Bill Ackman on Starting His Own Hedge Fund at 26 and Activist Investing

다듬은 글

※ 자동 자막 원문(다듬기 전)

01. i blew up my account twice and i called that my wall street tuition and he went into it with the expectation of blowing up and learning from that tuition gosh that's really really smart this is the how to trade stocks options podcast brought to you by 10minutestocktrader.com where we cover finance stocks options entrepreneurship education and money and here's your host voter 1 the top 100 people in finance christopher ewell hey there traders welcome back to today's how to treat stocks options podcast today we have a special lesson for you i'm putting it here on the podcast because i really believe that this is going to provide you massive massive value and that's what i'm trying to do here and hey listen if this podcast was useful to you at all i really highly suggest that you go check out the full trading course at aistoctradingsystem.com that's aistocktradingsystem.com markets are people people are predictable outlier can show you how to track market fear and greed with artificial intelligence on over 1300 of the largest market cap names visit outlier.com to learn more that's ovt they have a free pilot program for the rest of 2021 you can get access to right now at ovtyr.com that's ovtlyr.com hey make sure you subscribe and hit the bell so you'll be notified every time we give you more tools tips and tricks to help you trade faster and trade smarter every single week hey there traders welcome back to today's how to trade stocks options podcast today we are listening to bill ackman on starting his own hedge fund at 26 gosh what a baby 35 now i think about 26 that's when i had my first baby actually um but you know the older you get the more you realize how much you didn't know uh and on activist investing so very curious to see what an older bill ackman says about his hedge fund starting at 26.

02. so let's jump right into it to put this in context you were mid-20s and i had just gotten i just started as a rookie professor two years before so bill at the time was uh trying to set up an interesting business which ultimately became gotham partners so for those of you who are students as a as a 20 something year old bill set up his first hedge fund so why did you set up gotham bill and what did you learn from that experience uh experience is making mistakes and learning from them so that's what i learned um no so so uh the answer is i went to business school to learn how to be a good investor and i learned the first rule of investing which is you do your due diligence before you wire in your money and uh when i got to hbs i actually opened the course catalog for the first time and there wasn't a class on investing other classes on accounting or classes on finance so i decided i had to develop my own little self-study program and i wanted to uh so i opened a fidelity brokerage account i said this i had some money i made in the real estate brokerage business this was my tuition uh in the investment business and was about a year of tuition and if i lost it it was as if i had gone to business school for you know two years but paid for oh man that's so wise all right as i've said many times before i blew up my account twice and i called that my wall street tuition and he went into it with the expectation of blowing up and learning from that tuition gosh that that's really really smart three so i figured it wasn't like the inverse of the oxford one plus one program but um and uh you know i the first dock i bought went up and i said okay i found what i want to do a little more involved in that but i uh actually my father who's here he came with us that's dad over there in the corner you can ask him whatever questions you want afterwards um he told me it's a really dumb idea to start an investment fund right out of business school and he recommended that i go work for michael steinhardt or george soros or one of the other famous investors at the time but i figured that i knew enough this is the the perils of youth um but uh the answer is i was an entrepreneur and uh i felt that i wanted to approach investing my own way as opposed to learn from someone else it's one of the few things you can really learn on your own you can learn investing by reading books by reading annual reports by having a you can have a portfolio and invest a hundred dollars and you can and you can learn the business uh unlike many other businesses which require a lot more um at least that's what i thought at the time so you went far away from just investing in fidelity type you know on a brokerage platform and persian square has a particular form of investing which some of our members of the audience may not understand and it's sometimes called activist investing so maybe you can just help you know orient the audience about what exactly does persian square capital do what's the general investment style 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 kind of long-only institutions the vast majority of that capital is by charter passive passive means you do your research in some cases you don't do the research you sort of just blindly follow an index and you're judged based on how closely follow the index if you think about investing 100 years ago though investing you had andrew carnegie owning 20 of us seal where you had jp morgan 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're unhappy with the performance of the business they would replace the ceo they're 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 you know the uh the owners of many of these great uh businesses over time you know gave the shares away to a university or their heirs and the ownership was just you know spread out in the sam waltons of the world uh kind of passed away and the boards became to be managed by professional owners and so uh what we do is we look for situations where business has lost its way uh we're an otherwise great company within 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 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 gonna build a new one across the street 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 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 the railroad industry with the best ceo in your industry a lot of money could be made and we bought uh first twelve percent of the stock and then another two percent about 14 of the stock we recruited a guy named hunter harrison who is uh widely considered the best railroad executive of all time you know certainly in north america he had retired at 65 he was 66 and a half he had signed a two-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 other canadian railroad canadian national and we hired him as a consultant and he helped to study the railroad and he had plenty of fire in his belly and he said look would you be interested in the 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 and uh we recruited him and then we had to simply put him in place now the problem was canadian pacific has one of the most sort of esteemed illustrious boards in canada at least at the time and it was the former head of the world bank of canada the former ceo of san core energy the former head of the steel business you know 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 a proxy contest we put up seven directors for uh seven seats on a 13 seat board uh and the shareholders voted with us uh ninety percent of the time and voted against the other guys uh and they got between three and eleven percent 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 identified was the best guy we put him in a ceo that was 16 months ago and it's almost the most powerful railroad in north america after 16 months that's how quick this guy goes to work stock's gone from 46 uh to 151 dollars a share it's 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 um interesting okay so what did we learn here starting a hedge fund early but starting it with the intention of learning and losing and paying that tuition boy that's so smart you know if i had gone into trading with that mentality if i'm gonna lose it i don't know how i would have done but i came out of trading i wouldn't say out of but i came out of that experience having learned a lot of lessons and paid for my learning in the process and i think that was absolutely invaluable uh and then on activist investing right basically taking a company that that needs a turnover and turning it over and in 16 months making it one of the most profitable profitable in the country so interesting right so hey listen um make sure you smash the like button and share it with somebody who you think could use this as well and uh subscribe that way you never miss any of the tools tips and tricks we upload every single week help you trade faster and trade smarter i'll see the next episode okay so what you think that was pretty incredible right now if you like that that's only a taste only a sample of what you're going to find in the full ai stock trading system and i really highly encourage you to go and check this out obviously you are interested in learning and how to trade and that's why you're listening to this podcast now i'm going to take and download my entire trading system that i use day in and day out on to you and the only way i'm going to be able to do that is over at the aistoctradingsystem.com you're going to get phase one two and three several bonuses and on top of that i'm going to walk you through over a dozen trades that i put on inside of my account holding your hand and showing you exactly how i got in how i got out how i use the artificial intelligence data and how this could work inside of your own trading portfolio on a daily basis so make sure you head on over to aistoctradingsystem.com that's aistoctradingsystem.com to learn more and to get started and to download my decade plus worth of trading experience into your hands so you can start using the ai stock trading system today the five step system to take the guesswork out of trading hey if you like this video let me know by leaving me a like below and then subscribe and share it with somebody you think could use it as well be sure to comment below with your biggest takeaway from this episode and any suggestions you have for future episodes and finally make sure you watch these other videos to help you trade faster and trade smarter and i'll see on the next episode