Every three months we get to see what the greatest investors in
the world are doing with their portfolios, what they're buying,
what they're holding and what they're selling.
And we have the update. We have the 13 F filings for all
what I consider the greatest investors in the world.
In this episode, we're going to be doing an in depth review into
each of their portfolios and trades over the past three
months. The goal here is to give insight
and context into what each of these great investors are
thinking and doing. In my opinion, this episode, we
have the best list of super investors to cover that we've
ever had. Of course, we have Warren
Buffett, but we also have Bill Ackman, Terry Smith, Dev
Kantasaria, Josh Tarasoff, Pat Dorsey.
We have Polling Capital, which is a great firm.
Of course, we have Michael Bury, We have Chris Hoehn, Marc
Massey, and Chuck Aukri. That is 11 super investors, the
most we've ever covered in a single episode.
We have a lot to get into. Let's go ahead and start off
with the big man himself, Warren Buffett.
When we look at Warren Buffett's trades, one thing that we always
have to keep in context is that Warren Buffett always plays the
long game. He builds things to last.
He doesn't take any chances. The reason that he's had a
record that goes 40 years without any disaster or any real
problems with his companies is because he never takes big
risks. And by big risks, he never takes
things that could potentially destroy his firm, destroy his
company. He never over levers.
He never gets himself in the trouble.
He builds things to last. So when we look at his
portfolio, his stock portfolio in and of itself is worth around
$266 billion. So in and of itself, just as
publicly owned stocks are massive, it's like A S&P 500
huge company in and of itself, but that also doesn't factor in
all the wholly owned companies that he has.
So this is only around 3040% of the overall portfolio of
Berkshire. Now we can look at his current
portfolio and we see the same familiar names here.
We have Apple, American Express, Bank of America, he has Apple
and all the financials. But the first thing that I
notice is that Apple's going down in total percentage of his
overall portfolio. It used to be 40% of his
publicly traded portfolio, now it's only 26.
He's reduced Apple another 25%, which is 8.75% of his overall
portfolio. So this is a massive reduction
in shares. He continually is reducing
Apple. Why is Warren Buffett
continually reducing his Apple position?
I think the answer is simple. Apple's traded up to a valuation
that's rather high. It's richly valued with A31 Ford
PE ratio, a free cash flow yield.
That's 3%. When you factor in stock based
comp, which Warren Buffett absolutely does in its
valuations, that takes it to around 2.8%.
So the valuation has gone up for Apple.
Warren Buffett's up 5X on this holding, maybe even more than 5X
when you factor in his dividends.
So he's made a fortune on it. The valuation's higher and
Apple's growth potential is looking a bit dimmed.
It doesn't look quite as bright as it did when Warren Buffett
initially bought into it. Overall, the calculation of the
stock has flipped, and it makes sense that Warren Buffett's
taking some off the table. He doesn't want quite as much
exposed to a company with such a high valuation and with slower
growth prospects. So this is how Warren Buffett
handled his Apple position overall.
He bought into it in 2016. This is a great time to be
buying into Apple. He wasn't paying a lot during
that time period. He held it all the way
2018-2019. He trimmed the position slightly
in late 2020. That was a mistake because Apple
continued to soar up at that point, but not a big one because
he still held the majority of his stake.
Then in late 2023, he really started to trim the company.
In Q1 of 2024, he sold a bunch of the company.
This was was breaking news. Now he's sold even more and you
can see that he's cut his apple steak roughly in half over just
the past four quarters. So Buffett is dumping his apple
position. He wants out of this company.
He wants to reduce his stake in it.
He's not talking about it during his shareholder meetings, and I
think we outlined the reasons why.
Now, when we look at Bank of America, this is his next
largest trade. He sold down roughly 22% of his
stake. If we look at this over time,
this is the first major sell of Bank of America.
But again, this one doesn't surprise me that much.
I believe Warren Buffett thinks that the market, the economy,
everything's getting overheated. We can see the surging of stock
prices in the market, and I think he wants less exposure
overall. So he's selling out of these
companies with his major positions.
He's raising a ton of cash. Right now.
Berkshire has $320 billion in cash.
They're gaining something like $15 billion a year in interest.
And I think he doesn't mind that.
He doesn't mind just sitting there with a ton of Treasuries,
paying him interest, not worrying about stock prices and
what's going on with the economy.
So he's selling out of those big companies, enjoying all the
interest that he's getting on his treasuries.
