Well, folks, it's finally that time again that we get the 13 F
filings from the Super investors.
That means that we get to look inside of their portfolios and
see what they're doing. For example, we just heard news
that Warren Buffett, the big man himself, he bought Google and he
bought quite a bit of Google. This is a a big move in his
portfolio. The stock is up around 5% on the
day from that news and we're going to be discussing it.
We're going to be breaking it down.
Plus it doesn't just end with Berkshire.
We have many more hedge fund managers and big time investors,
super investors to go over, including Bill Ackman, what he's
doing with his portfolio. We have Devcantesario with
Valley Forge Capital Management. We have Terry Smith, Poland
Capital, Chuck Akrey's firm, Value Act Capital, and Josh
Terasov. These are all elite terror
investors, the very top of the very top, and we're going to be
going over all of their portfolios.
In this video, we'll be giving some explanations, some context
and analysis, and we'll be looking over all at the trends.
What are these investors buying and what are they selling?
So we'll be going over all of this in this episode.
And then we also have our fail of the week, which in this case
is a post from Bill Ackman where he's giving relationship and
dating advice, telling people that all they really need to do,
all guys need to do is go up to women and ask, may I meet you?
That's right. May I meet you?
This is caught the Internet by storm.
Many people are trying out Bill Ackman's advice.
May I? Meet you.
May I meet you? Be going over many examples of
people using the Bill Ackman pick up line in the fail of the
week. So this is a stacked episode.
We have a ton to get into before we do, I just have to say a
quick thank you. Thank you everyone for sharing
Qualtrim. I I know a lot of you have tried
it. We've literally had thousands of
new people join as members of this over just the past couple
of weeks. So thank you for trying it out.
If you haven't, you can try it out risk free with a 7 day free
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qualtrm.com. Now as we kick things off, we
get into the 13 F filings and we're going to start off with
the big man himself, Warren Buffett.
We heard the news, you probably heard it by now, but he bought
Google stock and he likely bought it with his team.
There's going to be people that point out that Warren Buffett
has, he's hired lieutenants and people that follow his investing
methodology. They follow the Warren Buffett
way of buying stocks. But overall, Warren Buffett
still today is the CEO of Berkshire.
He's stepping down and this is the last move that he did as
ACEO is he bought a very large position in Google.
Now, when we look at overall the activity, we can take a look at
the size of this. Right now it is A 1.62%
position. So he went from not owning
Google to buying it as almost a 2% position.
Now you may scoff and say, well, it's just a 2% position, right?
That's not a big deal. OK, This is not a 2% position of
your 500K portfolio. This isn't like 50 grand.
This is a lot of money. Look at how much money they
manage just in their public account, $267 billion, over 1/4
trillion. So when you're talking about
percentages, every tiny fraction of a percent is a lot, but
buying almost 2% is a ton. This is a massive position to to
buy as a new company. It's a meaningful one.
In fact, this immediately bumps it to around a top ten position
in the public portfolio. So they bought this stock.
They bought a meaningful amount. Warren Buffett for sure was
informed about this purchase. He allowed it if not decided on
it, and this was the final thing he did before stepping down as
ACEO. This is overall an incredibly
meaningful buy and I will just mention as one of the many
Google investors, I just can't help but be happy about this.
Isn't it a great feeling to be early on something to, to get
into a stock well before others do?
We got into the Google a long time ago.
We were in it before Bill Ackman was.
We beat him in the stock and then we even bought more after
Bill Ackman. We recognize this stock was at a
great stock and so many community members, so many
people here piled money into Google once, once it came
evident, once it became known that Google was not going to be
disrupted by Chachi BT and especially once it became known
that they're not going to have to sell Chrome.
This stock has been a solid buy. It's been the best risk adjusted
stock in the market for the past six months.
I've continually highlighted it. And so having this play out this
way where we have Warren Buffett giving the final stamp of
approval buying this company, doing so even symbolically
before he leaves Berkshire is a really good feeling.
And you have to just, you just have to be happy about it.
If you are in Google, and I don't know why you would not be
if you're not in Google today, I don't know what your reasoning
is. I, I can't, I don't know what's
going through your head. Like what, what are you missing
with Google? It's a low valuation, multiple
huge catalysts. They're, they're at the
forefront of like everything with AI, they're diversified.
