The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 29 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Enright: Exclusively Shorting Bad Businesses Leads to Bear Market Traps
“If your whole entire mantra is I just short bad businesses. Eventually you're going to get caught in a real bad bear trap.”
Enright: 2022 Drawdowns Driven by Longs Falling 50% Without Short Protection
“I think the drawdowns that we've seen are because Hedge fund longs are on average down 50 or 60% in a market that's down 30, and shorts either don't exist, or the shorts are down like 10.”
Enright: Citadel Model Incorrectly Pushes Leverage Immediately After Outperformance
“The only criticism I ever hear about the Citadel model is the better I do, the more gross they want to give me.”
Enright: Zero-Rate Era Led Investors to Mistake Business Quality for Stock Picking
“With interest rates being so low and all risk assets being anchored to a zero bound, everybody just assumed that you could just think about business quality because everything went up. Like stocks were missing numbers and going up because the most important in…”
Enright: Buying Consensus High-Quality Stocks Like Snowflake Offers Zero Edge
“The more I look at public market quality business investing and saying there's no differentiation there at all. So the idea that somebody is like, I love Snowflake. It's a great business. Like, yeah, who doesn't think Snowflake is a great business? Why is that…”
Enright: Never Short Stocks Over 10% Short Interest or One Day's Volume
“I'm not shorting a stock that has greater than 10% of the market cap shorted. I'm not shorting more than a day's volume of a stock that I think could double in a day, right?”
Enright: Regularly Ask if You Would Rebuild Your Liquidated Portfolio
“I think the heuristic is at least once a week,
If not a couple of times a month, you want to come in, you want to look at your portfolio, and you want to say, based on all the inputs that I'm getting every day to assess these, if there was a mistake and this b…”
Enright: Target 200-400 Bps Winners and Cap Losses at 50 Bps
“Well, I want 10 ideas that give me 200 to 400 basis points of performance, or I want six ideas that give me 300 to 400 basis of performance, and I want to minimize my losses to 50 basis points. And if I can have a handful of 50 basis point losses, that tells m…”
Enright: Hedge Fund Industry Has Shifted to Asset Gathering Over Alpha
“So much of what has become true over the last five years, all this is about is marketing and telling your story. It's gotten away from the purity of executing to what you say you're going to execute against, because most of it's just about collecting assets an…”
Enright: David Ott Was Viking Global's Secret Weapon
“David is, I think, the secret weapon inside Viking, right? David is, if you took all of the aspects of Michael Mobison that everybody thinks is amazing, and then all the aspects of Steve Mandel, and you put them together, that's David Ott.”
Enright: Every Viking Global Success in Its First 15 Years Came From Purcell
“Every single big successful person in the first 15 or so years of Viking came from Tom.”
Enright: Separate Stock Dynamics From Business Quality for Fundamental Investing
“You have to Start with understanding the underlying business if you want to be a fundamental analyst, and that is its own set of analysis, and it's talked about all the time, but then separate and apart from that, you have to understand the dynamics of the sto…”
Enright: Less Than 5% of Companies Compound Above 20% Over Five Years
“The half-life of all companies is 10 years and less than five percent compounded greater than 20% for more than five years or something like that.”
Enright: Alpha Exists in Rolling 9-18 Month Horizons, Not 0-6 Months
“If you think that you can find some variant perception in zero to three months or zero to six months, you're probably deluding yourself, right? Because that's really hard to predict. But if on a rolling nine to 18 months or so, and you're updating, you're bein…”
Enright: Keep Gross Long Exposure Over 100% Due to Asymmetric Upside
“For me personally, I'm going to capture more spread on the longs because longs have the potential to triple, quadruple, shorts going down a hundred, best case, but probably like 10 to 20. So I want to be tilted more gross exposure in my longs. And if I'm going…”
Enright: Trim Winning Positions When Weights Expand Without Changed Fundamentals
“The question I have to ask myself is, why are these two ideas better now than they were before because mathematically I'm saying they are by having them be a larger percentage of my capital. So I have to assess, is it actually better now? Should I keep them th…”
Enright: Long-Short Equity Spread Cyclically Expands and Compresses Like an Accordion
“Cause spreads an accordion, right? Like it doesn't get captured forever and continue to grow. It will compress and it will ebb and flow.”
Enright: Generating Alpha on Both Longs and Shorts Cannot Scale
“There's an amazing opportunity to Continued for spread for long alpha for short alpha for gross alpha with a moderate net or a reasonable net. It just doesn't scale.”
Enright: Multi-Manager Pod Funds Succeed Because Payout Formulas Are Written
“And I think what the pods do really well is they put it in writing. They tell you what your percentage is going to be, and then you go and you make money. And so that to me seems to be effective. And then what they do is they put a whole lot of handcuffs on yo…”
Enright: Shifting Compensation Terms and Back Trading Drive Fund Turnover
“And the reason why there's quote unquote back trading is because it changes over time. The size gets bigger, the talent changes, the person sitting in the seats change, and it gets very, very difficult. And that's why it leads to turnover.”
Enright: Trading Costs Have Increased, But Many Investors Fail to Track Them
“What is your total cost of trading in specific stocks? And that has gotten more expensive and a lot of people don't even track it.”
Enright: Analyze Financial Statements Before Reading Sell-Side Reports
“I think the most important thing is to understand the financial statements as quickly as you can without reading a sell side report and try to contextualize it too, right? Think about the seven powers or Porter's competitive advantage, right?”
Enright: Investors Analyzing New Industries Mistakenly Believe They Found Undiscovered Gems
“Because I think the biggest mistake people make when they get up to speed on a new industry is they think they've discovered plutonium. Like, oh my God, this is the greatest business in the world. I want to buy it. And then you buy it and you lose 20%.”
Enright: Unlike VCs, Hedge Fund LPs Advise Against Multi-Manager Partnerships
“VCs are always advising founders of businesses, get a partner. You don't want to go through this alone. It's lonely, but LPs are always advising hedge funds. Don't be a multi-manager. Don't have partners. It gets complicated. And so it can be a very isolating …”
Enright: Large-Cap Outperformance Crowds Out Alpha Generation
“Mobuson did a study where he showed that when large caps outperform, alpha's harder to find because they crowd everything out.”
Enright: Fund Gross Exposure Automatically Rises During Capital Drawdowns
“Everybody always forgets that in a drawdown, your gross exposure goes up because your capital base goes down.”
Enright: Viking Flexed Gross Leverage Dynamically for Top-Decile Performance
“From 2008, really through 2016, we were in top decile performance. And I think that's part of that because we were willing to flex our gross.”
Enright: Viking's 2008 Returns Suppressed by the Volkswagen Short Squeeze
“I saw this firsthand in 2008, we were up in a way we're up in equities and we would have been up a lot in equities if you strip out the Volkswagen effect. Cause we got caught up in that just like everybody else.”
Enright: The Best Ideas Exploit Revenue Inflections Without Rising Expenses
“I think that the best ideas I've ever had is when I can isolate a change in trajectory in revenue at the same time that there won't be a commiserate change in expenses. So I love when you can isolate a company coming out of an investment period or going into a…”