the possibilities are definitely there. It is a company headquartered in the US, most of its profits, about half, come from America, and it is listed on the Euronext stock exchange in Amsterdam.
And it suffers a bit from the listing location, because the logical market for these shares would probably be NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange. And that's something the company can resolve over time, but the business is doing great. Earnings have grown, you know, much more than we expected when we bought, well, entered into the stock purchase agreement in August of last year, and, in fact, the multiples have come down.
It's trading at, you know, somewhere under 20 times earnings for a business that we think can grow earnings, you know, 20% or at least in the high teens for a long time in, you know, a really resilient business. Ukraine is going through, you know, a tragedy, and, well, you know, but I guess people still listen to music in Ukraine.
You know, it can soothe, you know, the mind in tragic times , it's, you know, a kind of universal language, and, you know, over time you're going to see more and more of the growth of streaming music, and I think that's pretty inevitable. We like inevitable companies and we believe we have by far the best management team in the industry.
So there's nothing to complain about , except, I would say, in the short term, maybe the stock price. The other thing that hurts the share price is, you know, the conversion of euros to dollars, because it's a euro-listed entity, we hedge our risk on Universal's operating income in terms of its euros and other currency risks.
We do not hedge, so to speak, the currency risk of the stock price. So I think the earnings are better than expected partly because, well, you know, obviously the business is doing really, really well, but over time we expect the market to factor in the fact that a significant portion of the company's earnings are in U.S.
dollars, and the dollar has strengthened. You know, the stock price doesn't reflect that yet, and we think it will over time , but again, great company, great management, very, very cheap stock. They should not be trading at 19x earnings; This doesn't make any sense. Yes. Well, when we spoke earlier, which was shortly after the Universal deal, you told us that you had just come out of an investment meeting where you were seriously considering a new idea.
Now, I mean, you've probably had a lot of these meetings since then. Is there anything that catches your attention right now? Is there anything you are working on? And you won't tell us exactly what, but are there any clues ? Well, we've applied a number of other things, we spend a lot more time studying interesting asymmetric macro tools, and it's become a very profitable niche for us.
We probably made $2.7 billion in profit on interest rate hedging. And this is on a system-wide scale . So about 90% of this is Pershing Square assets. We made a fortune on credit default swaps, another $2.6 billion in 2020. And you know, we've always used these types of hedging, but I think we're refining our competency a little bit, so I would say most of the new investments that we've made in the short term have been relatively small in size.
You know, these are tools that, we believe, could become extremely valuable if global macro events develop according to our scenario. These investments in interest rate hedging totaled just under $400 million, but turned into $2.7 billion. This is difficult to do with stocks, at least in the short term.
So we love the high-quality, long-term businesses we own. This is a kind of long-term growth engine. Pershing Square Holdings, and we believe that opportunities arise from time to time for macro transactions with options, credit default swaps, swaptions or other instruments . And this year we spent a lot of time looking for interesting investments.
I would say that today these investments still occupy a relatively small portion of the portfolio, but they have the potential to become quite significant. We have not yet identified a new stock to buy. But it's an extremely volatile environment, and the advantage of some of the realized gains from our hedging is that we can invest them in undervalued stocks, and we have a list of companies that we would own at a certain price, and they're getting close to it.
You made huge bets on credit default swaps, as you just said, during the pandemic and then on the inflation spike. This again brought the fund billions of dollars. Do you have any similar deals in place right now, or more specifically, are there market rates that you think might make sense in the coming months?
Yes. In general, it is worth noting that these are typically very large nominal rates, meaning the size of the insurance policy is quite large, but the cost of insurance or hedging is usually quite small relative to the size of the policy. We like it, which is why I like to use the word "asymmetry." So these are not cases where we put significant capital at risk of loss.
But if they work, you know, they can be pretty powerful. And yes, we have entered into several new similar hedging agreements that are different from what we have done in the past. I think part of it is because the world is very volatile right now , and we track a lot of different things, from commodities and interest rates to currencies, that can affect the value of a business.
And if we have a different view than others, we can usually make these investments on very, very favorable terms. So we like to have a small portfolio of such bets, if I may say so, as part of the overall portfolio. So that's really the only new thing we've done in the last few months. Can you give us any details about these agreements?
Unfortunately, we can't . I think we are always happy to share whatever we can, but nothing that would put PSH at a competitive disadvantage , and disclosing this information at this stage would be just that. But at certain points we are ready to share our theses, for example, regarding interest rates.
If you follow us on Twitter or follow me, I think we were pretty forward-thinking, and if you just built your trading account around our views on interest rates or our public statements, you would make a pretty good profit. I mean these deals, again, you mentioned what you could call: you talked about credit default swaps on inflation, or it could be an equity, or a hedge .
Which of these deals are you most proud of, which ones were your best decisions ? I think we made a very good decision on COVID, obviously, and we were very early and got a good reward on interest rates. So that's true, but we want to achieve success for our investors, and of course we've gotten very good investment capital multipliers that have been substantial and have contributed a lot over the last four or five years.
In one of the, I don't know if you had a chance to read our semi-annual report, but I really took the time, which I haven't done before, and looked at the top 100 largest closed-end investment funds in the world. I was surprised to learn that we are second in net asset value and third in market capitalization due to the discount to net asset value, but we are the best in terms of profitability over one, two, three, and five years by a wide margin.
Another somewhat anomalous indicator is that our discount to net asset value was the widest of all two hundred. I think the average discount was somewhere in the mid to high single digits of percent to net asset value. So, Lee, you should figure out why there is such a huge gap. We also have the largest ownership stake, apart from, it seems, one or two entities, like the Centennial Trust, of any manager's stock.
Therefore, I believe that we have the best alignment of interests. You have the best results, at least in the last one to five years. Your historical rate over 19 years is, you know, 600-700 basis points, it seems, 700 basis points per year above our logical benchmark. So sooner or later it will be recognized.
We are looking forward to this day. Perfectly. Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Holdings. Thank you very much for joining me today. Thank you very much. Hey, you already
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