They have low downside. Like I don't know why you
wouldn't be in Google today. I, I don't know what that
argument would be, but for us that are the many investors that
have identified this one, I think it's just a time to feel
good about this buy to celebrate it.
And I don't believe this story is over yet.
When we look at Google stock, it's a company that I just think
is going to keep going. Keep in mind Berkshire entered
this position last quarter. Google wasn't that much, you
know, it's up a bit. It's up like 10 or 15%.
So they're in the green already. They're making money, but that
was like like 24250. Now it's at 280 to 290 and we
got the Buffett bump. We got 4.61% on the day.
Let me give you a spoiler alert, OK, Google isn't done.
It's not done today. The investors that we're going
to go over that are selling their position.
They're trimming their Google position.
That's a mistake. They're going to be regretting
that. I believe in just a couple
years, because the way that this stock evolves, and I've, I've
done this for a long period of time, when you know, a stock has
erased the downside, when the downside in terms of competition
has fizzled out and there's ample catalyst for real growth
in the future and diversification.
When the the story gets more evolved over time, that's a
stock that's going to go higher. Google has multiple catalysts.
Not only does it have a chance for multiple expansion from a 27
PE to a 30, but it also has enormous earnings per share
growth. It's at the forefront of AI.
The robotaxi is a real thing. They're really executing on
that. It's a valuable business.
They have Gemini, they have, they are vertically integrated,
they have cloud, they have YouTube.
This company has it all. They have the world in their
hands. Sundar Pichai is beholden to no
one. He doesn't have to ask
permission for anything. He can do whatever he wants.
Like Google is winning in every category and again, it's at a 27
PE reasonable valuation. Berkshire is not a company,
they're not an investment team. They don't hold an investment
philosophy where they only buy stuff because they intend to
hold it for a month. It's true that not everything
they buy works out. Sometimes they buy stuff and
they end up saying oh that wasn't the Best Buy.
Like anyone else, they're not perfect, but they buy things for
the long term. They, especially when focusing
on a buy as significant and meaningful as Google, an almost
2% position, they're going to buy that one for the significant
long term. So I think they're establishing
this is another core position in the portfolio, one like
Coca-Cola, American Express or you know, all the different
companies that they buy. And they're going to continue
holding this one for a long period of time, so long as the
fundamentals continue to develop, which I believe they
will. So this is such a, a validating
thing to have the Berkshire crew buy this stock, to have Buffett
do this at the end of his career.
I think it's just awesome. When we look at My Portfolio,
I've been an advocate of Google for some time now.
I have it in both portfolios and I'm not someone that I just
talked about a company because it's going up and it's great.
I put my money where my mouth is.
When I became bullish on Google, I bought the stock with a lot of
money. I made it my most.
It was one of my biggest buys that I've done.
In the passive income portfolio alone, Google has a $104,500
position, 38,500 of that being gains.
So over 100K in this portfolio, 38,000 in gains.
But then we hold it again in the story fund.
If I flip over and load the story fund, we have it right
here. We have Google again $68,000
position, $40,000 in the green. So it's a $78,000 gain on a
position that's now $173,000. So big position, but almost 80 K
in the the green. I believe that today Google is
my biggest winner in My Portfolio, the biggest gainer
overall and I haven't sold a single share.
Now again, there's going to be other investors that we
highlight today. We go over different portfolios
and many of them are are kind of taking a a victory lap and
they're selling out of Google. They're reducing their position
and I think that's a mistake. I agree more with the Buffett
team that last quarter is a great time to get in.
But I believe that there's going to be more of a story arc over
the next five years. Google should have significant
alpha over the next five years. So with this being really the
only meaningful move, there's other things that they did.
Of course, they're always changing around a few things
here and there. Most of these are very small
moves. Google's the biggest buy by far.
Other than that, they they took a little bit more gains in their
Apple position. Even though Apple stock has done
well and there are some catalysts for Apple, it's not
nearly as good as Google. Apple's at a higher valuation
and it's growing slower, but the Moat is less than less than
question. Google is at a much lower
valuation, growing much faster. And I believe the Moat is very
strong for Google as well. But Google does have more
opinions about the Moat than Apple.
