Bill Ackman: How To Invest For Beginners | Big Money Investing Review

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[Music] the lion shows up and everyone starts running you run with them that does not work well in markets in fact you generally have to do the opposite in your lecture on the basics of finance and investing you mention a book intelligent investor by Benjamin Graham as being formative in your life what key lesson do you take away from that book that informs your own investing sure actually it was the first investment book I read and as such it was kind of the inspiration for my career and a lot of my life important Book bear in mind this is sort of after the Great Depression people lost confidence investing in markets World War II and then he writes his book it’s for like the average man and basically he says that you have to understand the difference between price and value price is what you pay value is what you get stock market is here to serve you and it’s a bit like the neighbor that comes by every day and makes you an offer for your house makes you a stupid offer you ignore it makes you a great offer you can take it and that’s the stock market and the key is to figure out what something’s worth and you have to kind of weigh it the stock market in the short term is a voting machine it represents speculative interests you know supply and demand of people in the shortterm but in the long term the stock market’s a weighing machine much more accurate it’s going to tell you what something’s worth and so if you can Define what something’s worth then you can really take advantage of the market because it’s really here to to help you and that’s kind of the message of the book in that same way there’s a kind of difference between speculation and investing yeah speculation is just a bit like buying trading crypto short-term trading crypto maybe in the long run there’s intrinsic value but many investors in a bubble going into crash were really just pure speculators they didn’t know what things were worth they just knew they were going up right that’s speculation and investing is you know doing your homework digging down understanding a business understanding the competitive dynamics of an industry understanding what Management’s going to do understanding what price you’re going to pay you know the value of anything I would say other than love let’s say is the present value of the cash you can take out of it over its life now some people think about love that way but it’s not it’s not the right way to think about love investing is about basically building a model of what this business is going to produce over its lifetime how do you get to the value of a thing on the stock market Market sure companies the value of a security is the present value of the cash you can take out of it over its life so if you’re think about a bond your bond pays a 5% coupon interest rate you get that let’s say every year or twice a year split and half and it’s very predictable and if it’s a US Government Bond you know you’re going to get it so that’s a pretty easy thing to value a stock is an interest in a business it’s like owning a piece of a company and a business a profitable one is like a bond and that it generates these coupons or these earnings or cash flow you know year the difference with a stock and a bond is that the bond it’s a contract you know what you’re going to get as long as they don’t go bankrupt in default with a stock you have to make predictions about the business you know how many widgets are going to sell this year how many going to sell next year what are their costs going to be how much of the money that they generate do they need to reinvest in the business to keep the business going and that’s more complicated but what we do is we try to find businesses where with a very high degree of confidence we know what those cash flows are going to be for a very long time and there very few businesses that you can have a really high degree of certainty about and as a result you know many Investments are speculation cuz it’s really very difficult to predict what I do for a living is find those rare companies that you can kind of predict what they’re going to look like over a very long period of time what are the factors that indicate that a company is going to be something that’s going to make a lot of money it’s going to have a lot of value and it’s going to be reliable over a long period of time every consumer has a view on different brands and different companies you know what we look for are sort of these non-d disruptable businesses a business where you can kind of close your eyes stock market shuts for a decade and you know that 10 years from now it’s going to be a more valuable more profitable company so we own a business called Universal Music Group it’s in the business of helping artists become Global artists that’s recorded music business and it’s in the business of owning music publishing rights of songwriters I think music is forever right music is a many thousand year old part of the human experience and I think it will be you know thousands of years from now and so that’s a pretty good backdrop to invest in a company and the company basically owns a third of the global recorded music the most dominant sort of market share in the business they’re the at taking an artist who’s 18 years old who’s got a great voice and helping that artist become a superstar and that’s a unique talent and the result is the best artists in the world want to come work for them but they also have this incredible library of you know the Beatles the Rolling Stone YouTu Etc and then if you think about what music has become used to be about records and CDs and eight track tapes and it was about a new format and that’s how they drive sales and it’s become a business about streaming and streaming is a lot more predictable than selling records right you can sort of say okay how many people have smartphones how many people going to have smartphones next year there’s a kind of global penetration over time of smartphones and you pay call at 10 11 bucks a month for a subscription or last for a family plan and you can kind of build a model of what the world looks like and predict the growth of the streaming business predict what kind of market share