Another company that he sold out of, and this one was a bit
shocking and disappointing to some investors, was his Ulta
position. Warren Buffett bought into Ulta.
It made a lot of news. It was all over social media as
a lot of people love this stock and he completely dumped the
company. It doesn't shock me that he sold
out of Ulta. It is, after all, a very niche
retailer, something that I couldn't see Warren Buffett
holding long term. But if we look at his holding of
this company, he bought into it at around 385 and sold at 389.
So this is not a good trade from Berkshire.
It was another one that really didn't move the needle at all.
Now other than that, the trades in his portfolio that stand out
are two new positions we have Domino's Pizza and Pool Court.
Now, keep in mind these are very small positions for the
Berkshire portfolio, only .06 percent, .21%, so really small
positions. But this does give these
companies the stamp of approval from Berkshire, the stamp of
approval from Buffett. It is true that it's probably
one of his employees, his lieutenants doing these buys.
But Buffett always gives the stamp of approval.
He's given the OK for these companies to make it in the
Berkshire portfolio. So that in and of itself is good
news for Domino's and Pool Corp. Now, I don't always agree with
Warren Buffett's buys. In fact, I've been a vocal
critic of many of the buys he's done, including his buy into
Paramount. That was a mistake from the
beginning. All they did was buy into to
that company and sell it much lower.
Paramount is a subscale streaming company, very troubled
company from the very beginning. So I was a vocal critic of him
buying in a Paramount as well as Ally Financial.
He bought that one right at the top of the car market.
I thought it was a mistake. And that one didn't do well for
Berkshire either. So I'm not always in agreement
of what Berkshire is buying or what Warren Buffett's buying.
But these buys into Domino's and Pool Corp, I think are both
great. I like both of them.
Domino's and Pool Corp are both compounding machines.
They are great companies with great legacies, great histories.
They have great financials. If we look at Domino's, for
example, this is the revenue line on a trailing basis,
continually growing revenue over time looks very good.
Organic growth a little slower than what I would prefer.
But with Berkshire, you don't need the fastest revenue growth.
You just need one that you're going to grow over time.
The free cash flow shows a company that was surging up
until 2020. That makes sense with the stay
at home mandate. And then since then, the free
cash flow has gone down a little bit.
Sales have come down a little bit, but now you're seeing a
resurgence. Domino's has finally normalized
and it's starting to pick up again.
And this is a super free cash flow positive company that
trades at a decent valuation. Domino's has a long history of
being a compounding machine. It is a franchise company.
They're everywhere, they're easy to order.
It's food that almost everyone likes.
So this is a company that has very high upside.
It's one that can continue compounding for years and years
in the future. When I look at the company, I
also think it has rather minimum downside.
I don't think any pizza joints going to out compete Domino's.
I think the valuation in terms of the Ford PE ratio and the
free cash flow yield are also rather low.
So there's risk in every company, but I see this one as a
great risk and reward for the Berkshire Portfolio.
Pool Corp is another one that I have to say I just like.
I like this buy into the Berkshire Portfolio.
I think it fits well. I think whoever is deciding to
do these buys is on the right track.
Now. Pool Corp's an interesting
company. If you're not aware of what Pool
Corp does, it's all in the name. This company does everything
with backyard pools. So think about your backyard
neighborhood pool. Think about the pool itself and
the construction, the materials. Pool Corp provides that.
Think about the filters and the drains and the little vacuum
machines that clean it up and the Nets to sweep Leafs and
stuff off the top of the pool. Pool Corp provides all of that.
Think about all the chemicals, the treatments, the measuring,
everything that has to do with maintaining a backyard pool.
Pool Corp provides all of that. Think about all the companies
that go out and service pools and they come up with their vans
and every single week they come in and make sure things are
running well. Pool Corp provides all of the
products that they use. Pool Corp has a monopoly on the
backyard pool. That's what this company does.
So when you're investing in Pool Corp, you're investing in the
backyard pool and whether or not that's going to grow over time,
whether the service business is going to grow.
Now, obviously they make a lot of revenue from first time
installers, so that's the biggest upfront cost.
That's when you pay like $100,000 or whatever it may be
to get a big backyard pool, but then it doesn't.
And then when you install a pool, you know there's going to
be some level of maintenance. So they make residual income
selling all these products and chemicals to all their
suppliers, all their maintainers after the pool's already
installed. So as the pool base grows, so
does Pool Corp's reoccurring revenue.
