David Einhorn’s prensentation slides from the 29th Annual 2024 Sohn New York Conference, which took place on April 3rd, 2024.
I want to thank the Sohn Investment Conference and Graham for inviting me to speak.
Last year I hoped this conference would be in person. It is much easier to present an idea and receive immediate audience feedback.
It’s no fun telling corny jokes to a camera and wondering whether anyone laughs.
Here are our disclosures.
I’d like to remind everyone that the ideas I’m about to present are existing positions in our portfolio. We may change our positions at any time.
The cartoon says, “You have to invest for value these days. And these days I find the best value in gin and tonic.”
I’ve said the value investing industry is dead. However, value investing and the value investing industry are two different things.
The value investing industry is the thousands of people that used to be employed to analyze and pick stocks by trying to figure out which ones were undervalued.
Trillions moving from active management to passive have caused these people to be fired and they are not coming back. This is what I mean by the value investing industry being dead.
The cartoon says, “Good news – remember all those growth stocks I sold you? They’re now value stocks.”
With all these unemployed people and their AUM gone, it’s actually a great time to be a value investor. There is much less competition.
There are cheap stocks that are just much cheaper than they would otherwise be if there were lots of professionals with capital to deploy trying to identify them.
I will talk about one of those in a couple minutes.
Value Investment Industry
When I started in the business, everyone said Warren Buffett benefitted by starting his investment business when few people even read annual reports and few were good at valuing stocks.
It was a shame that there was so much competition for me. There were thousands of experienced professionals trying to do the same thing. Well, guess what?
That’s how it feels right now. For the few of us who are left, it’s a great time to be a value investor.
There is so little competition that the opportunities to buy fine companies with doubledigit cash-on-cash returns are more abundant than at any time in my career, other than at the bottom of a bear market.
This may be how Mr. Buffett felt in the 1950s.
So, here’s an example…
The cartoon says, “Mrs. Rothman, will any of this be relevant once AI takes over?”
We find ourselves asking the same thing.
I know everyone is talking about AI, and the title of my talk today is Solve-AI.
At Greenlight we have always thought of ourselves as flexible investors, willing to learn new things.
AI has been the rage for the last year and we have found a great idea.
See the full slides below.