Universal is going to have over time you can’t get to a precise view of value you can get to an approximation and the key is to buy at a price that represents a big discount to that approximation and that gets back to Ben Graham Ben Graham was about what he called invented this concept of marginal safety right you want to buy a company at a price that if you’re wrong about what you think it’s worth and it turns out to be worth 30% less you paid a deep enough discount to your estimate that you’re still okay investing a big part of investing is not losing money if you can avoid losing money and then have a few great hits you can do very very well over time there are all kinds of risks in every business this is one that I think has a very high degree of persistence and I can’t Envision a world where Beyond streaming in a sense now you may have a neuralink chip in your head instead of a phone but the music is going to come in a digitized kind of format you’re going to want to have an infinite library that you can walk around in your pocket or in your brain it’s not going to matter that much if the form factor you know the device changes it’s not really that important whether it’s Spotify or apple or Amazon that are providers I think the Valu is really going to reside in the content owners and that’s really the artists and the label that’s sort of one example another example could be just you know the restaurant industry you look at businesses like a McDonald’s right whatever the company’s like a 1950 vintage business and here we are it’s you know 75 years later and you can kind of predict what it’s going to look like over time and the menu is going to adjust over time to Consumer tastes and I think the hamburger and fries is probably Forever The Beetles The Rolling Stones the hamburger and fries are forever what’s the actual process you go through the process of figuring out what the value of a company is like how do you do the research so Chipotle What attracted us initially is the stock price dropped by about 50% great company great concept athletes love it consumers love it healthy sustainable fresh food made in front of your eyes But ultimately the company’s lacking some of the systems and had a food safety issue consumers got sick almost killed the rent but the reality of the fast food quick service industry is almost every fast food company has had a food safety issue over time and the vast majority have survived and we said look such a great concept but their approach was far from ideal we start with usually reading the SEC violing companies file a 10K or an annual report they file these quarterly reports called 10 Q’s they have a proxy statement which describes kind of the governance the board structure conference call transcripts are publicly available it’s kind of very helpful to go back 5 years and kind of learn the story you know here’s how management describes their business here’s what they say they’re going to do then you can follow along to see what they do it’s like a historical record of how competent and truthful they are you it’s a very useful device and then of course looking at competitors and thinking about what could dislodge this company if it’s an industry we don’t know well we know the restaurant industry really well music industry you know we’ll talk to people in the industry we’ll try to understand the difference between publishing and recorded music we’ll look at the competitors we’ll read books I read a book about the music industry or a couple books about the industry it’s a bit like a big research project and these so-called expert networks now and you can get pretty much anyone on the phone and they’ll talk to you about an aspect of the industry that you don’t understand want to learn more about try to get a sense you know public filings of companies generally give you a lot of information but not everything you want to know and you can learn more by talking to experts about some of the industry Dynamics the personalities you want to get a sense of management I like watching podcasts if a CEO were to do a podcast or YouTube interview you get a sense of the people the kind of business we’re looking for is kind of business everyone should be looking for right a great business it’s got a long-term trajectory of growth even beyond the foreseeable distance right those are the kind of businesses you want to own you want businesses that generate a lot of cash you want businesses you can easily understand you want businesses with these sort of huge barriers to entry where it’s difficult for others to compete you want companies that don’t have to constantly raise capital and these are some of the great businesses of the world but people have figured out that those are the great businesses so the problem is those companies tend to have very high stock prices and and the value is generally built into the price you have to pay for the business so we can’t earn the kind of returns we want to earn for investors by paying a really high price price matters a lot you can buy the best business in the world and if you overpay you’re not going to earn particularly attractive returns we get involved in cases where a great business has kind of made a big mistake or You’ have a company that’s kind of lost its way but it’s recoverable we buy from shareholders who are disappointed who’ve lost confidence selling at a low price relative to what it’s worth if fixed and then we try to be helpful in fixing theany company you said barriers to entry how do you know if there’s a type of moat protecting from competitors stepping up to the plate the most difficult analysis to do as an investor is that is kind of figuring out how wide is the moat how much at risk is the business to disruption and we’re in I would say the greatest period of disrupt ability in history right technology a couple of 19-year-olds can you know leave whatever University or maybe they didn’t even go in the first place they can raise millions of dollars they can get access to infinite uh band with storage they can contract with engineers in lowcost markets around the world they can build a virtual company and they can disrupt businesses that seem super established over time and then on top of that you have major companies with multi- trillion dollar market caps working