Now, obviously there's some skewedness in the revenue
growth. It grew dramatically since
COVID. People again want to have
experiences when they're locked at home and they're bored.
They start spending money in their stimulus checks and all of
that low interest rate debt that they could get.
They spent all of that on backyard pools.
I saw the same thing during the past couple of years after
COVID. I saw so many people around me
get backyard pools, low interest rates and fusion of stimulus.
You got yourself a backyard pool now that hit a peak.
Like every single pull forward of demand hit a peak and it
started to go down. And I think what Berkshire is
doing here is saying this is probably close to the end of it.
It's starting to normalize and we're going to see revenue
growth relatively soon. So we're going to get ahead of
that. We're going to invest in it now.
Once the company starts seeing revenue growth, once it starts
organically growing again, we can see the free cash flows grow
over time and it will end up growing again.
This company has a monopoly. They have the marketplace pools
are going to be a thing of the future.
I like this buy. So regarding both of Berkshire's
new buys, I like both of them. I think both of these are great.
But overall, I think the message is clear from Warren Buffett.
Right now, he's not an overall net buyer of stocks.
He is a seller. He's hoarding cash.
He believes the market's overvalued, and he doesn't buy
into hysteria. So while the rest of us are
celebrating stocks moving up every single day, Warren
Buffett's fine just holding on to his vast empire of different
companies that he's already purchased.
He's fine and having Berkshire make gains over time.
He's fine collecting interest, but he's not going to continue
paying a higher and higher price for companies.
He will not buy into the hysteria that everyone else
does. When eventually things turn
around and we see those days where the market goes down 3%
and 5% in a single day and it becomes very scary, Buffett's
going to sit there with 300 plus billion dollars in cash.
So right now Buffett is in defensive mode and overall I
think that's the right positioning from Berkshire.
Now Next up we have the activist investor turned activist
political commentator, Bill Ackman.
Bill Ackman runs Pershing Square Capital, it's a firm that he
started and the hedge fund has had rather good performance with
17% returns for the past 20 years and net of fees that beats
out the huge majority of hedge funds.
So you can think what you want about Bill's politics, but the
numbers speak for himself. He's a decent investor.
When we look at Bill Ackman's portfolio, he currently manages
around $12 billion. And one thing to note, this
shows the US holdings, it doesn't show Universal Music
Group, which is currently his largest position at around 15%.
So just imagine right at the top here, there's UMG, Universal
Music Group. That's his largest holding.
Now keeping that in mind, when we look at his most recent
trades over the past three months, his biggest trade is
buying into Brookfield Corp, ticker symbol BN.
Brookfield Corp is an asset manager and investment company.
It's a bit of a REIT and real estate company managed by the
charming Bruce Flat. If you haven't listened to Bruce
Flat, just search him on YouTube.
He's the CEO of the company. He's the one that's ran the
thing for like 20 plus years and he's made most of his investors
filthy rich in the process. The history is very illustrious
for Bruce Flat. He's had great returns for a
long period of time and he does all these specialized
investments into huge infrastructure projects that
very predictable ROI. So it makes sense that Bill
Ackman is attracted to this investment vehicle.
He's upped his stake dramatically in this company,
making it one of his largest positions.
So he bought 10% of his portfolio weight in this
company, in fact almost 11%, a big bet into BN, which is
interesting because when I look at BN and we look at the stock
price, we can look at the stock price here.
I don't know quite when he got into it, but here's the past
three months, unless he bought it right at the beginning of the
past three months, he bought it during during a stock surge.
So it looks like he's not trying to get the best deal because
this stock has been going up all year long and he just recently
bought into it sometime right around here.
So he thinks right now is a good deal.
He doesn't have anchoring bias. He doesn't think he had to buy
it here. He still thinks the future is
good. And I think Bill Ackman might be
right. Brookfield Corp likely has a
bright future. The other company that he
increased his stake in dramatically over the past three
months is Nike. Bill Ackman has a history with
Nike. He's invested in this company
before. The last time that he invested
in it, he bought it during a dip during a 52 week low.
He made a quick $100 million as a stock price just ebbed and
flowed back upwards, and he's trying to do the exact same
thing now. Nike is at a low.
If we zoom out the past five years, look at this low, it was
up to 180 back in 2021. And now the stock price is,
let's see, it's at 74. So from 180 to 74, you got the
brand logo, Nike, you got the history of Nike.
