There’s been plenty of press coverage of the Top 25 hedge fund earners recently, of David Tepper’s $3.5 billion haul and so on. But it’s probably even more striking to estimate what portion of total hedge fund returns these guys took home. It goes like this: Last year the industry began with $1.8 trillion in […]
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2014/05/how-hedge-funds-get-away-with-it.html
Yesterday was Williams Companies’ (WMB) Analyst Day. The company gave a strong presentation across each of their divisions. It highlighted the many opportunities to build new infrastructure in response to the shale developments, especially in the Marcellus. WMB’s dividend yield is 3.3% but such is the earning power of the assets they control that management […]
The CFA’s bi-monthly magazine includes an article on the gradual mis-reporting of inflation that’s taken place over the years (“Double, Double Toil and Trouble”). Criticism of how the government calculates inflation is not new, and I included a chapter on this in my latest book Bonds Are Not Forever. For a start, it’s hard to […]
Earlier this week I was at the 67th CFA Institute Annual Conference in Seattle. It enjoyed a record attendance of over 1,800 and I have to say was one of the better organized events I’ve been at, situated in the cavernous Washington State Convention Center. One thing I particularly liked was that the networking doesn’t […]
The ham sandwich test, credit for which goes to Warren Buffett, asks whether a company you’re invested in has such a great business with such high barriers to entry that it could be run by a ham sandwich. I’m increasingly beginning to think that ADT will be subject to this test, and we’ll see how […]
The shareholder vote on Coke’s (KO) compensation plan last week was disappointing in several ways. The plan itself is overly generous to management, contemplating as it does up to 500 million of share issuance to executives depending on certain performance targets. KO’s proxy statement revealed that it could transfer up to 14.2% of the company, […]
Today’s FT has a story on the relatively weak corporate governance practiced by tech companies. Jeff Ubben of ValueAct criticized Eric Schmidt’s 2011 payout of over $100 million from Google, and features such as the dual share class (used by Google and other tech companies) were also highlighted. Public shareholders can only buy shares with […]
I don’t always agree with Paul Krugman, but in this op-ed from a couple of days ago he makes some good points about the size of the financial services industry. He’s prompted to do so by Michael Lewis’s new book Flash Boys (although Paul Krugman probably needs little encouragement to whack Wall Street). But the […]
Making short term market predictions is a fool’s errand, and consequently we don’t do it. Investing for the long run is hard enough without being confused by all the pundits on cable TV. But underneath the visible noise of market direction an interesting shift is taking place. We tend to own stocks that are less […]
