Dan Loeb: Short-side investing is fun when uncovering fraudulent companies
“I mean, investing is fun, and particularly on the short side. I mean, there's so much humor in it when you, Detect these companies, especially in the nineties. I mean, it was really unsupervised. There were some incredibly fraudulent companies out there, and i…”
Loeb: Investors could be economically or technologically illiterate before the GFC
“You could be technologically illiterate or just say, I don't do it. And you could also be even more or less, you know, up until the GFC, I think you could be more or less economically illiterate and make a lot of money.”
Loeb: Humans will always be needed in capital allocation despite AI
“Maybe, maybe you can theorize that there will be agents that will sit at Andreessen Horowitz and whoever else, your funds, but I think the human will always have to be there”
Loeb: Identifying 10-to-20-year business moats is harder today than in the past
“And it's, it is harder now. I don't think we can, I don't know that we can really go out, you know, 10 or 20 years ago. By the way, I think we deluded ourselves earlier, because I think if you ask people about the moat around, you know, IBM, or, you know, some…”
Loeb: Third Point is investing outside tech in adaptable management teams
“We're investing Outside of tech into companies that have you know, some great, well, first of all, it also comes back to the management because we can't really just look at a product or a technology and say, oh, this is going to be it forever. So we really loo…”
Loeb: Solely valuation-based shorting is risky due to retail squeezes
“I think one thing that we've avoided is kind of evaluation, a solely valuation based approach. There's a, I've just seen I've seen too many people get run over by shorts that have dumb valuations, but they get captured on, you know, Reddit or one of these othe…”
Loeb: Third Point has been shorting homebuilder-related equities
“We had, ah, a really strong view on home builders from last year that, ah, there were two things going on. It wasn't just It wasn't just rates, mortgage spreads that were depressing housing prices, that home prices, that the home building industry was first st…”
Loeb: Oil and AI Trump Traditional Macro Indicators Right Now
“People will ask me about, like, macro, what's important, and I think when people think about macro, they think about all the typical stuff that the government reports, growth, unemployment, inflation, rates, currencies, where's gold, where's crypto, and I thin…”
Loeb: Spinoff management teams sandbag forecasts to optimize incentive packages
“Management teams would go out in the case of a spinoff. And do a road show that would present a very conservative view. Some might even say sandbag the numbers. Why? Because people are always creatures of incentives. Their incentive package would be set at the…”
Loeb: Dogmatic Deep-Value Focus Caused Widespread Investor Underperformance
“I think if you look at a lot of the people who have underperformed or haven't survived the last decade or so, when people are really stuck on the idea of deep value, low multiples, and being really stubborn about How they viewed businesses and less flexible ab…”
Loeb: AI Disruption Rapidly Degraded Supposedly High-Quality Businesses
“Now what happened last year was really interesting because a lot of these companies that appeared to be super high quality, probably the worst year and going into the beginning of this year because the disruption of AI, a lot of these apparently high quality c…”
Loeb: A Completely AI-Managed Capital System Is Highly Unlikely
“I think you always need some human interface in the middle of that, but how that's going to, I think it's highly unlikely that there will be a completely, you know, AI managed capital system.”
Loeb: Pod and Quant Risk Models Force Selling, Creating Fundamental Opportunities
“They have, ah, risk metrics which have forced selling on the way down, so they do the opposite of what, it might be rational for their business model, but it's not rational for long-term investors. So you have a lot of these things that will Continue to create…”
Loeb: AI Will Not Replace Humans in Private Equity and Restructurings
“If you think about a continuum of public securities and private equity, the AI will not do Private equity. Always need people to do deals. I think you will. And then you have the kind of the stuff in between that requires a lot of negotiation and human interac…”
Loeb: Writing and PR are the best ways to exert activist social pressure
“Social pressure is actually a very effective way. And I think the best way to put social pressure on a company is through writing and PR efforts around the company.”