So Apple's just trading at a higher valuation because there's
less question about the future, the future disruption of the
company. So I love the trade.
I love Warren Buffett doing this.
They've talked about Google for a long time.
There is Berkshire meetings in 2019 when they're asked about
why they didn't buy it. And Charlie Munger just said it
was a mistake. They said that they they know
they've been paying Google to do these ads for GEICO or they pay
like $10.00 an ad, a click. And then when it, when somebody
clicks through, they buy GEICO service.
They earn a lot of money over the lifetime of that customer.
So it was good for GEICO, but they looked at the Google side
and they thought that click must have cost Google nothing.
So we just paid them $10 per click.
When they generate those clicks cost Google nothing.
What a great business. Since that time period in 2019,
what has happened? Google's no longer just a
company that offers links that you pay for clicks.
Now they're at the forefront of AI, quantum computing, the other
bets that they're wasting money on.
Many people thought they're wasting money.
Yeah, that was a significantly good move.
Sundar Pichai invested in robotaxi and figured it out
where Apple did not. So they have the robotaxi
business figured out. They also have YouTube that's
growing. It's going to double in size, I
believe over the next five years.
You have Google Cloud that's going to over double in size
over the next four to five years.
They have vertically integrated the TP US.
They've been investing in that so they're not as reliant on
NVIDIA. There's so many good things
going for this company. Wonderful by by Warren Buffett
and the team in terms of who gets the credit.
When you're the CEO of the company, the company that's
known for being stock pickers it all, it ultimately comes back to
you. This is the one.
This is the area where even if his Lieutenant came up with the
buy, even if they're the one that had the idea, Buffett owns
the buy, just like he did with Apple.
Apple originally wasn't Buffett's idea, but he's able to
identify whether or not something is good or something
is bad. He's able to identify whether an
idea is one that he wants to embrace, and he's obviously
chosen to embrace this idea. So I believe whether or not you
give credit to the lieutenants or Buffett, who cares?
Buffett is the executive. This is a final move that he
did, and I think it's a great one.
Now moving on, we get to Bill Ackman with Pershing Square
Capital. Let's go ahead and take a look
at his. I always like looking at what
Bill Ackman's doing because he runs a fairly concentrated
portfolio. He has companies that in many
cases, I really like the companies he's invested in.
So we look at the portfolio overall and I love the
construction of it. We have Uber as the very top.
This one has been a home run for him.
He invested in it early this year and it's gone up quite a
bit this year. So good investment by Bill
Ackman. Then we have Brookfield Corp.
This is another one that I think is a fairly risk, a low risk
investment. It's more like an infrastructure
play, a diversified investment. I think it'd be really tough to
lose a lot of money on BN. This one's also done fairly well
this year, keeping up with the market.
We have Howard Hughes Holdings as a 10% position and then we
get into Google. Now his Google position is
really big. It's actually bigger than Howard
Hughes because you have GOOG, which is 10.5, then you have
GOOGL which is 8. So as an 18% Google position
overall. And the one trade that he did,
if we look at his activity this quarter, we can see that he
trimmed a bit of Google. He trimmed about .86% of his
portfolio, which is 500,000 shares.
This is something that you'll see hedge fund managers do from
time to time. They do have some liquidity
needs. For example, of people are
pulling money out of the fund, they have to raise that cash
somewhere, so they are forced to sell a stock.
Now I can't prove that that's what happened here with Google,
but I believe there's a good chance it was either that or
some rebalancing. I think that overall taking
gains in Google today is mistake.
Google's a company that I still believe is going to go much
higher. It's going about $300 per share.
I think the company today is worth at least $320 per share.
So there's still some buffer room.
The stock is still undervalued. If I was looking at Bill
Ackman's portfolio, I would sooner sell a few companies in
the portfolio and trim them out of it than Google.
Bill Ackman holds a very concentrated portfolio of
incredibly high quality companies.
You can talk about valuation and which one is possibly the best
idea, but when you have these type of stocks concentrated in a
portfolio, the odds are really good of you outperforming the
market. Especially with the type of
companies that he invests in, these platform companies like
Uber, infrastructure companies, high margin data companies.
He also likes restaurants where he has a special knack for
finding ones at a good valuation.
Bill Ackman has been hit by the Chipotle holding.