This is one he's willing to take a big swing on and put 10% of
his portfolio into the company. I think this is another decent
buy by Bill Ackman. I see why he's doing it.
It makes sense. Nike's a company to me that I
still think has a bit more risk than what Bill Ackman and other
investors think. Hoka wasn't a thing in 2019.
On shoes wasn't a thing in 2021. Brooks Skechers making a
comeback. New Balance signing a bunch of
athletes onto their shoes. There's a lot of things that
changed since 2020 that I think factor in to the stock price
decline. But overall, even with my
concerns about Nike, I still think this is a decent pick for
Bill Ackman buying this company at the price he is.
I think the risk reward is still rather good.
It's definitely a positive risk reward.
So when we look at the overall portfolio, one thing that looks
a little different here than you might think is when you combine
GOOG&GOOGL, when you combine both of that, that actually
makes it at the very top of this list.
So Google would be above Brookfield Corp here in his
total portfolio waiting since he split it between the two
tickers, it's way down here at the bottom.
But for all intents and purposes, Google is one of his
main positions right now. Then we have Brookfield Corp,
then we have Hilton Chipotle, which he didn't sell any of over
the past three months. I thought that was interesting.
He's holding on during the little dip in Chipotle, wants to
get a higher price point for the sale.
Then we have Restaurant Brands International.
I don't love this company's portfolio.
Maybe he sees something I don't. Howard Hughes Corp, that's his
own specialized deal in real estate.
And then we have Nike, Canadian Pacific and then a couple
companies that don't even make up half a percentage.
When I look at the trades of Bill Ackman, I like both of
them. I like that he's buying Nike
into weakness. I think that's a decent trade.
And I like the Brookfield Corp addition to his portfolio.
I think it's a great company with great stewardship over it.
So Bill Ackman has a stronger portfolio today than he did
three months ago. Good job, Bill Ackman.
Next up, we have the legendary British investor Terry Smith
that manages over $25 billion. And so far, his performance has
beat out the S&P 500 by a narrow margin.
But the past couple of years, he's made a series of blunders,
particularly with his cells. He sold companies at the wrong
time. He sold Amazon at a low.
He sold into it right before it took off.
He held on the PayPal too long and then sold it at a low.
So he's made a series of mistakes and he's trying to make
a bit of a recovery, trying to turn things around with this
fund. Now, when we look at Terry
Smith's latest trades, there's just not much hair.
For example, the biggest trade he made to his overall portfolio
was selling a little bit of McCormick.
He sold down 2.71%, so he sold 82% of his McCormick position.
Basically, this is a way of saying that he's dumping the
position. He wants to get out of
McCormick. Now McCormick is of course the
spice maker. The company makes all the
flavours. They're a flavour expert.
When I look at this company, it's not one that I would invest
in. And the reason why is simple.
I do a lot of at home cooking. I like cooking different meals.
And my cabinet, my spice cabinet upstairs is full of a million
brands of spices that are non McCormick.
There's so many different ones that are great from different
brands. And the truth is, I think this
company is continually losing market share.
There's so many flavour companies and spice companies.
I see them on the shelves of Costco and Target and Smith's
and Kroger's everywhere you go. They have their custom label
brands, their private label. They have third party brands
that are non McCormick. I just see more and more of that
going on. So my simple taste test here, my
sample size of the market is that this company's going to
struggle to grow with this onslaught of competition coming
in and the revenue shows that. Look at the revenue of the
company. It's barely growing.
It grew 1% over the past one year and that is of course not
inflation adjusted. So it's actually shrinking in
market share when you factor in inflation.
So I like this trade. I like that Terry Smith is
dumping McCormick and hopefully can do something else with the
money. When we look at Terry Smith's
portfolio overall, I would say it's very conservative.
He has 40 different positions. He does weight them more heavily
towards the top holdings, which are Microsoft and Meta.
And I think overall with this level of diversification, he's
not going to see dramatic outperformance of the indices.
His goal here is to protect the capital of his investors and
grow it in a stable manner slowly over time.
Now Next up, we have Dev Kantasaria, who is quickly
growing his portfolio to massive size.
It currently has a value of over 4 1/2 billion dollars.
Just a couple years ago, he's only managing $1 billion.
So he's forexed his portfolio. He's gotten more inflows from
investors as he's had spectacular market beating
results from both the QQQ and the S&P 500.
