Lee Ainslie Quotes
102 Lee Ainslie Quotes (Lee S. Ainslie III, Maverick Capital, Tiger Cub)
1 2 3
[In July 1996.] I realized long ago that I am much, much better at picking securities, long and short, than I am at trying to time the market.
Lee Ainslie
[In 2007.] At the time of maximum pain, you need to maintain your discipline.
Lee Ainslie
[In January 2014] I’ve been able to learn something from almost every book I have ever read.
Lee Ainslie
[In January 2014] If a week goes by that I haven’t learned something new, then that is really a wasted week.
Lee Ainslie
[In January 2014] At the end of the day, investing is not rocket science.
Lee Ainslie
[In January 2014] If you’re not improving you eventually get left behind.
Lee Ainslie
[In January 2014] We are trying to identify the winners and losers in each industry in which we invest and then evaluate the discrepancies between our conclusions and consensus views… I believe that is an effective approach for both longs and shorts.
Lee Ainslie
[In January 2014] It’s not impossible, but the odds are against you if your view is the same as everyone else’s because that view is probably already reflected in a stock’s valuation.
Lee Ainslie
[In April 2006.] I’m amazed at how many CFOs don’t truly understand the long-term sustainability and value creation of stock buybacks.
Lee Ainslie
[In August 2014.] There is this pattern of ever shorter time frames for these very significant volatility shocks.
Lee Ainslie
[In April 1994.] Nothing really helped us this quarter and we beefed up our investments in Mexico just in time for an assassination.
Lee Ainslie
[In July 1996 on Maverick Capital.] We started purely with private money from the Wyly family, who founded Maverick in 1990. When I started in September 1993, we managed $60 million. We're now managing $245 million.
Lee Ainslie
[In July 1996.] We are sort of the opposite of what some people consider hedge funds to be. We aren't trying to make market calls or make macro-economic bets or figure out which sector is going to be hot and which is not. We are working hard to take all of that out of the equation, making our success dependent purely upon our ability to pick longs and shorts.
Lee Ainslie
[In July 1996.] The classic hedge-fund approach, which was started by AW. Jones in 1949, combined the idea of using a little leverage with investing in longs and shorts, to have net exposure to the market below your equity value. In other words, for every $100 invested, the classic hedge fund may have $110 in long securities, $70 in short securities, for a net exposure to the market of only $40, or 40%. And actually, on a percentage basis that would be a pretty fair characterization of Maverick.
Lee Ainslie
[In July 1996.] Technology tends toward standards. And the companies that are able to dictate those standards typically maintain superior growth rates and a higher level of profitability for longer than most people believe possible.
Lee Ainslie
[In July 1996.] In general, on the short side we focus on poor fundamental and competitive situations, hopefully with weak management teams, more than we focus on valuation. In other words, we have no problem shorting cheap stocks where we see long-term structural or competitive problems. And we never short stocks purely for valuation reasons. As we have all seen over the last year, unreasonable valuation can often become more unreasonable.
Lee Ainslie
[In August 2001 on his best investment idea.] I would go long on Target, which has better same-store sales and better fashion sense than Wal-Mart, yet is selling at half the valuation. Kmart, despite what you see on TV, is slowly but surely going out of business.
Lee Ainslie
[In 2001.] We hope to add value by shorting individual stocks that we believe will underperform the market.
Lee Ainslie
[In 2001 on the US.] This is the region we know best and where we have had the most consistent performance. It is the most efficient market to short stocks.
Lee Ainslie
[In 2001.] They are peers, not employees.
Lee Ainslie
[In 2001.] I play devil’s advocate and make sure the level of analysis has been complete and thorough and that all the relevant resources have been brought to bear.
Lee Ainslie
[In January 2004 on 2003.] Stocks went up, virtually all stocks, regardless of fundamentals, valuation, accounting practices, competitive positioning, quality of management, financial viability, earnings momentum and every other factor that we consider critical.
Lee Ainslie
[In April 2006.] First and foremost, we’re trying to understand the business.
Lee Ainslie
[In April 2006.] We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to understand the quality, ability, and motivation of a management team.
Lee Ainslie
[In April 2006.] We have made the mistake more than once of not investing in a company with a great management team because of valuation concerns—only to look back a year later and realize we missed an opportunity because the management team made intelligent, strategic decisions that had a significant impact.
Lee Ainslie
[In April 2006.] Our success is driven by making many good decisions rather than depending upon a few big home runs.
Lee Ainslie
[In April 2006.] A short seller is really the only guaranteed buyer that a company has.
Lee Ainslie
[In 2006.] Our goal is to know more about every one of the companies in which we invest than any non-insider does.
Lee Ainslie
[In May 2007 on 130/30 strategies.] There is a lot of interest, but it's not clear yet whether this is the latest fad or a new investment paradigm. I'm inclined to think it's the latter.
Lee Ainslie
[In June 2007 on going to work at Tiger Management.] For me, it was a very straightforward decision: Someone I greatly admired was going to pay me to do what I loved.
Lee Ainslie
[In June 2007.] We don’t have any magic black-box program that that generates our returns; I wish we did.
Lee Ainslie
[In June 2007.] The only asset we have at the end of the day is people.
Lee Ainslie
[In December 2007.]Oddly, our disappointing results in 2003 did not concern me too much. But in 2005 I was very concerned because it was clear that we should have generated much stronger returns in what was a more rational environment.
Lee Ainslie
[At the beginning of 2006 on their 2005 performance.] Our security selection was terrible, our shorts were actually up more than our longs for only the second time in our history.
Lee Ainslie
[In December 2007.]There is a lot to be said for staying focused.
Lee Ainslie
[In December 2007.]We expect to know more about a company than any other noninsider
Lee Ainslie
[In 2007.] The odds of my adding value consistently by trying to time the market are very slim. At the time of maximum pain, you need to maintain your discipline.
Lee Ainslie
[In 2007 on looking back at Julian Robertson offering him a job at Tiger Management when he graduated.] Stock picking had been a hobby for a long, long time.
Julian [Robertson] was going to pay me to do what I would have done for free for fun. Other than joining the NBA, there wasn’t anything I’d rather have been doing.
Lee Ainslie
[In 2007.] Julian was very focused on the quality of the management team – their abilities, their background, and their desire to create shareholder value. He has always had an intuitive understanding of the key drivers and pressure points of a business. He was quick to home in on the key variables and made sure we had a thorough understanding of those factors.
Lee Ainslie
[In 2007 on testing his convictions on whether a stock is a buy or a sell.] This is how I’ve come to think of it over the years: Either this security deserves incremental capital at the current price point or it doesn’t – in which case, let’s sell it and put the money to work in a security that deserves that incremental capital.
Lee Ainslie
1 2 3
Return from Lee Ainslie Quotes to Quoteswise.com