He has been reducing his Chipotle holding all throughout
2023-2024 and early 2025, and he probably wished he reduced it
even more because Chipotle has been clobbered.
It's given up so much gains over the past year.
So that's one where I think he's probably the most disappointed
in his portfolio. Overall, this is a very strong
portfolio. Again, I don't like to sell on
Google. I think he should have picked a
different company, but I still like what I see here.
Now moving on, we get to TCI Fund.
TCI is the children's investment fund and it's ran by a guy named
Chris Hohn who is one of these legendary super investors.
Because you may feel that your portfolio isn't properly
diversified if you don't hold more than like 7 holdings.
And again, your portfolio may be $1,000,000 or 500K or whatever
stage react in your investment cycle.
They continually grow over time. But imagine that your portfolio,
imagine your portfolio was over $50 billion and you held.
Let's see how many holdings 123456789, 9 positions and $53
billion. That's how concentrated and how
confident Chris Hoen is in his portfolio and in these
positions. Now how can you do that?
How can you comfortably and I think with the even level of
prudence, put that much capital into that few investments?
Well, the way that he does that is he does not take risk.
The risk per position is so low, the company's moats are so wide,
the company's business models are so indestructible that he's
able to put 50 plus billion dollars into only these nine
positions. So that's the calculation.
Chris Ho knows if you don't have a diversified portfolio with
dozens of positions, you have to be very careful for every
position you take. Now, when we look at the overall
portfolio, you have a lot of the usual suspects here.
There's some outliers, but there's a lot of the usual
suspects. You have the Visas, the
Microsofts, the Moodys, the S&P Globals, the Canadian Pacifics.
He loves the railroads. The biggest position by far, a
27% waiting is in GE Aerospace and we'll get to that one in a
minute. When we look at overall the
trade, you'll note that the trade that he does here, the
biggest one by far, is he trims about half of his Google
position. So he just chopped Google in
half last quarter. Now Google again has come up
quite a bit from last quarter, the past three months, it's up a
decent amount. So in hindsight, in a short term
hindsight, this was a mistake. You can do some hindsight
analysis, but I think that misses the point of what Chris
Hohn does with his investment thesis.
When I try to look at what Chris Hohn actually does, the way that
he invests, he invests again by reducing risks per holding next
to 0. It's not perfectly 0, but it's
as close to 0 as it gets. So if there's any position at
all that shows any level of risk, he's going to get rid of
that company. He's going to, he's going to
chop the position in half. He's going to cut it down.
Not even if the risk is played out, not even if it's real, not
even if it's, you know, played into the fundamentals.
He's going to get out before that.
Even if he believes there's any risk growing in a stock at all,
he will exit the stock. And he's outlined this before.
Here is a recent interview he did.
He talks about his overall portfolio and he mentions that
Google is the most risky stock in its portfolio.
Maybe our most risky investment, one of our smallest investments
as a result, it's it's and where we have some level of protection
because it there are businesses like YouTube and and and their
cloud business which represent half the market cap.
It isn't all search, but search is is critical and and so can
they out innovate competition. Yeah, there's a risk of search
fragmenting, you know as competitors come in and try to
but it's a question mark. We don't think so.
We think they have a lot of advantages of their data to have
to offer higher quality search results, but competition is
increasing. He.
Acknowledges the greatness of Google.
He says that they're diversified.
He says that they that he believes they have a lot of data
advantages. But notwithstanding that, he
says there is a question mark. Competition is increasing in
this very lucrative high margin, valuable space of Google search.
And for him, this calculation is different than most investors.
He doesn't like battleground stocks.
He doesn't like stocks where there's big disagreements or big
question marks of how how things may turn out.
Even though he believes that Google's likely to do really
well, it's most likely to turn out really great.
He just won't take any risk with any type of battleground stock.
So as Google starts to show any level of competition in one of
their core businesses where they historically didn't have as much
competition, Chris Hohn just chops that position.
He's chopped it nearly in half, and it looks like he put most of
that capital in Visa, which is a stock that's not a battleground
stock. There is no big unknowns or
question marks with Visa. So Chris Hohn puts his money in
that and he feels comfortable. He can sleep easy.
He doesn't have to figure out the technological differences
between Google and a perplexity or open AI.
He doesn't have to care about that.