to find profits wherever they can and so that’s a dangerous World in a way to be an investor you have to find businesses that it’s hard to foresee a world in which they get disrupted in the beauty of the restaurant business and we’ve actually our best track records in restaurants we’ve never lost money we’ve only made a fortune interestingly investing restaurants a big part of it it’s a really simple business and if you get your pootle right and you’re at 100 stores you know it’s not so hard to Envision getting to 200 stores and then getting to 500 stores and the key is maintaining the brand image growing intelligently having the right systems now when you go from 100 stores to 3500 stores you have to know what you’re doing there’s a lot of complexity you know if you think about your local restaurant you know the family’s working in the business they’re watching the cash register and you can probably open another restaurant across town but there are very few restaurant operators that own more than a few restaurants and operate them successfully and the quick service business is about systems that a stranger who doesn’t know the restaurant industry can come in and enter the business and build a successful franchise now Chipotle is not a franchise company they actually own all their own stores but many of the most successful restaurant companies are franchise models like a Burger King a McDonald’s Tim Horton you know all these various Brands Popeyes and there it’s about systems but the same systems apply whether you own all the stores and it’s run by a big Corporation or whether the owners of the restaurants are sort of franchises you know local entrepreneurs so if the restaurant has scaled to a certain number that means they’ve figured out some kind of system that works it’s very difficult to develop that kind of system so that’s a moe a moe is you get to a certain scale and you do it successfully and the brand is now understood by the consumer and what’s interesting about chipot light is what they’ve achieved is difficult they’re not buying frozen hamburgers getting shipped in they’re buying fresh sustainably sourced ingredients in preparing food in the store that was the first quality of the product of Chipotle is incredible it’s the highest quality food you can get you can get a serious dinner for under 20 bucks and eat really healthfully and very high quality ingredients and that’s just not available anywhere else and it’s very hard to replicate and to build those relationships with Farmers around the country it’s a lot easier to make a deal with one of the massive food producers buy your pork from them than to buy from a whole bunch of farmers around the country that is a Big Mo for Chipotle very difficult to replicate you were talking about Moes and this kind of remind me of alphabet parent company sure it’s a big position for us it’s interesting that you think that maybe alphabet fits some of these characteristics It’s tricky to know with everything that’s happening in AI it’s interesting that you think that there’s a mo what’s your analysis of alphabet why are you so positive about it it’s a business we’ve admired as a firm for whatever 15 years but rarely got to a price that we felt we could own it because again the expectations were so high and price really matters really the sort of AI scare I would call it you know Microsoft comes out with chat GPT they do an amazing demonstration people like this most incredible product and Google working on AI even earlier obviously the Microsoft Microsoft was behind an AI that was really their chat GPT deal that gave them a market presence and then Google does this fairly disastrous demonstration of Art and the world says oh my God Google’s fallen behind an ai ai is the future stock gets crushed Google gets store price around 15 times earnings which for a business of this quality is an extremely extremely low price and our view on Google one way to think about it when a business becomes a verb that’s usually a pretty good sign about the mode around the business you know you open your computer and you open your search and very high percentage of the world starts with a Google page in a on line you type in your search Google advertising search YouTube franchise is one of the most dominant franchises in the world very difficult to disrupt extremely profitable the world is moving from offline advertising to online advertising and that Trend I think continues why because you can actually see what your ads work you know they used to say about advertising you know you spend a fortune and you just don’t know which 50% of it works but you just sort of spend the money because you know ultimately that’s going to bring in the customer and and now with online advertising you can see with granularity which dollars I’m spending when people click on the search term and end up buying something it’s a very high return on investment for The Advertiser and they really dominate that business now ai of course is a risk if all of a sudden people start searching or asking questions of chat GPT and don’t start with the Google search bar that’s a risk to the company and so our view based on work we had done and talked to Industry experts is that Google by virtue of the investment they’ve made the time the energy that people put into it we felt their AI capabilities were if anything potenti greater than Microsoft Chat GPT and that the market had overreacted and because Google was a big company Global business Regulators scrutinized it incredibly carefully they couldn’t take some of the same Liberties a startup like open AI did in releasing a product and I think Google took a more cautious approach and releasing an early version of Bard in terms of its capabilities and that let the world to believe that they were behind and we ultimately concluded they’re tide or ahead and you’re paying nothing for that potential business and they also have huge advantages think of all the data Google has like the search data the various applications email and otherwise it’s an incredible data set so they have more training data pretty much any company in the world they have incredible Engineers they have enormous Financial Resources so that was kind of the BET and we still think it’s probably the cheapest of the big seven companies