Dev Cantosari has blown it away. He's starting to make a real
name for himself. When I listen to Dev Cantosari,
I speak and execute a strategy. He strikes me as a very high IQ
individual and a very disciplined individual in
executing his strategy. It's been incredible to see what
he's really done with his portfolio.
While we have so many investors out there, ones that I'm not
covering in this video, but there's so many hedge fund
managers, they just copy the index.
They make no bets into individual companies.
They just spread out their bets amongst a ton of different
companies and basically match the index.
Dev does it differently. He makes significant
concentrated bets into companies with a deep understanding of
what the company is, the pricing power of it, and the future
value of it. The company that he did this
with over the past five years? Is Fair Isaac FICO.
This is now 35% of the Devcantesaria Valley Forge
capital portfolio, 35% Now it didn't start that way.
When we look at his most recent trades, he's starting to sell a
little bit of the company. His biggest trade was only 3%.
He trimmed 7% of his Fair Isaac position.
So he's selling a little bit. But let's go ahead and just take
a look at how he's handled this company over the years.
We look at the trading history here.
He's had this one on the radar since at least 2018.
So it's been a company that he's held around 300,000 shares of.
But then in Q4 of 2020, Dev realized something with FICO and
he wanted to own the company. What did he realize during this
critical time period? He realized that they were going
for volume. FICO was making their score
ubiquitous for 10 years, gaining market share over every other
scoring alternative. And then he realized that they
were implementing a structured pricing care that would
dramatically increase the price of the FICO score up hundreds of
percentages, making it so that their free cash flow with their
huge volume would explode. Consider if Netflix with their
280 million subscribers was capable or able to raise their
prices 5X in a single year from 16 bucks a month or 7 bucks a
month up to $70.00 a month or $100 a month.
Of course, Netflix can't do that.
Everybody would rebel. With FICO, that's essentially
what they did. They raised the prices hundreds
of percentages and nobody rebelled because the prices were
so low to begin with. Most people don't notice.
Dev Kantasaria realized that this is on the horizon because
of his studying of this company. He bought in heavily in Q1 of
2021. He continued to hold and then he
bought more and more, especially with the inflows in the company.
He got all the way up to a share count of 963,000,000 shares.
That was in 2022 and he held on to that share count through an
epic surge in price of FICO all the way until Q4 of 2024.
When we look at the prices here, he basically was buying into
FICO when it was underneath the price of $700.00 per share, and
that's when he started to sell. So as soon as FICO hit $700.00
per share, he started to trim the position just slightly
trimming 2% one quarter, 4% another quarter, 2% another
quarter only -.34% this quarter. And then this most recent
quarter is his largest trim he's done at FICO, trimming off 7.86%
of his position. So when we look at this, he is
selling every single quarter, but we look at the total sales
by comparison and he's not selling that much.
Look how much he's reducing his position.
He's only reduced it around 15% overall and the share price has
gone from $300.00 when he was first buying it up to $2000 per
share. Not only did he buy into FICO
well, but he's handled his shares and holding of it very,
very well. This should be looked at as one
of the most significant best trades ever from a super
investor. Now that he did trim his FICO
position a couple percentage points of his overall portfolio,
he moved that money mostly into ASML.
He doubled his position in ASML and then he also bought a little
bit more Moody's and A little bit more S&P Global, which I
love seeing because I own both Moody's and S&P Global.
If Dev Cantesar is buying into the company, that's another
stamp of approval that at least he thinks there's decent value
here. He also gave a nice stamp of
approval right now for ASML and it seems obvious why he's buying
the company right now. He's owned a bit of ASML and it
is in the red. Year to date, ASML has had its
demand go down as we went through a big influx.
We see the total net bookings here go down a little bit, and
Dev Kantasaria is betting on a recovery in this share price.
Now, the reason that he likes ASML, from his own words is he
says that basically right now there's a lot of AI companies.
It's hard to predict which ones are going to be the winners.
But he knows that at least ASML is going to make a lot of money
during the next 10 years supporting all these various AI
companies. Because ASML of course designs,
manufacturers and implements these highly critical machines,
these lithography machines that are critical in the production
of semi chips. So this plays a very important
role in the overall AI theme for the next 10 years.
He considers it a predictable player in that category.
