William D. Cohan’s story on Bill Ackman hit the interwebs on Tuesday, and as always, the former M&A banker got into the nitty-gritty of things and subsequently raised a few good questions about his subject matter. I don’t want to spoil it for you as it’s an intriguing piece and you can read the whole thing here, but I can’t help but share some of the story’s more colorful quotes about Ackman, his risk management skills, and his future as a fund hedge manager.
- Marc Cohodes, former partner, Copper River Partners: “I think he hits a brick wall at about 197 miles an hour…I think he’s done. I think he’s a dead man walking and he’s completely un-investable.”
- Anonymous hedge fund manager: “I think he’s proven himself incapable of managing risks. I think that’s kind of obvious at this point.”
- John Hempton, partner, Bronte Capital: “Ackman’s model has always been a huge-bet model…it’s never been more than 10 stocks. Warren Buffett’s approach is, you have four or five really good ideas. What the hell are you mucking around with your 17 best ideas for? But the second side of that is when you don’t have any good ideas, you should do nothing, and Bill’s never been very good at doing nothing.”
- Marc Cohodes, again: “When you have a media-driven business model and you don’t do much work on your companies, you’re hanging on by your fingernails, and that’s where he is.”
- Anonymous hedge fund manager (following David Einhorn’s lead): “I had my guys look at [Ackman’s numbers], and if you go through all of it . . . I think he’s returned zero.”
Funny enough, Ackman may still have the last laugh here. As regrettable as his performance has been, as Cohan points out, the erstwhile Wall Street golden boy managed to secure $4 billion in permanent capital by selling Pershing Square Holdings shares in Amsterdam back in 2014, so no matter how bad he does, he’ll probably be around much longer than most would expect.
Photo: Insider Monkey