in terms of price you’re paying for the business relative to its current earnings it also is a business that has a lot of potential for efficiency you know sometimes when you have this enormously profitable dominant company all of the technology companies in the post March 20 World grew enormously in terms of their teams and they probably over hired and so you’ve seen some you know the Facebooks of the world and now even Google starting to get a little more efficient in terms of their operation so low multiple for their business one way to think about the value of the business is the price you pay for the earnings or alternatively what’s the yield if you flip over the price over the earnings it gives you kind of the yield of the business so a 15 multiple is almost a 7 half% yield and that earnings yield is growing over time as the business grows compared to what you can earn lending your money to the government you know 4% that’s a very attractive going in yield and then all kinds of what we call optionality in all the various businesses and Investments they’ve made that are losing money you’ve got a cloud business that’s growing very rapidly but they’re investing basically 100% of the profits from that business in growth so you’re in that earnings number you’re not seeing any earnings from the cloud business and you know they’re one of the top Cloud Player so very interesting generally well-managed company with Incredible assets and resources and dominance has no debt it’s got a ton of cash pretty good story is there some more risk introduced by the possibilities of AI absolutely it’s a great question investing is about finding companies that can’t be disrupted AI is the ultimate disruptable asset or technology and that’s what makes investing treacherous is that you own a business that’s enormously profitable management gets if you will fat and happy and then a new technology emerges that just takes away all the profitability and AI is this incredibly powerful tool which is why every business is saying how can I use AI in my business to make us more profitable more successful grow faster and also disrupt or protect oursel from the you know the incomings it’s it’s a bit like you know Buffett talks about a great business like a castle surrounded by this really wide mode but you have all these barbarians trying to get in and steal the uh princess and it happens you know Kodak for example was an amazing incredibly dominant company until it disappeared Polaroid you know this incredible technology and that’s why we have tended to stay away from companies that are technology companies because technology companies generally the world is such a dynamic place that someone’s always working on a better version and you know codec was caught up in the analog film world and then the world changed you mentioned management how do you analyze the governance structure and the individual humans that are the managers of a company as I like to say incentives drive all human behavior and that certainly applies in the business world so understanding the people and what drives them and what the actual financial and other incentives of a business are very important part of the analysis for investing in a company one great way to learn about a business is go back a decade and read everything that management has written about the business and see what they’ve done over time you know conference calls are relatively recent when I started in the business there weren’t conference call transcripts now you have a written record of everything management is said and response to questions from analysts at conferences and otherwise you learn a lot about people by listening to what they say how they answer questions and ultimately their track record for doing what they say they’re going to do do they under promise and overd deliver do they overpromise and underd deliver do they say what they’re going to do do they admit mistakes do they build great teams do people want to come work for them are they able to retain their talent and then part of it is how much are they running running the business for the benefit of the business how much they running the business for the benefit of themselves very Senior Management matters enormously you we use the Chipotle example Steve ell’s great entrepreneur business got to a scale he really couldn’t run it the company recruit a guy named Brian nickel and he was considered the best person in the quick service industry he came in and completely rebuilt the company actually we moved the company was moved to California and sometimes one way to redo the culture of a companies just to move it geographically and then you can kind of reboot the business but a great leader has great followership over the course of their career they’ll have a team they’ve built that will come follow them into the next opportunity but the key is you know really the top person matters enormously and then it’s who they recruit you know you recruit an A+ leader and they’re going to recruit other a type people recruit a b leader you’re not going to recruit any great talent beneath them you mentioned waren Buffett you said you admire him as an investor what do you find most interesting and Powerful about his approach most of what I’ve learned in the investment business I’ve learned from Mor muffett he’s been my great professor of this business my first book I read in the business was the Ben Graham intelligent investor but fairly quickly you get to learn about Warren Buffett and I started by reading the Burkshire hathway annual reports and then I eventually got the Buffett partnership letters you can see which are an amazing read to go back to the mid1 1950s and read what he wrote to his limited partners when he first started out and just follow that trajectory over a long period of time so what’s remarkable about him is one duration right he’s still added at 93 two takes a very long-term view but a big thing that you learn from him investing requires this incredible dispassionate on emotional quality you have to be extremely economically rational which is not something you learn in the jungle if you think about the surviving the jungle the lion shows up and everyone starts running you run with them that does not work well in markets in fact you generally have to do