Now not to be mistaken, ASML is still a very small position in
his portfolio, only 2% and other than that he still holds
relatively the same portfolio, super huge weighting towards
FICO 35%. He loves S&P Global, he's owned
this company for over a decade. He loves a MasterCard, Moody's,
Intuit, Visa, and so I think that he has one of the strongest
portfolios in the market. The only real criticism I can
think of Dev Cantisari's portfolio here is that there's
some overlapping factors with his companies.
A lot of these have to do with debt markets and credit.
So if the theme of debt markets didn't do well, if consumers
took out less debt, companies took out less debt, that would
be a headwind for his portfolio. But I just don't think that's
going to happen. Companies are going to take out
more debt, consumers are going to take out more debt.
It's just the way of the world and he's well positioned for it
Now. Next up, we have the Super
investor Josh Terasov that manages a little over $300
million. So this is a small portfolio
relative to other super investors, but I like that he
has a highly concentrated portfolio, only in nine
positions. When we look at what's gone on
with Josh Terasov over the past three months, he's done a series
of cells. He sold 8% out of his Brookfield
Corp position, 8% of his total portfolio, which is 33% of the
position. He sold 6% of his portfolio out
of the Microsoft position. He sold another 6% out of
Amazon. He sold 1.5% out of Tesla, and
so on. He didn't really do any buying
glass quarter. And what this means is that Josh
Terasov needed to raise money to pay out some of his investors.
This is called redemptions, meaning they invest other
people's money, sometimes for different reasons.
Those people want their money back.
Josh Terasov has to make sales to pay that money back.
So I don't really see this as real trading or him building his
portfolio. What I see is him selling the
companies that have done exceptionally well over the past
year. So overall, not much change
quarter over quarter for Josh Terasov.
He has a list of decent companies, but I still think his
portfolio lacks any type of meaningful structure.
He trades into companies and out of companies rather frequently.
A number of his recent trades have not great, so his trading
has given me a little bit of pause.
It's not a strategy that I would emulate now.
Next up we have the Super investor, Pat Dorsey.
He's the guy that's originally behind the Morningstar Mote
analysis where they try to dissect the different network
effects or competitive advantages that a different
company has. He's one that developed that and
now he's since gone his own way, started his own fund, and he
manages a billion dollars, so he's doing quite well for
himself. When we look at Pat Dorsey's
most recent trades, there's one that's highly questionable right
here. His biggest trade by far was
buying a 10% position, so 10% into App Lovin.
Now App Lovin is the best performing stock in the market
year to date. So in the entire S&P 500,
basically in the entire stock market, this one has done the
best, up 667% year to date. This is a company that does AI
marketing. It doesn't seem that
exceptional. But when investors really found
out about what they're doing, they started to buy it up.
Now, what makes this investment so questionable by Pat Dorsey is
the update is from the date of November 14th.
So the update is from, right. If we look at it right here,
it's from right, November 14th right there.
That's when the update occurred. So he could have bought this
company at a price of 159 or he could have bought it at a price
of 286. Did he buy it at 189 or 286?
We have no clue. We just know that he bought it
sometime 90 days before November 14th.
So we don't know whether or not this was an incredible buy that
he bought 87% lower or whether it's a buy that's brand new and
it might turn out well. But I can't really assess
whether or not this was a great buy or not a great buy when I
don't know what price he bought it.
And with the huge change in share price, that really changes
the the other trades that he did was he sold out a lot of
Smartsheet. I think he sold this position to
buy into App 11 and he sold a bit of SEM rush.
There was a time period a couple years ago where I was really
critical about Pat Dorsey. He was buying and holding and
selling everything during the wrong time, destroying his
investors money. But he's really gotten that
under control. I think he's really honed in his
strategy over the past two years.
He's held a lot of Meta, which is good.
He's bought into AutoZone lately, which I think was a
decent buy. He has Wix and now he has the
App 11 Buy. Of course, he's holding PayPal,
which this one I find a bit questionable.
But other than that, I see a list of decent companies here
and I like the most recent trades he's done.
Next up we have David Poland or Poland Capital Management.
This is more of a team effort. They have a big firm, they have
a lot of analysts, but I really like what they put together.
Right now they're managing a staggering $38 billion.
So there's a lot of trust put into these guys.
I think they're doing a wonderful job.
When we look at their most recent trades, they have made a
couple trades that I do disagree with.
One of them is selling out of sales force to buy more Apple
and Oracle. So they sold their entire sales
force position, 99.47%. So basically the entire thing
that was around 5% of their portfolio.
