In his latest interview with The Hustle, Stanley Druckenmiller discussed a number of topics including how the greatest investors make large concentrated bets when they have a lot of conviction. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Druckenmiller: When I’ve looked at all the investors (that) have very large reputations — Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, George Soros — they all only have one thing in common.
And it’s the exact opposite of what they teach in a business school. It is to make large concentrated bets where they have a lot of conviction.
They’re not buying 35 or 40 names and diversifying.
I don’t know whether you remember that Icahn a few years ago put $5B into Apple. I don’t think he was worth more than $10B when he did that.
[In 1992] when I went in to tell Soros that I was going to short a 100% of the fund in the British pound against the Deutschmark, he looked at me with great disdain.
He thought the story was good enough that I should be doing 200%, because it was sort of a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
So, [these investors] concentrate their holdings. This is very counterintuitive.
In my thinking, [concentrating your bets] decreases your overall risk because where you tend to be in trouble is if you have 35 or 40 names.
If you start paying attention to one. If you have a big massive position, it has your attention.
My favorite quote of all time is maybe Mark Twain: “Put all your eggs in one basket and watch the basket carefully.”
I tend to think that’s what great investors do.
You can read the entire interview here:
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The Acquirer’s Multiple® is the valuation ratio used to find attractive takeover candidates.
It examines several financial statement items that other multiples like the price-to-earnings ratio do not, including debt, preferred stock, and minority interests; and interest, tax, depreciation, amortization.
The Acquirer’s Multiple® is calculated as follows:
Enterprise Value / Operating Earnings*
It is based on the investment strategy described in the book Deep Value: Why Activist Investors and Other Contrarians Battle for Control of Losing Corporations, written by Tobias Carlisle, founder of acquirersmultiple.com.
The Acquirer’s Multiple® differs from The Magic Formula® Earnings Yield because The Acquirer’s Multiple® uses operating earnings in place of EBIT.
Operating earnings is constructed from the top of the income statement down, where EBIT is constructed from the bottom up. Calculating operating earnings from the top down standardizes the metric, making a comparison across companies, industries and sectors possible, and, by excluding special items–earnings that a company does not expect to recur in future years–ensures that these earnings are related only to operations.
Similarly, The Acquirer’s Multiple® differs from the ordinary enterprise multiple because it uses operating earnings in place of EBITDA, which is also constructed from the bottom up.
Tobias Carlisle is also the Chief Investment Officer of Carbon Beach Asset Management LLC.
He's best known as the author of the well regarded Deep Value website Greenbackd, the book Deep Value: Why Activists Investors and Other Contrarians Battle for Control of Losing Corporations (2014, Wiley Finance), and Quantitative Value: A Practitioner’s Guide to Automating Intelligent Investment and Eliminating Behavioral Errors (2012, Wiley Finance). He has extensive experience in investment management, business valuation, public company corporate governance, and corporate law.
Articles written for Seeking Alpha are provided by the team of analysts at acquirersmultiple.com, home of The Acquirer's Multiple Deep Value Stock Screener.
All metrics use trailing twelve month or most recent quarter data.
* The screener uses the CRSP/Compustat merged database “OIADP” line item defined as “Operating Income After Depreciation.”
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