Chit Chat Stocks - Stanley Druckenmiller: The Investor That Beat Warren Buffett

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

On this episode of Chit Chat Stocks, we discuss Stanley Druckenmiller. The longtime investor put up 30% annual returns for 30 years, beating the returns of Buffett over that time frame. But is he the ...best investor ever? We discuss: (03:39) Early Life and Career of Stan Druckenmiller (08:03) Lessons from George Soros: Mentorship and Position Sizing (35:28) Summary of Druckenmiller's Investment Philosophy (36:59) Being Asset Agnostic: Learning About Different Asset Classes (40:19) Thinking in Probabilistic Scenarios and Waiting for a 'Fat Pitch' (45:20) Considering Future Potential and Not Just Current Earnings (48:05) Paying Attention to Geopolitical Events and Other Factors (53:51) Comparing Druckenmiller's Philosophy to Buffett's (01:02:41) Finding Your Own Investment Approach ***************************************************** Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChitChatStocks  Follow us on Twitter/X: ⁠https://twitter.com/chitchatstocks  Follow us on Substack: ⁠https://chitchatstocks.substack.com/  ********************************************************************* Options are not suitable for all investors and carry significant risk.  Option investors can rapidly lose the value of their investment in a short period of time and incur permanent loss by expiration date.  Certain complex options strategies carry additional risk.  There are additional costs associated with option strategies that call for multiple purchases and sales of options, such as spreads, straddles, among others, as compared with a single option trade. Prior to buying or selling an option, investors must read and understand the “Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options”, also known as the options disclosure document (ODD) which can be found at: www.theocc.com/company-information/documents-and-archives/options-disclosure-document Supporting documentation for any claims will be furnished upon request. If you are enrolled in our Options Order Flow Rebate Program, The exact rebate will depend on the specifics of each transaction and will be previewed for you prior to submitting each trade. This rebate will be deducted from your cost to place the trade and will be reflected on your trade confirmation. Order flow rebates are not available for non-options transactions. To learn more, see our Fee Schedule, Order Flow Rebate FAQ, and Order Flow Rebate Program Terms & Conditions. Options can be risky and are not suitable for all investors. See the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options to learn more. All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for US-listed, registered securities, options and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA & SIPC. See public.com/#disclosures-main for more information. ********************************************************************* FinChat.io is The Complete Stock Research Platform for fundamental investors. With its beautiful design and institutional-quality data, FinChat is incredibly powerful and easy to use. Use our LINK and get 15% off any premium plan: ⁠https://finchat.io/chitchat/?lmref=J3bklw  ********************************************************************* Check out https://www.firmreturns.com/ for value-focused equity research  Use our link and get a 20% discount on a premium plan: firmr... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, Chit Chat listeners, Ryan here. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. You know how much you hate fees on options trading? You know how these fees can be as high as a dollar per contract? Public.com has just launched a first-of-its-kind options rebate program that can save you money. In a sleek, modern trading experience, Public.com options traders have zero commission fees, zero per contract fees, and trading rebates of up to 18 cents per contract traded, depending on the number of referrals you make.
Starting point is 00:00:28 That's right. Public.com will give you back money on every options contract you trade, which can save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year as an active options trader. It's simple. Public allows you to spend less and get more back on your options trades. Why would you go anywhere else? Check it out for yourself and start saving on your options trades at public.com. This is paid for by public investing. Options are not suitable for all investors and carry significant risk. Full disclosures are in the podcast description, U.S. members only. Welcome to Chit Chat Stocks. On this show, hosts Ryan Henderson and Brett Schaefer analyze businesses and riff on the world of investing. As a quick reminder, Chit Chat
Starting point is 00:01:13 Stocks is a CCM Media Group podcast. Anything discussed on Chit Chat Stocks by Ryan, Brett, or any other podcast guest is not formal advice or recommendation. Now, please enjoy this episode. Buffett, in the last 30 years, has compounded just under 20%. $1,000 30 years ago would be $177,000 today, 24 up years and 6 down years, of which 3 of the 6 were more than 20%. Our speaker tonight, if he invested $1,000 30 years ago, today it would be $2.6 million before taxes and after taxes, because people say hedge funds don't do a very good job. They're not tax efficient. $300,000 still, 30 years and no losses.
Starting point is 00:02:12 That, Ryan, is a quote from a lead-in to a speech from the investor we are covering today. Perhaps, I wouldn't say an under-followed investor, but perhaps even despite his well-known track record, the praise he gets in the media, how people follow him, how everyone kind of looks at his takes and tries to see, you know, and build their own, perhaps still underrated It is Stanley Drunkenmiller, Stan Drunkenmiller for short. And as you can see from this quote here, Ryan, double the returns of Buffett over a 30-year period. That is correct.
Starting point is 00:02:53 And we should introduce listeners to the show. This is the Chit Chat Stocks Podcast. We are your hosts, Ryan Henderson and Brett Schaefer. And today, as you mentioned, we are talking about really a legendary investor and probably one of the best investment track records of all time. I will say Buffett did it for longer. So it's hard to really say anyone beat Buffett given how long he's been doing it for. But yes, during this 30-year time period, I'd say other than Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies, there really is not... I can't think of anyone that outperformed him.