the opposite right when the Lemmings are running over the cliff that’s the time where you’re facing the other direction and you’re running the other direction I.E you’re stepping in you’re buying stocks at really low prices you Buffett has been great at that and great at teaching about what he calls temperament which is this sort of emotional kind of or unemotional quality that you need to be able to dispassion look at the world and say okay is this a real risk are people overreacting people tend to get excited about Investments when stocks are going up and they get depressed when they’re going down I think that’s just inherently human you have to reverse that you have to get excited when things get cheaper and you got to get concerned when things get more expensive I think it’s something you kind of learn over time a key success factor is you want to have enough money in the bank that you’re going to survive you know regardless of what’s going on with volatility and markets people who one you shouldn’t borrow money so if you borrow money you own stocks on margin markets are going down and you have your livelihood at risk it’s very difficult to be rational so key is getting yourself to a place where you’re financially secure you’re not going to lose your house right that’s kind of a key thing and then also doing your homework stocks can trade at any price in the short term and if you know what a business is worth and you understand the management you know it extremely well it doesn’t bother you when a stock price goes down or it has much less impact on you because you know as Mr Graham said you the shortterm the market the voting machine you have a bunch of lemmings voting One Direction that’s concerning but if it’s a great business doesn’t have a lot of debt and people going to just listen to more music next year than this year you know you’re going to do well so it’s a bit some combination of being personally secure and also just knowing what you own and over time you build calluses I would say I’m a pretty emotional person or I feel pretty strong emotions but not an investing I’m remarkably immune to kind of volatility and that’s a big advantage and it took some time for me to develop that so you weren’t born with that you think no so being emotional do you want to respond to volatility yeah you can learn a lot from other people’s experience it’s one of the few businesses where you can learn an enormous amount by reading about other periods in history following Buffett’s career the mistakes he made if you’re investing a lot of capital every one of your mistakes is going to be big right so we’ve made big mistakes the good news is that the vast majority of things we’ve done have worked out really well that also gives you confidence over time but because we make very few Investments you know we own eight things today or seven companies that matter if we get one wrong it’s going to be big news and so the other nature of our business you have to be comfortable with is a lot of public scrutiny a lot of public criticism and that requires some experience call it that the only person who can cause you more harm than a thief with a dagger is a journalist with a pen is there some general advice from the things you’ve been talking about that applies to Everyday investors sure never invest money you can’t afford to lose where if you lost this money it you know you lose your house Etc so being in a place where you’re investing money that you don’t care about about the price in the short term it’s money for your retirement and you take a really long-term view I think that’s key never investing you borrow money against your securities the markets offer you the opportunity to leverage your investment and in most worlds you’ll be okay except if there’s a financial crisis or you know a nuclear device gets detonated God forbid somewhere in the world or there’s a unexpected war or you know someone kills a leader unexpectedly 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 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 that seems tend to be the ones that panic in the downturns get overrated 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 a very educational let’s put it that way for learning about this business you mentioned eight companies but what do you think about mutual funds for everyday investors that diversify across a larger number of companies I think there are very few mutual funds there thousands and thousands of mutual funds they’re very few that earn their keep in terms of the fees they charge they tend to be too Diversified and too shortterm and you’re often much better off just buy an index fund 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 will danoff at fideli have a great record over a long period of time you know the famous Peter Lynch Ron Baron 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 on basically what would be the leap for an everyday investor to go to investing in a small number of comp companies like 2 3 four five companies I even recommend for individual investors to invest in you know a dozen companies you don’t get that much more benefit of diversification going from a dozen to 25 or even 50 you know 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 you understand 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 you know 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 you know go there every week and you can monitor is anything changing how these new how chicken Alp store is that a good upgrade from the basic chicken you know the drink offerings improving are the stores 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 probably do much better than your typical mutual fund yeah it’s interesting consumers that love a thing are actually good analysts of that thing or I guess a good starting point by 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 DC now everything’s available online conference call transcripts are free AI you know you have unlimited data all kinds of message boards and Reddit forums and things where people are you know sharing advice and everyone has their own by virtue of their career or experience they’ll know about an industry or a business I would take advantage of your own competitive advantages

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