In Search of the Perfect Investment

It’s Columbus Day. Half a holiday. The Feds are closed. Stockmarkets are open, though trading will be light.

I have a whole bunch of great material for the column. But I need today to catch up on paperwork and (yuch) taxes. I have an extension because of sluggish K1s.

Meanwhile there’s a really neat piece on David Tepper in the latest New York Magazine. The title of the article is “Ready to Be Rich.” The man is an unbelievably successful hedge fund manager worth billions.

Its a long piece. Here are my my favorite excerpts:

+ Then, late in the afternoon, David Tepper, a hedge-fund manager out of New Jersey, bounded up onstage and ripped off his tie, as though the lack of air in the room had become physically constraining. “I got a little story for you,” he said into the microphone, and proceeded to read it from a crumpled piece of paper in his hand.

“In 1898, the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York,” he said. “It was abandoned after three days because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis caused by urban horses and their output. In the Times of London, one reporter estimated that in 50 years, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure.”

He paused, allowing people in the crowd to snicker to themselves, then went on to recommend a handful of investments most would consider highly risky, among them debt in AIG and equity in financial companies like Bank of America and even some banks in teetering Europe. “I know, everyone hates the financials,” he said. “But the PIIGS” — Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, considered to be the most troubled European economies—“every single one has a deficit-reduction plan! The ECB—the Bundesbank—bought back government bonds!” He paused for dramatic effect. “Holy Christ. It’s like the chastity belt is off, and the girl is starting to play.”

The crowd tittered nervously. “On the way to work this morning, I got a headache because I was listening to one guy talking about how there’s gonna be hyperinflation. And then after him there was some guy telling me there’s going to be a depression and deflation. Neither—neither—is most likely going to happen,” he said. “The point is, markets adapt, people adapt. Don’t listen to all the crap out there.”

Tepper had good reason to feel confident in this thesis. Last year, when the market effectively crapped itself, Tepper’s firm, Appaloosa Management, made a fortune rolling around in it. In February and March 2009, when consensus had coalesced among market watchers that certain financial institutions were insolvent and would have to be nationalized, triggering a massive sell-off that drove shares of companies like Citigroup and Bank of America into the single digits, Tepper decided to tune out the chatter. After all, the Treasury Department had said it would hold up the banks—why wouldn’t they keep their promise? He directed deputies at his firm to purchase billions of dollars’ worth of bonds and stocks in those and other financial institutions. Then they waited.

At the time, taking such a position was like swimming into the ocean as a tsunami approaches: It looked crazy. But actually it was the right thing to do. When the government intervened as promised, the value of the shares shot back up. Appaloosa made over $7.5 billion. Not bad for a tiny fund from New Jersey.

+ By all accounts, Tepper’s personal volatility is as up and down as his returns. “He’s an asshole, to say the least,” says someone who worked with him. “I had stuff thrown at me. He can be a nice guy off the desk, in the kitchen or walking to the car. It’s almost like Jekyll and Hyde, you didn’t know any given day who was going to walk through the door.” This is not merely someone with a grudge. When Tepper coached elementary-school kids in softball, Phil Glassman says, he could be heard screaming all the way down the block.

Tepper admits he can be difficult. “I used to be worse,” he says over the phone. “When I was at Goldman, I’d say things to people like, ‘Do you know what a schmuck is? Go look in the mirror.’ Now I’m kinder and gentler. Aren’t I kinder and gentler?” he asks his employees.

In the background there’s silence.

“Aren’t I kinder and gentler?”

Over the summer, even Tepper’s outsize confidence was shaken. By August, Appaloosa had reduced its stakes in financial companies and picked up safer blue-chip pharmaceutical stocks.

Thanks to weak economic figures, discouraging jobs reports, and the sense that policy-makers were unlikely to provide any more stimulus, Tepper was close to becoming one of the doomsayers he had made fun of just a couple of months before. He was quoted prominently in a Wall Street Journal article, hemming about deflation. “It just feels very uncertain right now,” he said over the phone in August. “I’m a natural optimist, but the numbers are just horrid. The whole economy is stuck in mud. Thick. Dark. Mud.”

Sure, he was still having fun: There was golf, and poker, and his nephew’s bachelor party, among other things. But his main pleasure, trading gargantuan sums of money, was unavailable to him. “This company looks cheap, that company looks cheap, but the overall economy could completely screw it up,” he said grumpily. “The key is to wait. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to do nothing.”

Basically, Tepper was bored. Betting on the markets is “like gambling,” he said. “It fills that same rush.” And once you get the rush of making $4 billion, it’s hard to fill that void with anything else.

“What would I do?” he said, back at the Hilton, when I asked why, with more money than he could ever need, he didn’t just quit while he was ahead. “When do you stop trying to be the best?”

Fortunately for Tepper, he didn’t have to wait too long. By early September, his spirits were up considerably. The government had indicated it was not completely averse to another stimulus. Things were bad, but they were moving. “I’m feeling more optimistic,” he said in September. “The mud is loosening up.” Soon, he’ll be ready to dive into it again.

You can read the entire article here.

Dog problems solved with telecom technology. Todd sent this one.

A dog lover, whose dog was ‘in heat’, agreed to look after and house her neighbors’ male dog while they were away on vacation.

She had a large house however, and believed that she could keep them apart, but as she was drifting off to sleep she heard awful howling and moaning sounds, rushed downstairs and found the dogs locked together, in obvious pain and unable to disengage as so frequently happens when they mate.

Unable to separate them and perplexed as to what to do next, although it was late, she called the vet, who answered in a very grumpy voice.

Having explained the problem to him, the vet said.”Hang up the phone and place it down alongside the dogs. I will then call you back and the noise of the ringing will make the male lose his erection and be able to withdraw”.

“Do you think that will work?” she asked

“It just worked for me” he replied

Harry Newton who took a set off Israel on Thursday. Today it will be two.