Bill Ackman
speaker
1,217 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 3 Jun
Bill Ackman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
You know, things happen that can change the course of history, and markets react very negatively to those kinds of events. And you can own the greatest business in the world, trading for $100 a share, and next moment it could be $50. So as long as you don't borrow against securities, you own really high-quality businesses, and it's not money that you need in the short term...
then you can actually be thoughtful about it. And that is a huge advantage. The vast majority of investors, it seems, tend to be the ones that panic and the downturns get over-related when markets are doing well.
Buffett is the ultimate long-term thinker. And just the decisions he makes, the consistency of the decisions he's made over time, and fitting into that sort of long-term framework is very educational, let's put it that way, for learning about this business.
I think there are very few mutual funds. Uh, there are thousands and thousands of mutual funds. They're very few that earn their keep in terms of the fees they charge. Uh, they tend to be too diversified. Um, and, uh, too short term, and you're often much better off just buying an index fund.
And many of them perform, if you look carefully at their portfolios, they're not so different from the underlying index itself, and you tend to pay a much higher fee. Now, all of that being said, there's some very talented mutual fund managers, a guy named Will Danoff at Fidelity. He's had a great record over a long period of time.
The famous Peter Lynch, Ron Barron, another great long-term growth stock investor. So there's some great mutual funds, but I put them in the handful versus the thousands. And if you're in the thousands, I'd rather someone bought just an index fund basically.
I even recommend for individual investors to invest in a dozen companies. You don't get that much more benefit of diversification going from a dozen to 25 or even 50. Most of the benefits of diversification come in the first, call it 10 or 12. And if you're investing in businesses that don't have a lot of debt, They're businesses that you can understand yourself.
Actually, individual investors did a much better job analyzing Tesla than the so-called professional investors or analysts, the vast majority of them. So if it's a business you understand, if you bought a Tesla, you understand the product and its appeal to consumers, it's a good place to start when you're analyzing a company. So I would invest in things you can understand. That's kind of a key.
You like Chipotle. You understand why they're successful. You can go there every week and you can monitor, is anything changing? How's chicken al pastor? Is that a good upgrade from the basic chicken? You know, the drink offerings improving, the store is clean. I think you should invest in companies you really understand.
Simple businesses where you can predict with a high degree of confidence what it's going to look like over time. And if you do that in a not particularly concentrated fashion and you don't borrow money against your securities, you'll probably do much better than your typical mutual fund.
By the way, there's much more information available today. When I was first investing, literally we had people faxing us documents from the SEC filings in Washington, D.C. Now everything's available online. Conference call transcripts are free. You have AI. You have unlimited access. data and all kinds of message boards and Reddit forums and things where people are sharing advice.
And everyone has their own, by virtue of their career or experience, they'll know about an industry or a business. And that gives them, I would take advantage of your own competitive advantages.
If it's going to affect your experience, I wouldn't buy the stock.
I think recently, in the last couple of days, I read an article saying that more than 50% of the capital in the world today invests in the stock market's passive, indexed money. And that's the most passive form, right? So if you think about an index fund, a machine buys a fixed set of securities, right?
in certain proportion uh there's no human judgment at all and there's no real person behind it in a way they never take steps to improve a business they just quietly own securities what we do is we invest our capital in a handful of things we get to know them really really well because you're going to put 20 of your assets in something you need to know it really well but
Once you become a big holder and if you've got some thoughts on how to make a business more valuable, you can do more than just be a passive investor. So our strategy is built upon finding great companies in some cases that have lost their way and then helping them succeed. And we can do that with ideas from outside the boardroom. Sometimes we take a seat on a board or more than one.
And we work with the best management teams in the world to help these businesses succeed. So when I first went into this business, no one knew who we were. And we didn't have that much money. And so to influence what was, to us, a big company...
uh we had to make a fair bit more noise right so we would buy a stake we'd announce it publicly we'd attempt to engage with management the first activist investment we made at persian square was wendy's i couldn't get the ceo to ever return my call he didn't return my call so we actually in that case our idea was wendy's owned a company called tim hortons which was this coffee donut chain
And you could buy Wendy's for basically $5 billion. And they owned 100% of Tim Hortons, which itself was worth more than $5 billion. So you could literally buy Wendy's, separate Tim Hortons and get Wendy's for negative value. That seemed like a pretty good opportunity, even though the business wasn't doing that well. So we bought the stake, called the CEO, couldn't get a meeting, nothing.
So we hired actually Blackstone, which was at that time had an investment bank. And we hired them to do what's called a fairness opinion of what Wendy's would be worth if they followed our advice. And they agreed to do it, paid him a fee for it. And then we mailed in a letter with a copy of the fairness opinion saying 20s would basically be worth 80% more if they did what we said.
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