He knows in Visa, there's just no question marks.
And that's his investment philosophy.
He's willing to give up a little bit of upside to make sure his
portfolio has no question marks in it.
And again, that's something that's unique to Chris Hone.
So while I fundamentally disagree with the sell on
Google, you know how bullish I am on the company.
I also respect what he's doing with this portfolio.
I respect his investing philosophy.
And I realize that he's in a different category managing $50
billion than I am managing even a million plus dollars, very
different levels. He's managing other people's
money. He's being far more conservative
with it. So this is part of the reason
that TCI has done so well. It's beat out so many fund
managers. It is concentrated, it's a low
risk, but it's in high return capital companies, very good
investment philosophy. And I believe that puts him as
the top tier S tier of investors.
One of the companies he continues to focus on his GE
Aerospace. There's a business breakdown on
this stock that I think is great.
That goes over it, but I want to cover this one in more detail in
the future as well. The basic summary of GE
Aerospace and the reason that the stock has gone up so much.
It's been such an incredible performer for Chris Hohn over a
long period of time. Look at the performance of this
stock. It's just left out of the
conversation. It's up 500% over the past five
years. Year to date, it's up 80%, but
you're not hearing about it on CNBC or other places.
And part of the reason why is because it's, it's one of these
companies that's a little bit lesser focused on.
It's not in this AI battle. But GE actually has a lot of
similarities as an ASML. I feel like my investment in
ASML is very similar to the investment in GE.
We can look at ASML today and we'll, we'll talk about this one
in the future. It's not up as much, it's up
4546% year to date, but it it's very similar in thesis.
And that is that they make equipment, they make things that
are so difficult to manufacture, that takes such a big history
and knowledge base, so many, so many learnings over so many
years, so many unique partners and exclusive relationships that
it's so difficult for other competitors to create the thing
they did. Most of them don't even try.
They know that if you try to compete with GE Aerospace,
you're going to burn a ton of capital in the process.
And GE is a company that makes things that are so complicated,
these aerospace engines, no one else can do it.
And they have a diversified customer base.
They can sell them to lots of different airlines and different
people that want them O their customer base is diversified.
The product they solely own. It's very similar to an ASML
type of relationship. Very well done by him and I
think also a great buy into Visa.
I think American Express, Visa MasterCard are all wonderful
buys today. They've all been fundamentally
doing great this year. But I believe that Visa,
MasterCard have more upside today now with Chris Hoenn
dramatically trimming his Google position, saying that it's more
risky than any other stock he owns.
I do think that he's wrong here. And I, I think it's worth
highlighting that even the smartest, brightest minds, the
best investors can be wrong on big decisions like this.
And Chris Hoen is somebody that has been wrong before.
I don't highlight this to criticize him, but just to give
some context that we make, the judgement calls that we make.
And in some cases we can be off on things.
Chris Hoen back in 2022 wrote a letter, an open letter to
Google, to the executives of the company, the board of directors.
This was November 15th, 2022, where he he addresses Sundar
Pichai directly, saying that they're a significant investor.
They're expressing their views that the cost basis for Alphabet
is too high. The management needs to take
aggressive actions. The company has too many
employees. The cost per employee is too
high. Management should publicly
disclose EBIT margin targets and substantially reduce the losses
in other bets and increase share buybacks.
He goes through all of this. He says that the company's just
hiring way too many employees and he gives data of the, the
growth in the compounding of hiring different employees.
He says the compensation for these employees are way too
high. And again, he he goes through
and gives charts of how much Google's compensating their
employees compared to other companies.
And then finally he goes into the other bets.
This is where he gives a criticism for Waymo and all of
this. This entire letter was entirely
wrong. Every bit of advice that Chris
Hoen had was wrong. Now again, this isn't just to to
bash Chris Hoen. I think he's one of the best
investors, top tier. I have immense respect for him
and his beliefs even in this case were were very justifiable.
In fact, I believed I agreed with a lot of the criticisms
here. But it shows how much time can
change opinions on things. For example, the first argument
that he made was headcount is too high.
The reason that Google accelerated the headcount, and
this is something that the Information did a report on, the
reason it accelerated at a 20% Kegar was because of Google
Cloud. Google needed rapid increases in
employees. They needed to compensate them
to get the best of the best. SO Google spent their huge cash
pile. They spent that.