And they bought into Apple and Oracle.
Now I think Oracle is an interesting buy here, huge cloud
player, lots of growth, great ownership.
So I like the Oracle buy, but I don't agree with selling out of
sales force to buy Apple. When I look at sales force, it
is true that the stock price has surged up recently, so I can see
why they're doing this trade, why they've decided to take
gains out of it. But Salesforce still has a lot
of growth ahead of it. I'm not as concerned about all
the AI talk as a lot of people are.
I think Salesforce is still going to be relevant and growing
in the future. The company also trades at a
valuation that's very similar to Apple's, the same PE ratio,
around the same free cash flow yield.
But Salesforce is growing its revenue much faster and growing
its free cash flow per share much faster.
So in my opinion, and again, there's no guarantees here, but
I believe that Salesforce over the next five years is going to
outperform Apple. That would be my guess.
So I don't think this is the optimal buy and sell, but I also
don't think it's going to be overly destructive.
They have their reasons for trading in and out of companies.
The other things that they're doing is they're doing a series
of small trims and Microsoft Nike, which I think is
interesting. They're selling a little bit of
Nike right now. I don't agree with that one.
They also sold a little bit of Amazon and Google, again, other
cells that I don't really agree with.
So even though I could nitpick their trades, I think that their
strategy overall is good. The list of companies is good
and I believe that this portfolio will beat the market
over time. Now Next up, we have the Super
investor Chris Home that is one of the best.
He manages a staggering $44 billion.
The TCI fund that he runs has been consistently outlined as
one of the best performing hedge funds out of any hedge fund.
It's always towards the top and he doesn't mess around.
No messing around with this portfolio.
He only has 10 holdings and all of these companies are
incredibly powerful business models.
The one that I don't understand the most is his top holding,
General Electric. But Chris Hoen studies these
companies. He understands them.
He bought this one at a wonderful time.
He really bought it on a low. It's surged up in price, so it's
become a bigger position in his portfolio.
His other portfolio holdings mimic the small world of high
quality super investor portfolios.
You'll have some familiar names like S&P Global, Microsoft, you
have the railroads, Canadian Pacific, Visa, Canadian National
Railway, and then of course he has Google in the portfolio as
well. Overall, a very strong list of
companies. The biggest trade he made last
quarter was a very, very small trade.
He slightly trimmed his Microsoft position to buy a
little bit more Canadian National Railway.
That was it. He trimmed 1.4% of his portfolio
to buy 1%, so almost no change to his portfolio.
It's the same over the past six months.
And that's a common theme you'll see with these type of high
quality investors. The better decisions they make,
the less they have to trade and the better performance they
have. He's beat the market for a long
period of time and he's done so with very minimal trading.
He's not buying and selling companies all the time doing all
these different technical analysis techniques.
He's just buying into high quality monopolistic companies,
holding them long term. Now Next up we have the man
Michael Bury himself of the Big Short fame and the only way to
really describe his latest purchases is a big bet into
China. He bought a lot more, in fact a
huge portion more of JD, of Baidu and of Alibaba.
So he's buying more and more into Chinese retailers.
He's going where no one else wants to go.
Michael Bury is dispassionate. He likes to look for the raw
numbers. He likes to look for where he
sees a lot of value. And obviously right now he sees
it in China. Now, I have to be honest here, I
don't really like these buys because I've dealt with Chinese
stocks once, I dealt with Alibaba.
It's just so much of a headache dealing with the Chinese
government and the way that they manage their companies.
You really never know what's going to go on.
But Michael Burry prefers that risk and reward over the risk
and reward in the US with higher price equities.
So the biggest trade he's doing by far is his shift into China.
Another one that I think is notable is he likes Shift 4
payments. Shift 4 is overall a great
payment processor. They're growing in a lot of
verticals. I see their software expanding
and trying to get a bigger total addressable market.
So I like seeing that one there. But again, overall, when we look
at his current positions in the way that he's tilting his
portfolio, it's with a significant bet into China.
Another thing that we don't see in this portfolio is his
options. Michael Bury likes to exercise
options all the time. So we don't know fully what he's
doing with his investments. And This is why I'd give caution
into following Michael Bury. For the most part, it's
interesting to look at, but I think he's very difficult to
follow as an investor. Next up, we have the very
concentrated portfolio from Mark Mass.
