The Ledger, every show

“Semiconductor industry, the barriers to entry are getting lower, not higher. Chinese are coming in a very aggressive way, including into semi-cap site, equipment site, memory site, the ramping up capacity. That's a far lower barrier to entry business than what…”

“One of the big lessons investing is if Chinese are a competitor, be very careful because they will overproduce and kill you.”

“If you look at Google, if they had not changed the depreciation policy, the margin would be high single digits, operating margin.”

“Our view is that this is a powerful technology, but the economics are really bad. And time is not a friend. So if you're trading here, different matter. But the economics are not good economics.”

“Now we're getting more clarity that more than half of the backlog, hence probably the revenue too, Is coming from basically anthropic slash open AI. If you look at Google and Microsoft is more than half open AI. Amazon is more than half. So they invest with op…”

“When you're underpricing everything, if you look at CoreWeave and EBS, they're bleeding heavily. That means they're not covering the cost. The real test of shortage is when you're priced appropriately. It's a capitalistic system, so when you subsidize somethin…”

“Because specialists at major inflection points are usually wrong. If you're not able to compare, you don't know what good or bad is.”

“Relative is fine in an up market, but over the long run, if you don't have absolute returns, nobody needs you. You don't pay bills with relative performance. In a bull market, everybody thinks a relative, but if you want a long-term survival, you need an absol…”

“Now we have an equal amount of journalists and traditional analysts. Their job is to take the opposite view by default. Journalists are pretty good at that. I've learned a lot hanging out with journalists. Half the team is journalists who basically criticize e…”

“Fees, I think what's the biggest problem in hedge funds? They charge too much. There's only so much juice in the game. These are efficient markets. It's not like seventies. Buffett can do whatever sitting, reading Moody's manual and pick up stock two times ear…”

“If you look at it, how many companies have survived in software business over 30 plus years? Microsoft is an exception, and maybe Oracle, it's a lower barrier to business.”

“Today, for example, in 12 months now, we have almost nothing in semiconductors. We have almost nothing in tech.”

“NVIDIA invests in over 50 plus of their customers in the last six, nine months.”

“Look at software today. We feel that it's a very intriguing area. These established businesses, but 10, 12 times earnings and folks feel they're completely going out of business. There's no sign of that. Not only that, they're growing 20% in some cases, and yo…”

“Cigarette volume has been declining at seven, eight percent in US. And guess what, last five years? Altria has outperformed Mera. I think now Microsoft and Amazon last five years.”

“The sizing should be based on how a credit analyst would think. You can't have a very large position in monoline business, which operates a very narrow niche. Can't do it. So if you think about how does S&P would give AAA, it would never give AAA to an E&P com…”

“Exxon is almost similar market cap as AMD. Depending on the oil prices, this year they generate probably fifty billion of clean free cash flow. AMD will be lucky if they generate nine.”

“SpaceX is wonderful, but eighteen billion revenue and five billion loss.”

“One crisis after the other, as I've evolved over the years, it's become where top-down is a risk management tool, and we use it heavily. It's a switch off, not switch on. It should help you reduce risk, but not add risk. In other words, if Chinese growth is go…”

“It's better to be early than trying to time it. Once things find a catalyst, it happens. If you're running any size and scale, you won't be able to exit in a timely manner.”

“If you look at the energy business, it has become far higher barrier to business than it used to be. If you look at the pipelines, how long does it take to get any approvals? You don't have to go into Keystone, but any other pipeline, it's a much higher barrie…”

“Public cloud is 90% plus penetrated for large enterprises.”

“The cumulative capex of all these MAG companies in their history is one and a half trillion dollars. Think about it. Now they're talking about three trillion in just three years.”

“If you look at Qatar, they've already said that 20% of thereabouts of their LNG facilities are down. They'll take three to five years to fix them.”

“I'm now excluding the recent spike in memory prices leading to S&P earnings upgrades. That won't last memories as cyclical as they come.”

“The reason was because when you have a high hit rate, the problem is you have a high bar on what comes in. So you also miss a lot of multi-baggers for that reason. You actually lower the hit rate because then you have a small position.”

“First of all, we don't have any specialists, even in the traditional analyst pool, which is a classic buy side and the non-traditional, non-traditional journalists basically, and they go wherever.”

“That's what we don't own in U.S. Banks. If you look at large Wall Street money center banks, they're all trading at some of the highest valuations on a price to book or price to revenue in some 25 years.”

“I don't like contrarism as such. I joke around that contrarian is a deer that gets hunted first. It's overrated. But at extremes, you have to lean away.”

“In the long-only world, and I operate in the long-only world, is to become lazy. This business is fine, long-term, we'll all be okay. Because you can always find facts that support your opinion at that point. If the market is telling you you're wrong, you gott…”

“Petrobras, which we owned in a big way in the last five years, when we bought it was a 35% dividend deal. Today it's a 12% dividend deal, a 75 dollar oil. It's six times earnings.”

“The whole notion that we have great track record and people will come, that doesn't work that way. A lot of money managers don't have client servicing aspect in that.”

“Quarterly reporting doesn't do much good. Transparency is fine, but it multiplies the work. Six-month reporting is good enough, in my opinion, and I'm talking about as an investor, because most of the world had six months anyway.”

“This is the only business where you don't need an average. Somebody needs an average phone. Somebody needs an average car. You do not need an average manager. Vanguard is happy to do it for you for two basements.”

“If I go back to .com, the biggest lesson was some of the biggest losses that came in my book were the names that were cyclicals and we paid high multiples on peak margins. I remember Japanese names, which went from five percent operating margin to 25% margin, …”

“Which was one of the biggest learning experiences you forget as an analyst is that things have to be in a little more precise manner than simply putting in a model, or you grow at 15% next five years, and we all live happily ever after.”

“I got nervous in early 2007, so we had exited all our banking exposure and financial exposure.”

“You never want a team that agrees with the hundred percent. Huge mistake. Because it simply will cheerlead you.”

“We don't allow any personal trading here. Everybody has significant skin in the game. And I understand people have sometimes different views. I've had almost all of my net worth out value GQG in the products that clients would consume. Same exact vehicles.”

“In last month, we put almost ten billion dollars to work in software.”

“Media has been the single biggest winner in GQG's history in terms of absolute profits.”

“We talked to so many oil companies that our realizations are running 10 to 20 dollars, in a lot of cases, above what is trading in the futures market.”

“You can buy utilities in the US, but they'll be giving you five to 10 Year visibility of eight to 10% EPS growth. That's faster than S&P.”

“In summer of twenty-twenty-two, we started buying semiconductors, and we had no exposures. I felt like, great job, and we walk on water. In October, this whole thing heated up between US and China, the restrictions, and the stocks went free-fall. They got very…”

“There is a benefit because you only learn if you own a staff. We can talk whole day about how wonderful the business is, but once you own it, and once you're underwater in that name, it sharpens your thinking quickly.”

“We don't launch multiple products, four core products, same process, same team.”

“When we went public, in my first letter as the largest shareholder of the company, I specifically wrote two things. We will never have AEM targets, and we never have margin targets, so that nobody's confused.”

“I became CIO in January, 2002. And quickly, 75% of clients fired us.”