They have enough money to buy anything they want.
So they're not at a lack of capital.
They were at a lack of employees and a lack of talent.
They have money to solve those problems.
So Sundar intelligently made the calculation that we're not going
to be cheap on our employees. We're not going to try to
underpay them and get second tier, third tier employees.
We're going to hire aggressively.
We're going to hire the best. We're going to pay them whatever
we need to get the best employees.
So what did he build from all these employees?
Google Cloud, which has Gemini and DeepMind and the TP use
everything that comes along with that.
That requires a lot of employees.
This has been one of the best decisions Sundar has done is
hiring all these employees, getting that running, and now
they have an amazing cloud business attracting enormous
amounts of revenue and clients and growing the MO of Google,
diversifying itself from Google search.
So the first criticism that Chris Hung gives turned out to
be wrong. The employee count was not too
high given the situation. They weren't paying people too
much given the situation. Although there was some waste at
the company and some ways to trim like there is any big
company. Sundar Pichai had a meaningful
reason to hire aggressively and pay aggressively.
The next thing that he was completely wrong on was the
Waymo Other Bets. He says the biggest component of
Other Bets is Waymo. Unfortunately, enthusiasm for
self driving cars has collapsed and competitors have exited the
market. Ford and Volkswagen recently
decided to shut down their self driving car venture saying
quote, we looked at it in every way we could and we just don't
see profitability. A long way out.
Waymo has not justified its excessive investment and its
losses should be reduced dramatically.
So he's calling for instead of Google to be building Waymo
again. This is in 2022.
He's telling them to shut down Waymo.
Stop losing money in that little endeavor and instead buy back
shares. That's what you should do,
Sundar. Don't invest in Robotaxi, just
buy back a few more shares now. What do you think has moved the
stock more for Google over the next three years?
The explosive accelerated growth of Waymo or what could have been
saved, which is around $2 billion in share buybacks, maybe
buying back another .2% of shares outstanding.
Obviously, Waymo has been a way bigger contributor to share
price improvement. They've generated 10s, if not
hundreds of billions of dollars worth of value worth of market
cap in Google by investing in Waymo and ignoring the letter of
Chris Hohn. Cause Sundar Pichai knew that
even though Ford couldn't figure it out, even though these other
companies like Apple couldn't figure it out, we know how we
can get the job done. So Waymo's now expanding to all
different cities. It's expanding on freeways.
It's going into airports. They have path to profitability.
They're already on a per unit basis almost profitable in
California. There's so many good things
coming from that. And the the reason that I
highlight this again is to show that even though he's selling
out of Google, he's had takes on Google.
They haven't been accurate before.
And I think that this is another one that Google's more risky
than these other companies, I think is just frankly not true.
So even though I have great respect for Chris Hoen, I, I
think that overall his portfolio is fantastic.
I just wanted to point this out now.
Next, we have one of my favorite super investors, which is of
course, Dev Cantosario from Valley Forge Capital.
He's someone that I just see eye to eye with.
We agree on a lot. I don't agree with him on
everything. There's a time period where he
sold out of Amazon towards the bottom.
I didn't love that, but he bought into it and that one did
great. And that's the story of Valley
Forge Capital Management. Even the mistakes that Dev makes
are not that big. He usually makes up for it like
in the next trade he makes way more money than the mistake he
made. It's been the story of an
investor that focuses on extraordinarily high quality
companies. High quality meaning super wide
moats, high returns on capital. They have very capital efficient
business models. Not a lot of money spent on
stock based comp, not a lot of money spent on CapEx.
He invests in these companies that have a lot of pricing
power. He says that pricing power is
the key to a high quality company, the ability to raise
prices consistently above the rate of inflation.
And he also loves data centric companies, ones that just sell
something that has 0 marginal cost.
It's quality after quality with no compromises in the portfolio.
So when we look at this overall, if we were to take the current
percent allocation so far, Dev Cantisari's performance year to
date is -2.3%. So the market's up 15%, the
QQQ's up around 20% or 18% or whatever it may be, and here we
have him sitting at -2.3%. That looks bad.
And many investors would look at that if they were performing
that way, and they would believe that they're doing something
wrong. They're making some big mistake.