You have Alteroc Partners. They manage $5 billion and it's
only in nine positions now. They have done a decent amount
of trading over the past three months.
They added to their Amazon position by 30%.
They sold 37% of their Visa position and they put that money
as well as an additional amount into MasterCard over doubling
the position. Now this is an interesting
trade. They are selling out of Visa to
buy MasterCard. In my opinion, both of these are
great companies but I definitely think that MasterCard has the
advantage and that is because of their international growth.
I believe MasterCard is better positioned to grow faster than
Visa. The Altarock portfolio is
similar to other high quality super investor portfolios where
they're investing the majority of their money in the same group
of exceedingly high quality companies that continue to have
very prosperous looking futures. We have the same names like
FICO, MasterCard, Visa, Moody's, Google, Google's a very common
one that we're seeing in this group of investors.
We also see, of course, Microsoft, Amazon, and this
one's unique holding. The one that makes Alta Rock
different is their top position is Transteim, so that may be an
interesting one to look into. If you like their other
positions and these ones align with your investing strategy,
and you see an investor go so heavily into one company that
you don't know as well, typically that means that you
might want to look into it, see what they see in this company.
Next up, we have the Chuck Auchry portfolio.
Now, it's important to note that Chuck Auchry himself, the
legend, is no longer managing this.
He's basically retired and he's implemented A-Team to try to do
the same things he was doing to try to implement the same
strategy. But it's very difficult to have
the same fine touch that Chuck Ockery had with his portfolio.
They managed $12 billion and since their team has taken over,
they've continually sold out of some of their best positions,
Moody's being one of them. Since around Q1 of 2023, they've
been dumping their Moody's position more and more and more.
And we see more selling of Moody's in the most recent
quarter. And no matter how hard I try, I
can't figure out why they're selling it.
Is it valuation? They usually don't sell because
of valuation, but to me, that's the only real concern.
Moody's has gone up in valuation, but typically it's
been a very strong trait of Chuck Ockery to never sell
because of valuation, to just hold on to quality companies
because decades later they'll be worth even more and they'll
generate a ton of cash flow. This is a position that right
now Chuck Auchry's team is selling out of, Dev Cantosari is
buying into. So you can see the juxtaposition
there. One of them is continually
selling out of this high quality position, another one's buying
into it. I agree more with Dev's side.
Now the company that they're buying into is Airbnb.
They added almost another 2% to this position.
I look at Airbnb and I think it's a fantastic company.
So this is one that I don't disagree with.
My pick has been Booking Holdings.
I think they have some unique advantages over Airbnb, but I
see that Airbnb has a new story to it.
It has huge network effects. They really do have a very wide
Moat company at this point in time.
It's an asset light business model and with those strong
network effects, I can see why it's attracted the team of Chuck
Ockery. My only criticism here is that
they're selling one very high quality company by another high
quality company. It's not really the best trade
in my mind. I think they should look for
other places to raise cash to buy Airbnb.
Other than that, the Chuck Ockery portfolio looks very
similar to last quarter. They have MasterCard as the
largest position, Moodys, KKR, American Tower Corp.
This is one that they've talked glowingly about for a long
period of time. The very high return on capital
from that company. We have Brookfield Corp, we have
O'Reilly, we have Visa, Roper Technologies and so on and so
forth. Even though I don't agree with
some of their recent trades, I don't think they're all that bad
and I still believe that this is a very strong portfolio overall.
So that is the final update of the Super investors across their
portfolios. A couple common themes I've
noticed is first of all, they're being very disciplined and I
would say even reserved with their buying.
They're not buying companies left and right.
They're not scooping up different companies over and
over again. What they're doing is being a
little bit conservative. They're being discerning.
They're being a little cautious with their buying.
Warren Buffett leading the charge.
They're holding an enormous amount of cash and not doing
many buys and in fact selling a little bit.
So I see overall a defensive posture.
Another common theme that I noticed is just a lot of
holding. A lot of them are just holding
on to their companies. Most of them are not doing big
sells, but they're just holding what they already own.
I've also noticed a lot of Google and this is a company
that I own. I think it's one of the few
that's at 1/2 decent valuation right now.
It's also a great company. There's some fears regarding
Google, so it makes sense that people are cautious about it
right now. But I've noticed Google and a
lot of these super investors portfolios.
So overall, there's the update. Let me know what you think.
We'll have more content in the future.
See you next time.