Loeb: Third Point targets boards driven by status and income
“I think if you're on a board because you are either getting status or you're getting income and that's your primary reason for doing it, not for representing shareholders, then that's where we come in to try to disintermediate that and take away some of the st…”
Loeb details Third Point's credit, CLO, and liability asset breakdown
“Across the fund we have a CLO business with about seven billion dollars in it. Within Third Point itself we have about 30% of a, which would make it about close to three billion dollars in structured credit and corporate credit, but that's within the hedge fun…”
Loeb: Nvidia represents a catch-up trade at 15x 2027 earnings
“I mean, there's such a catch-up trade in NVIDIA at 15 times 27, 12 times 28 for the most dominant, fastest, I don't know if it's the fastest growing, but very fast growing company at its size.”
Loeb: AI and hyperscalers are the most attractive market sector
“Unless you are really draconian or negative, and you think that somehow the AI world is going to roll over in 31 or 32, I think it's some of the most attractive, you know, I think it's the most attractive sector right now. It's where the bulk of our capital is…”
Loeb: Current AI Tech Does Not Have a Dot-Com Valuation Bubble
“So, I, it's very different from the dot-com bubble, which we were short, you know, going into and had good numbers in those years. I just don't see, you don't have the valuation bubble now on those companies that you had on, on, on those companies back in thos…”
Loeb: Bullish on Korea, Taiwan, and Japan; Europe Tough Due to Regulation
“In terms of the big markets, yeah, there's a lot going on in Korea, Taiwan, Japan. I'm Probably more bullish on just in terms of a hunting ground to find great companies. The European markets are just tough right now, given the regulatory environment. They jus…”
Loeb: Danaher is truly one of the best-run businesses
“I think investing in Danaher has been the most instructive because it really is truly One of the best run businesses.”
Loeb: Third Point Now Checks Bank Balances After the FTX Fraud
“I will say that now our due diligence process, we definitely, like, check bank balances and do, like, the most basic due diligence that probably would have, you know, turned stuff up on, on this.”
Loeb: Claude enables individual autonomy and continuous self-improvement
“Claude really is like a, and it really enables you
To be an individual self-improver. It makes you very autonomous and like your ability is sort of like, it'll give you back whatever you put into it. If you put a lot of time and energy and effort into it.”
Dan Loeb: AI will create net jobs rather than economic apocalypse
“I think we're probably more optimistic or I should say that maybe less pessimistic that there's going to be some kind of
You know, apocalypse from AI, like I, I'm still pretty optimistic that it will create opportunities and create jobs and create net jobs.
Ob…”
Loeb: Third Point's strong 2020 came from IG credit, not stocks
“So, going back to, like, COVID, the thing that we got really right, because we had a good year that year, but it wasn't because we piled into stocks, we piled into, you know, IG credit when it was, so, maybe that's answering the question a little bit different…”
Loeb: Drexel Burnham Claims Were Among the Best Bankruptcy Investments Ever
“That was one of the best investments ever in the history of bankruptcies was the claims on Drexel, because people didn't understand the complexity of the different value pools and liquidations, and the claims were overstated, the assets were understated, but i…”
Loeb: Great Analysts Today Must Master Industry Nuances and Technology
“I think now it's somebody who's like a Gavin Baker type, a junior Gavin Baker, somebody who understands a company or understands an industry and understands the nuances of a technology.”
Loeb: Casey's Succeeded by Being a Pizza Chain Masquerading as Convenience Stores
“Casey's general stores, like, why was this one of the best performing stocks? It looked like a, you know, it looked like a tech stock. It was Because they were not a convenience store chain, they were a pizza chain, kind of masquerading as convenience stores.”
Loeb: Middle East is probably the world's most vibrant region
“To travel to the Middle East, which I think is probably the most vibrant, interesting part of the world.”
Loeb: Middle Eastern nations and Azerbaijan are better US allies than NATO
“I mean, who would have thought 20 years ago, or even three years ago, Bahrain, the Emirates, Saudi, Morocco, Azerbaijan would be better allies to the U.S. Than NATO.”
Scaramucci: SkyBridge increased its allocation to Dan Loeb over the past year
“We have more money with him today than we did a year ago, but a year ago we had way less money with him than we did three years ago”