After all, why would your portfolio go down while the rest
of the market's going up? But notice what Devcantasaria
does. Does he panic and start changing
everything with his portfolio? Does he abandoned all the
research and all the analysis that he did before?
No, he just continues to keep his portfolio virtually the
exact same if his stocks are down year to date.
If many of these stocks are down like 15 or 20% year to date, why
isn't he buying the dip? In this interview, he's asked
about his cash strategy. Listen to what he says here.
We have in our history been at much higher cash positions.
Today, we're less than 1% cash and that is a reflection of the
opportunity that we see today on a risk reward basis.
Now, that interview was a few years ago, but he's continually
reiterated the same thing. He doesn't like to hold a lot of
cash. So it makes sense that right now
he's not selling because he doesn't want to sell.
But he's also not buying because unless investors or other people
give him more cash to invest, he doesn't have some huge cash
position to deploy. Now, those are what I consider
the big investors, ones that I think are the most meaningful to
pay attention to. We have some other notable ones
that we can take a peek at. We have Terry Smith here.
I have not personally been too impressed with Terry Smith's
fund Smith. Over the past couple of years.
They have made a series of buy and sell mistakes, holding the
wrong companies, selling or buying the wrong companies at
the wrong time, selling companies right before they go
up, buying them right before they go down.
We've seen this happen and performance has suffered on a
relative basis. I have, I haven't been impressed
with Terry Smith's moves for some time and this is another
quarter where I leave wondering why he's making the decisions he
is. Next up, we have pulling
capital. Now this isn't like a single
investor. This is their growth fund and
they have a ton of managers. It's a whole investment team.
It's really a big institution. They do a lot of research.
They have like multiple portfolio managers for every
everything they do. When we look at their most
recent trades, we can take a look here, The biggest one was
buying Broadcom. So that seems a little bit like
a momentum buy. They're buying a name that's
gone up a lot. Broadcom has a lot of tailwinds
and they initiated a position or they at least added a huge
percentage to NVIDIA. So Broadcom and NVIDIA, they
want to increase exposure to the chips, play to the GPU's, and
then you have a bunch of other trades that are below 2%.
And this is what they do. They're constantly doing this
type of momentum rebalancing and they've even said in their
letters that this isn't helping with their performance all that
much. After that, we get into Chuck
Ockery with Aucry Capital Management.
Now, it's still under Chuck Ockery's name 'cause he's an
absolute legend, but the name's a bit of a a misnomer now
because Aucry, at least Chuck Ockery, is not managing this
fund anymore. He stepped down a little bit
like what Buffett's doing, and the team at Aucry Capital
Management is trying to manage it in his stead.
Now we have some reductions. They've continually been
reducing MasterCard, Brookfield, Visa, Moody's, O'Reilly, all
these companies that they've held for a long period of time.
But if we look at what they did, I actually like some of the
moves they made. I've been critical of them in
the past, but I like these most recent moves.
They built a sizable position in FICO, so they bought it during
the sell off. I don't know if they bought the
absolute low, we can't tell, but they bought FICO, which is one
of the stocks that's down this year.
They sold out of MasterCard and bought into it, which I think is
a good trade. I actually think this is a great
one. It's the first one that I've
seen this team do that. I agree 100% with it.
Next we get to Alter Rock Partners.
This is another one that has a ton of money that they manage
over $5 billion and they only have 9 positions.
So it's a a little bit like Chris Hohn to just a smaller
extent. What I see here as well, they
have added a lot, a lot of conviction to one position,
which is Amazon. I love seeing that Amazon, I
think is, is one of the two big tech companies.
The two big tech companies that I'm the most bullish on is
Google and Amazon first and foremost of those two companies.
So I love the new buy into Amazon adding 20% to the
position, making it another 5% increase.
They're doing the same thing that a lot of Google investors
are doing. I believe it's a mistake.
They reduce their Google position by 67%.
Next we get to value Act Capital.
They manage over $5 billion. They've done the opposite trade
of Altarock. They've trimmed their Amazon
position a bit, but they've also bought Mongo DB.
They bought Rocket Companies, they bought Toast, and they
bought Visa, and they added to Meta.
