Portfoliomanagement
A long interview with two IP partners (in Portuguese – we’re having it translated and will post it here), Cristiano Fonseca Filho and Fred Trigueiro. The talk was very informal and spanned IP’s pioneering story in the Brazilian financial market. It gives insight into how we apply some of the most important aspects of our [...]
There’s timing and there’s packaging. The second is easier to control… This WSJ story highlights the success story of GLD, the Gold ETF, and the potential risks caused by its very success. By the way, we’ll have more on “packaging” in a future post.
Read more about The success story of Gold… the ETF, mind you
Quick post: Since Mr. Paramés was featured in the NY Value Investing Congress (he’s the 4th one down) and we respect him a lot, we decided to also post this recent interview with him (in Spanish!). As for older but still relevant links, he was also featured in the November 2006 issue of Value Investor Insight and in an October 2006 interview with hedgeweek.
Read more about Interview with Bestinver’s Francisco Paramés
Quick post. This long May 2010 interview with Seth Klarman (by WSJ’s Jason Zweig) is pretty interesting in all regards. While we don’t necessarily agree with everything he says or does, long-time readers of our reports have probably noticed by now that we like to quote his no-B.S. lines – and his famously out-of-print book is a perennial reading list favorite here.
Mr. Druckenmiller has over 30 years’ experience, his Duquesne Capital manages $12 billion and since 1986 never had a down year (although it is down 5% YTD). He worked with George Soros (while still managing Duquesne!) and was there for the famous British pound trade. So why quit? Interestingly, he’s “frustrated by his failure in the past three years to match returns that had averaged 30 percent annually since 1986.” Why, in his opinion, did it happen? “Managing more than $10 billion seems to challenge my long-term standard for investment performance.” A fund manager’s mandate is all about investment performance and not AUM growth – the opposite is not just wrong, it can also be self-defeating.
In a first of what we hope to be many article collections about investors we keep track of, this one is about Glenn Greenberg of Brave Warriors Capital. He’s better know as the co-founder of Chieftain Capital, but in the end of 2009 him and John Shapiro parted ways (Mr. Shapiro and two other partners left but retained the name Chieftain Capital). Being the first to be profiled in this series isn’t a matter of order of preference at all.
Gustavo Loyola, a former Brazilian Central Bank chief, writes an op-ed today about the increasingly irresponsible legislative pieces enacted or proposed by our Congress. He goes back to the ages-proven concept that success breeds failure and vice-versa and applies it to Brazil’s current situation. We’ve been mentioning these risks in our latest reports and it’s part of our reasoning to keep a relatively high cash stake. While it has been somewhat tempered since our last report, some prices still imply a “blue-sky” scenario that we’re not comfortable with.
Read more about Brazilian Congress vs. fiscal responsibility
Now that the U.S. Healthcare bill has passed and just been signed into law, it’s interesting to notice the amount of noise generated in the past two days. Newspaper and sell-side reports are booming with articles and so-called analysis of what this means to investors, but right now it’s probably better to “do something by doing nothing”.
God has spoken, go out and read it. The core is dedicated to welcoming and explaining BRK to its new shareholders acquired through BNSF, so no big news. Buffett complains more about the media and investments analysts, on how they distort things, causing losses to the less diligent and recommends that everybody form their own knowledge base and opinion. Hope he lives to see that happening, but we sincerely doubt it.
We worried about implied expectations for 2010 in our Q4 2009 report and said that we were increasing the percentage of cash in our funds. Enter Greece and other European peripheral countries. Macro issues are not our core by any measure, and our point is just that volatility, that friend of the long-term investor holding a lot of cash, is on the rise. The post collects, as food for thought, interesting FT articles on Greece’s and Europe’s woes.
