저자: 미상 · 외국인
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Pershing Square Holdings(PSH) 2024 주주서한 분석. 2024년 NAV 수익률 10.2%, 2004년 이후 연복리 15.9%(S&P500 10.0%). 자사 주가는 NAV 대비 약 31% 할인, 이를 줄이기 위해 2017년 이후 약 6,700만주 자사주 매입(평균 할인율 약 29%). 주요 포지션으로 Uber(AV 시대에도 수요 변동성 때문에 하이브리드 구조 수혜 주장), Brookfield(BN 할인 주장), Howard Hughes 전환, 패니메이·프레디맥 민영화(정치적 촉매), Nike 콜옵션 전환, Alphabet(저평가), QSR, UMG 등 언급.
다듬은 글
Welcome back to the deep dive. Today we're digging into a fantastic set of documents, the 2024 annual report and the investor letters for Persing Square Holdings or PSH. And our mission here is uh pretty ambitious. We're not just looking at returns. This is really a masterclass in a certain kind of investment strategy.
We want to understand why they made these huge contrarian moves. you know, like buying into Uber. And that's the perfect place to start because the long-term results really tell the story. In 2024, they delivered a solid 10.2% ANEV performance, which is good, but not earthshattering, right? But it's the compounding that's incredible.
If you've been in since 2004, you've seen a 15.9% compounded annual return. Wow. That's against 10.0% for the S&P 500 over that same 21-year stretch. The magic is in the long game. Okay. But you mentioned the central tension right at the start, the discount. Exactly. I mean, despite that incredible performance, the gap between their asset value and their stock price, it widened to over 31% by the end of 2024.
So, the market is essentially saying the whole strategy is worth 30 cents less on the dollar. That's a huge problem for them. It's the corporate challenge they are obsessed with solving. Okay, let's start with the foundation then their philosophy. When they look for a company, what are the non-negotiables?
What are those core criteria? Well, they're filtering for um let's call it extreme durability. The first thing is the business has to be mostly insulated from big macro shocks or you know geopolitical noise. So stable built on something essential, right? Second, it can't be a company that always needs to raise more money.
It has fund itself, generate its own cash. And that third point that feels like their core defensive idea. It absolutely is. A strong balance sheet. They say it explicitly, and I'm quoting here, even a great business with a bad balance sheet is a risky proposition. They will not compromise on that. Which makes perfect sense when you think about their biggest weapon, permanent capital.
For a normal hedge fund, volatility is terrifying. It's the enemy because clients get scared. They ask for their money back and the fund manager has to sell good assets at bad prices just to meet those redemptions. Exactly. But PSH with its permanent non-redeemable capital, it just flips that script completely.
Volatility becomes their friend. It's an enormous advantage. They get to go shopping when everyone else is having a fire sale. That's the whole game. They can be truly opportunistic. So, let's circle back to their own stock trading at that huge 31% discount. How are they actually fighting that? Well, the problem got a little worse in 2024 after they pulled the IPO for their US vehicle PSUS.
A lot of people were hoping that would be a catalyst and it wasn't. It wasn't. So, they've doubled down on what they can control, buybacks. Since 2017, they've bought back almost 67 million of their own shares. And and the key is the price they paid, right? Precisely. They bought them for $1.4 billion at an average discount of about 29%.
In 2024 alone, the average discount was almost 32%. So, help me understand for you listening, how does that actually create value? It's just math. I mean, if you can buy a dollar's worth of your own assets for 70 cents, every share that's left is now worth more. It instantly boosts the NAV per share for everyone who holds on.
It's the cheapest, highest return investment they can make, without a doubt. And on top of that, they're growing the dividend. It's up 13% for 2025, which is a 65% jump since they started the program. Okay, let's pivot to one of the big new bets, Uber, initiated in early 2025. I mean, Uber is a household name.
What did the market get so wrong that PSH saw it as undervalued? The whole thesis is contrarian. It's all about autonomous vehicles or AVs. The market's view is simple. Robo taxes are coming. Human drivers are out. And Uber's business model is toast. And PSH just doesn't buy that. They think the market is completely misunderstanding the structure of that future.
Not just the timeline, but the actual logistics of it. So, what's the fatal flaw in the AVs take over everything argument? It's not the technology. The biggest sort of unsolvable problem is demand. Ride sharing demand is incredibly spiky. Right. Think a rainy Friday night versus a quiet Tuesday morning.
Exactly. You can see a 10 times swing in demand over a single week. An AV only fleet just can't handle that. Either you build a giant fleet for Friday night and 90% of it sits idle on Tuesday, which kills your economics. Or you build for the average and on Friday night everyone is waiting for hours.
It just doesn't work. That's the aha moment. You need a flexible supply to meet that peak demand. Precisely. They argue the future is a hybrid model. AVs will handle the predictable high utilization base load routes, but you'll still need human drivers, Uber's 8 million partners, to handle the massive variable peaks.