So they have a whole slew of companies here that they've been
buying. The most notable thing that
they've done is they've bought into Toast and they've added a
lot to Mongo DB. Those are two companies that I
think are interesting, but Mongo and Toast do not have the Moat
that I'd look for when I'm buying a new position.
Lastly, we have Josh Tarasov. This is another investor that I
like to follow. He manages a much smaller
portfolio, but I still like the trades that he does.
In this case, really all he did this quarter was he sold BAM,
which is Brookfield Asset Management and he bought
Brookfield Corporation. So investors, if you're invested
in Brookfield, you may take notice of that trade and maybe
the reasons behind it. So there we have a look at some
of the best super investors in the world, many of them buying
Google, some of them trimming the position.
We see a slight preference of Visa over MasterCard.
We also see investors buying into FICO.
But overall they're just holding to their strategies.
Their portfolios are mostly the same.
We see no widespread panic, no selling as these investors stick
to their game plan. Now moving on, we get to the
fail of the week. This time it features a post
from none other than Bill Ackman.
We just went over his portfolio, but now we're going over his his
solutions to social problems and cultural problems.
Bill Ackman is somebody that there's no problem he can't
solve, whether it's political, financial, or even in everyday
relationships. He hears about this this issue
that he describes as young men not being able to meet women.
So let's go ahead and just take a look at this post.
This is just recently. We have it from Bill Ackman
here. He says, I hear from many young
men that they find it difficult to meet young women in public
settings. In other words, the online
culture has destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet
strangers. As such, I thought I would share
a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone that I
found compelling. I would ask, quote, may I meet
you? May I meet you?
So Bill Ackman apparently would go up and ask may I meet you to
different women before engaging further in conversation.
It inevitably enabled the opportunity for a further
conversation. I met a lot of really
interesting people this way. I think the combination of
proper grammar and politeness was the key to its
effectiveness. You might give it a try.
And yes, I think it should also work for women seeking men as
well as same sex interactions. Just two cents from an older
happily married guy concerned about our next generation's
happiness and population replacement rates.
Now this went hyper viral online.
It filled my feed and I saw a lot of people immediately jump
to this advice. We have Nick O'Neill taking this
advice to heart, putting it into action immediately on the
streets of New York City. Harry is going to a woman asking
her if if he can meet her. Hi, Excuse me.
May I meet you? May I meet you?
Later, Bill Ackman suggested that we have a crisis of men
unwilling to approach women and just suggested that I say may I
meet you? OK, we'll meet later.
Noel Ackman's really fell through.
With that advice. Crazy OK, it's just so good.
This is one of the many memes shared on this, but it wasn't
the only one Let's go ahead and take a look at some others.
I spent I did scroll on social media yesterday and I will say
that this this brought me a lot of joy seeing some of the
reactions to this. We have Greg, notable account on
X. You miss 100% of the shots that
you don't take. We have Sydney Sweeney's
Instagram account. We have Greg's message right
there. May I meet you.
Best of luck, Greg. I hope it works out with Sydney
Sweeney. We have high yield Harry, a
financial account, meaning Kendall Roy on the phone talking
to someone. Yeah.
May I meet you. This is Kendall Roy from
Succession. I played by Jeremy Strong.
Great meme, great format. Good one there from High Yield
Harry. Ramp Capital with another meme.
Hey, may I meet you? This one is this one of course
is Shane Gillis on tires. That one got 24,000 likes.
So these are super viral memes. Now you probably don't want to
look like this when you ask a woman may I meet you?
Trung Fain's account says may I meet you and it has the Baron
Harkinen in one of his black mud baths.
This is from Dune. So there you have another meme.
Pretty good one solid meme from him.
Then we got Robert Stirling with the OJ Simpson car chase meme
with a bunch of police officers with a text over it May I meet
you and OJ Simpson driving away fleeing all the all the men
saying may I meet you And this is what's going on with Twitter
over the weekend. We have the real Madhu Guru
tweeting, taking a break from Gemini to ship an urgent change
to Google Calendar. And right at the top there you
can see it says may I meet you and then plus meet me.
So we even have product leads at Google over Gemini and the
calendar getting in on the fun posting memes of the Bill Ackman
pick up line. So there we have it folks.
All we have to do to solve this problem of men meeting women is
just to go up and ask, may I meet you?
That's going to be it for this episode.
Hope you enjoyed. See you in the next one.