Bill Ackman Quotes
108 Bill Ackman Quotes (William Ackman, Pershing Square Capital Management)
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Everyone told me it was a really stupid idea to start my own hedge fund right out of business school. That’s how I knew that it was a good idea.
Bill Ackman
In order to be successful, you have to make sure that being rejected doesn’t bother you at all.
Bill Ackman
You should surround yourself with people that believe in you, in life, and in business.
Bill Ackman
[In December 2011 on businesses that could last forever.] We want a business that sells a product or a service that people need and is somewhat unique. And they have a loyalty to some sort of brand or product and people are willing to pay a premium for that.
Bill Ackman
[In December 2011 on ‘The Intelligent Investor’ by
Benjamin Graham.] You read it and it is either an epiphany and it affects the way you live your life, or it’s of no interest to you… I found it fascinating.
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] People seem to be happier buying something at 50 percent off for $50 as opposed to having it marked at $40 and there being no discount, which is sort of an interesting psychological phenomenon. But it’s real.
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] I want to be the champion of shareholder… And when I’m concerned about the direction of the business I’m not afraid to air those concerns.
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] I’m a very straightforward person. I say precisely what I think. Sometimes it rubs people the wrong way.
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] The benefit of short sellers to the markets is they’re sort of the canary in the coal mine… They are the early warning signal about a problem in the business, a problem in the capital markets.
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] If Madoff had been a public company we probably would have shorted it…
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] Ultimately, investors are - are only as good as their track records.
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] What the market tells you in the short term is what a certain subset of people believe. That doesn’t mean they’re right.
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] One of the mechanisms by which we implement our ideas if we are unsuccessful in convincing management is by going to the shareholders.
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] I’ve seen very few people in the world accomplish anything unless they were optimists.
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] We’re not a trader at all. We don’t trade. We buy a stake in the business. We get actively involved in the business. We work to make the business more valuable.
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] In the investing business you need a - a high degree of confidence but you also need a high degree of humbleness and you have to balance those two… Humbleness comes from mistakes.
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] We invest generally in very good companies that have lost their way. And with better management, enormous value can be created.
Bill Ackman
[In August 2013.] I think that there’s a lot to be said to have someone with a business background making decisions about the economy.
Bill Ackman
[In February 2011.] This is not a black-box strategy. With most of our investments, we share our thesis about what’s going to happen.
Bill Ackman
What motivates people to succeed? Sex. People don’t like to admit it, but it’s the primal driver.
Bill Ackman
We buy 8, 9, 10 percent of the company when we see long-term value in the investment, when the pieces are worth significantly more than the entire business or an operational change needs to take place. We don’t predict when the stock market is going up and down or what’s causing that. So we’re not in a rush to get out.
Bill Ackman
Fundamentally what drives most human behavior is basically foreplay.
Bill Ackman
[On his investment in General Growth Properties and helping make it more valuable by successfully steering it through the bankruptcy process in 2009 and 2010.] I get thank-you notes from people who bought the stock at 50 cents who still own it. When someone buys something that goes up 40 times, it can actually make a big difference in his or her livelihood. I have letters from people who lost their job and then invested some of their IRA in General Growth, and it saved them.
Bill Ackman
Do you really want to invite in the outsider who’s barging his way in the door because he bought a bunch of stock in your company? That’s how some directors think about it.
Bill Ackman
Raising money for a start-up hedge fund is a lot like blind dating. You meet someone you’ve never met before, you have a limited time in which to make the pitch, and then you try to close the deal. Charm matters. And sometimes people with the best ideas aren’t very good at blind dating. When I decided to run a hedge fund out of school, I’d meet with 100 people before one or two would finally agree to invest with me. In order to be successful, you have to make sure that being rejected doesn’t bother you at all. So for example, in college when I was dating and a girl didn’t like me, I didn’t get upset, I thought that if she didn’t like me, then she clearly wasn’t right for me. You should surround yourself with people that believe in you, in life, and in business.
Bill Ackman
[On asking
Richard Rainwater if he thought it was a stupid idea for him to start his own fund right after graduating.] He said to me, ‘You don’t have to be old to be right.’
Bill Ackman
From day one, I was always unafraid to ask someone to invest because, I thought that, while capital was a commodity, good investment ideas were rare assets.
Bill Ackman
Investing is one of the few things you can learn on your own.
Bill Ackman
I felt I had the basic skills to be a successful investor, and if you think you’re Picasso, you’re not sure you want to learn from another artist. I had an unlevered strategy, doing plain-vanilla value investing – not something complicated or particularly risky. I thought, in the worst case, if I fail, I’ll be able to get a job.
Bill Ackman
[On the Rockefeller Center deal.] So we negotiated a deal with the company’s bank lenders and borrowed $90 million in a bridge loan from a group of shareholders, paid off public debt, did a rights offering to pay back the loan, and then brought in a new management team.
Bill Ackman
When you have an aggressive regulator trying to find you guilty of something, even though you know you’re innocent, it’s a scary time.
Bill Ackman
So the only good thing I had going for me was that a very reputable investment firm with a track record better than [Warren] Buffett’s from 1979 to the present agreed to put in $50 million.
Bill Ackman
[On investing in Sears Roebuck & Company in June 2004.] Sears was one of the first big investments we made. What attracted us to the company was that after they sold their $30 billion credit card business, the enterprise value declined massively. They used the money from the sale of the credit business to pay off their debt, and to buy back a bunch of their own stock, yet the stock just continued to go down. So we bought a stake in the company, but we were a tiny little fund without a lot of firepower. We believed the business had reached the end of its strategic life, and the pieces – the real estate, the brands Craftsman and Kenmore, Sears Home Services, the inventory, etc – were worth a lot more than what the stock was trading. And we believed we could help unlock value by catalysing a sale of the company to a strategic buyer – either a real estate investor or another retail company. [Sears was ultimately sold to Kmart in November 2004.]
Bill Ackman
Wendy’s was a really good investment for us, making the fund a few hundred million, which was sizable as a percent of our total assets at the time. Wendy’s set us up for McDonalds.
Bill Ackman
The untold secret of McDonald’s is that when you sell a restaurant to a franchisee, sales typically go up a lot because the franchisees do a much better job managing the store.
Bill Ackman
[In November 2006 on saying that Borders was undervalued and that it’s shares would rise from $23.92 to $36 with the We were wrong. We did our best to save the company, but it still failed.
Bill Ackman
[On Target in April 2007 after starting to buy shares at approximately $54 a share.] The best retailer in the world.
Bill Ackman
We’re going to make some mistakes…
Bill Ackman
When I first started in business, I didn’t know when it was time to move on. But I learned a lot about what I call the return-on-invested-brain-damage calculation. If the return isn’t high enough to justify the brain damage, I won’t spend the time.
Bill Ackman
Here I am, I own 25 percent of the company. I’m offering to help. Their stock is trading for pennies and they won’t let me on the board?
Bill Ackman
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