The Ledger, every show

“We're having to get to the memo stage, and usually we start buying it before, because in the public markets, you know, if you have a good idea, you could take a month and a half to, like, write a memo, but by that time, the price may have moved. So usually we …”

“You can sell, like, the best companies you can sell easily, but those aren't the companies you want to sell. You know, it, it's, ah, we rarely transact in the secondary market because, you know, we don't want to sell the best companies, and it's hard, like peo…”

“One, we don't hire portfolio managers. I pretty much only hire people who've never done public equity before which has pros and cons.”

“We, yeah, we, everyone has like a, what we call a mock portfolio. So every week they have to take the positions they cover and they have to say, if I was managing capital, here's how I would allocate capital.”

“If you have a portfolio of things that you've built over time, our monthly returns and quarterly returns are purely an output. Like there's nothing, it's, it is arbitrary in some respects.”

“We never came close to going into business, never had margin calls, never.”

“We covered everything at the worst time, and I knew it was the worst time. But, if it kept going on for two weeks, yeah, all of a sudden there's a real problem, and I wasn't going to put the firm at risk, and I told my investors that this is the worst time.”

“Now, if I had held that short portfolio, forget like from the top, if I just held from the end of 2020, I mean, they underperformed massively.”

“I would say that the opportunity for short selling is better than it's ever been in my career.”

“If you buy great businesses, you overpay for them a little bit, you get their earnings wrong a little bit in the short term. Over time, value, you know, compounds, and time is your friend. Macro, that's not the case. It's more of, like, a binary bet.”

“Ultimately, the bottleneck is going to be electricity, and so companies that enable electricity production, assuming they have some moats, are going to be good investments.”

“Yeah, we stopped investing in China about three years ago.”

“He is a brilliant guy, but he actually does like to portray himself in a certain light.”

“So there's fewer people competing, but they're all doing the same thing. Whereas the public market, there's tons of people competing, but they're all playing a different sport.”

“We invested originally at the hundred and twenty-five billion dollar round, so I don't think people were entirely sold on LLMs as a business model, but if you want to invest in LLMs as a business model, OpenAI was kind of the, you know, it was the one.”

“In most industries, ah, investing in the second player is not, ah, the path to glory.”

“I place a lot of weight, rightly or wrongly, on clarity of thought and the ability to communicate as a CEO, like, what you want to achieve and how you're gonna achieve it, and especially in written form, because taking the time to write something down, you act…”

“The music on Spotify is no different than Apple music or Amazon music, right? It's, theoretically, it's a pure commodity. What makes Spotify have pricing power? What makes it differentiated? Why would people, you know, be incredibly upset if you said, like, yo…”

“Unless someone's really interested in something, they're not going to be good at it. So, you know, it might be the case that like being a plumber or being an electrician is like the most, you know, moated job in the world, but if you don't want to be a plumber…”

“GameStop was, it, you know, it changed, it was the beginning of a change in the market structure and on the retail side, and so I knew we had to adapt to that.”

“So it's impossible to disprove the negative narrative in the short term. It takes a lot of time.”

“I don't harbor any ill will. I mean, look, I think that you know, the act of redeeming is, like, to some extent, we deserved it, right?”

“It has to be the case that if you believe in scaling laws and you believe in AI, that economic growth will be very powerful. I mean, this is the ultimate productivity tool. And what productivity does is allows you to grow while having disinflation, which is li…”

“The bad ones tend to, like, be More obvious. Faster. The great private tech investments, I think, are sometimes slower to prove how great they are because, like, you have these amazing founders who are just, you know, constantly making decisions which take the…”

“I could be a family office right now, and there's Plenty of, you know, positive things about being a family office. The drawback is like, you're not in the arena. I'm very collaborative with other investors. It's not like I'm sharp elbowed, but being out there…”

“It was pretty clear to me that from a business perspective, it was not in Andreas's best interest to have one person manage more than half the capital. I don't think that'd be even good for LPs.”

“Art is important because it is created by people, and I think the bold case in art would be, like, as everything else is, like, automated and, you know, in infinite supply because it's being created by AI, You know, art created by people reflects emotion and, …”

“Japan and Korea were not well positioned for the last 20 years because it was just, like, digital companies, but when it comes to, like, actually hard assets and good engineering, they, Germany, Korea, Japan have a lot of companies that have excellent physical…”

“I think some understanding of we need 10 to 20 years to replicate this supply chain.”

“Usually when dictators say they say something, and they say it, like, religiously, You should believe them.”

“Up until the LLMs are very few tech companies where it's like a huge fixed investment. And then the incremental, ah, margins on the sales are extremely high.”

“Now, like, if I hire somebody from private equity, it takes about three years for them to really be, like, contributing to the one.”

“After GameStop, we took about a year off of short selling, and then I reengaged in short selling.”

“Our short alpha since that time, and since we implemented the more diverse portfolio you referenced, our short alpha has been as good or better”

“And then I'd say the last, ah, and least attractive shorts are the ones where it's like, cyclically, they're just over earning a lot, and you believe that the real earnings, if you were to look like through a cycle, are much lower than people think.”

“I find that, like generally, companies that have secularists almost never get bought. Like, I rarely has, do I ever see a CEO say, I want to go buy something that grows slower than I do, right? Like, this doesn't happen, right? Nobody wants, like, Take the tim…”

“If the company reports earnings, I expect the analyst to be awake. And I'm awake too.”

“It's just very, very good business that's, and the starting multiple is pretty reasonable, and I think, you know, I can grow earnings well into the teens for 10 years.”

“Siemens Energy and GE Vinova are basically the same company. Like, there's no two companies I've ever looked at that are more similar. They have almost the same revenue, dollar revenue, I think it's like, 45, 50.”

“I think if you look back in history, 70% of the time that you have this kind of, like, major breakthrough technology, there is a stock market bubble.”

“If I'm thirty billion dollars, it's really, you can't really short five billion dollar companies”

“Iterate on product faster, have better engineers, and I think that those banks are going to increasingly take market share.”

“I think most investors who love investing start out with a deep value bent because it's, you know, if you want to read about great investors, historically, most of them were deep value investors, Ben Graham, you know, Buffett.”

“By 2016, I was managing, ah, just over half of Viking's capital, somewhere 55, something percent of Viking's capital.”

“What I'd say about this job, is that there's like an asymmetry of emotion, right? Like, when you're making a lot of money, it's not like I'm, like, tap dancing around my house, like, euphoric, like, my lifestyle doesn't change. I feel like, yes, I'm happy that…”

“Definitely not macro. First of all, like, it's tempting to think that because you're good at one thing, you're going to be good at all these different things, and, ah, I think that in and of itself was like a mistake.”

“There's a couple called Clean Harbors, which I like a lot, which is, they do hazardous waste, and they own the majority of the incinerators in the United States. You can't really build more incinerators because of NIMBY.”

“I think to our detriment. We should have owned more AI stocks.”