So Uber becomes the network that optimizes the whole system both for the AS and the humans. And that's why they argue Uber's 20% take rate is justified. [snorts] They see a path to 30% or more earnings growth even with the stock at 25 times earnings today. Fascinating. So from a bet on the future of mobility, let's look at something completely different, a structural value play.
Brookfield Corporation, BNA. The sources admit it's complex. How do they find the value in that complexity? You really have to break it down some of the part style. You start with the engine. Brookfield Asset Management or BAM. That's the clean asset light part the market loves, right? It manages over half a trillion in fee paying assets and they're targeting a trillion by 2029.
It's writing huge trends like decarbonization and AI. The market values BAM at about 28 times earnings, which is fair. Okay. So, if BAM is valued fairly, where is the hidden value in the parent company, BN? The market is basically ignoring the lumpy, less predictable cash flows. They estimate BN is trading at uh something like a 38% discount to its real value.
A huge part of that is the carried interest. Okay. So, for you listening, just quickly, what is carried interest? It's the manager share of the profits from the funds. It's deferred revenue. BN expects to get over 10 billion dollars in cash from this over the next five years, but the market hates it because it's not a smooth quarterly fee.
Exactly. It only comes when a fund sells an investment, so it seems risky. On top of that, you've got Brookfield Wealth Solutions, which this this $120 billion insurance business. It's a huge pool of stable capital, kind of like what Apollo has with Athen. All of that is being undervalued. Okay, let's turn to Howard Hughes, HH.
This is a story of transformation. PSH saw that the market was punishing the company with a high cost of capital. What does that actually mean? It means the market sees the business as super risky. HH was all about developing these massive master planned communities which is very tied to the economic cycle.
Very so the market demands a really high return on any new project just to compensate for that risk and that can stifle growth because perfectly good projects start to look too expensive to fund. So the fix is to change the company's DNA, right? Shift it to a more diversified holding company, inject new capital, and lower that perceived risk.
The spin-off of Seapport Entertainment was part of that. PSH jumped in, took a big stake, and is helping guide that transformation. All right, let's do the portfolio scan. These are positions with clear catalysts on the horizon. Let's start with the most political one. Fanny May and Freddy Mack. The thesis here is almost entirely driven by a potential political outcome.
The documents are pretty clear. They see a high probability of a Trump victory. And he's on the record saying he wants to privatize them. And the timing is right because their balance sheets are finally strong enough. That's the key. Their combined net worth is approaching $154 billion. So the political will is there and now the financial capacity is there to actually exit government conservatorship.
And if that happens, they believe it could multiply the share value. It's a pure catalyst bet on a political event. Okay. What about Nike? They did something uh pretty technical here. Converting stock to call options. Why do that? It's a really efficient way to play a turnaround. They sold the stock, took the cash off the table, and uses a small piece of it to buy long-term call options that are already in the money.
So, they keep most of the upside if the stock recovers, but they've dramatically reduced the capital tied up in the position. It frees up cash for other ideas like Uber while still keeping a seat at the table for the Nike story. It's very shrewd. It is. Now, Alphabet, Google, everyone knows Google. What's the hook?
Why is it still undervalued? The hook is that this absolute powerhouse is trading like a slow growth company. It delivered 29% profit growth in 2024, but it's trading at about 18 times forward earnings, which is a huge discount to its peers, a major discount. And the margin growth isn't just from cost cutting.
It's real AI efficiency. The report notes that over a quarter of their new code is now generated by AI. That's a massive productivity gain. Let's touch on QSR restaurant brands. Tim Hortons, Burger King. Why is it trading 30% cheaper than its competitors? It's a puzzle. I mean, it's a great capital light franchise model.
Tim Hortons has had 15 straight quarters of traffic growth. Their growth potential is similar to their peers, but the valuation just hasn't caught up. PSH sees that gap closing. And finally, Universal Music Group, UMG, and this idea of streaming 2.0. This is about changing the economics of streaming, pushing for higher wholesale rates, creating new premium tiers for super fans.
They're already signing new deals with Spotify and Amazon on these terms. Plus, a US stock listing could be a huge catalyst for them. And we should just mention Spart, the acquisition vehicle, still hunting. Still hunting. It's a very clean, efficient structure. No underwriting fees, no founder stock, and almost nine years left to find a deal.
It's a great option for a big private company that wants to go public. So, if we pull back, the lesson here for you, the listener, seems to be about combining two things. A search for incredibly highquality, durable businesses and then using that unique permanent capital structure to be ruthless to exploit short-term fear and structural weirdness in the market.
whether it's about AVs or complex accounting, they're just indifferent to the day-to-day noise, right? And that long-term focus has delivered that 15.9% compounded return for two decades. But we started with the tension, didn't we? Their own stock still trades at a 30% discount to that value. And that really leaves you with a final provocative question.
Given that the strategy is so concentrated, just 8 to 12 big bets, what level of volatility are you actually willing to accept for that kind of long-term conviction? How do you weigh the magic of compounding over 20 years against the short-term risk the market sees in that 30% discount? It really forces you to decide if you believe the market is wrong.
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