Starting point is 00:03:35 Yeah, well, maybe at a large size. And we can talk about this more during the performance section. We'll go through the details and some of the numbers there again, because I know any listeners might have missed some of the details there. I will say we do not know his returns after 2010. So perhaps he is doing even better than Buffett over a longer time period. I'd say as a hunch, maybe he is, given some of the investments that we know he made, especially over the last couple of years.
Starting point is 00:04:04 But yes, we're covering Stan Drunkenmiller's history, performance, investing philosophy. We're going to try to cover on this episode as we do about once a month, maybe once every two months, covering a famous investor, someone who's done really well in the past,
Starting point is 00:04:19 you know, someone out there and try to learn from them, see what we can do as individuals. And if there's anything to learn from Stan Drunkenmiller in the past, we've covered, who is it? Terry Smith. Ray Dalio, which was a fascinating episode. We always get good reviews on that one just because
Starting point is 00:04:37 he's such a controversial figure. And that book was so fascinating. And we also did perhaps the most underrated investor out there who doesn't do any sort of media, Norbert Luce. So go check those out if you like these investor series. But Ryan, let's get right into it. Who is Stan Drunkenmiller? And how did he become such a prominent? And perhaps him and George Soros as a combo, the most famous hedge fund managers in modern times. Stan Druckenmiller is, just in terms of his titles, he's a professional fund manager. He's the lead investor at Duquesne Family Office, and he's the previous portfolio manager, maybe, I'm not sure on the title, it might have been chief investment officer
Starting point is 00:05:20 of the Soros Quantum Fund. But before we get into his investing career, I think it can be kind of fun to study what his early life looked like because, I don't know, it varies so much, so widely between great investors. So many investors had very different upbringings. There isn't any one path to getting there. So let's go through it a bit. Stan Druckenmiller was born in 1953. Until he was nine, he lived in a few small towns in South Jersey. then when his parents split he moved to richmond virginia with his father who was a chemical engineer he's pretty forthright about himself not being a great student he just comes out and says you know i wasn't anything special and it's kind of funny because we looked at norbert lou who was
Starting point is 00:06:12 an exceptional student top of his class graduating early you know all the uh success in the world academically. We're not seeing that with Stan Druckenmiller. He even says, the first thing I'd say very clearly, I'm no genius. I was not in the top 10% of my high school class. My SATs were so mediocre. I went to Badoin. I might be saying that wrong. Yeah, Badoin. As West Coasters, we don't really know some of these East Coast liberal arts schools and how to pronounce them. Yeah. So he went to Badoin College because it was the only good school that didn't require SATs. And this was a small liberal arts college in brunswick maine and there he studied english for the first two years because
Starting point is 00:06:57 his goal at the time was that one day he wanted to become an english professor however he says that while he was at college he was having a hard time understanding the financial section in the newspapers so he decided to take an economics course so that he could understand the newspapers a little better when he read them and he instantly fell in love with it he then went on to cram a bunch of economics classes into his last two years and he got a second major in economics and his goal at the time was to become an economics professor he says he loves to teach you can kind of see that in some of his speeches he likes he kind of has this like professor style way of talking to an audience in a way yeah he talks at a lot of
Starting point is 00:07:38 colleges now yeah and after that he attended university of michigan i believe it was for grad school and he dropped out. So dropped out, worked construction for six months. Says he didn't have a whole lot of job prospects, but he ended up getting a job at Pittsburgh National Bank through his first wife's stepfather. This is kind of interesting because this is a guy who didn't go to a target school. He didn't go the typical route. He wasn't phenomenal academically. He had an economics degree, but he was an English major too. He doesn't check a lot of the boxes of the typical finance route, if you want to call it that. Would McKinsey or Goldman Sachs hire him today?
Starting point is 00:08:29 I don't know. Probably not. I doubt it. I doubt it, actually. I think it's interesting for any listeners who were not in that group either of the big target schools. I think, look, yeah, you can be a very smart person and be a good investor, but I think it shows and Munger and Buffett have said this from their, I guess, RIP to Munger, but they said it time and time again over the last 50, 60 years. It's like, yes, it can be important to have good
Starting point is 00:08:58 smarts, to be a good student and all that stuff, but it's not necessary to be an investor and it's not the number one thing you need. And as we'll get into here, Druckenmiller, like Buffett, says that psychology and having emotional stability, rationality, thinking in probabilities is way more important than being the smartest guy in the room. Yeah. And you might even be able to argue that if he was the smartest guy in the room from a young age, he wouldn't have been as successful investing. Maybe he wouldn't have made such concentrated bets, which we'll get to in a little bit, but let's keep going on the history here a bit. He started at Pittsburgh National bank as a chemicals and banking analyst. But when he was – I think it was either 20 – so he got
Starting point is 00:09:44 promoted at 25, maybe it was 26. And he got promoted basically to like a portfolio manager to make some of the allocation decisions. And he was promoted by who he now calls his first mentor. And here's kind of the rationale from the mentor. He says – and this is in a speech that Druckenmiller gave to, I think it was at a private event. He says, after about a year and a half, I was a banking and chemical analyst. This guy calls me into his office and announces he's going to make me the director of research. These other eight guys and my 52-year-old boss are going to report to me. So I started to think, I'm pretty good stuff here. But he instantly said, now, do you know why I'm doing this? I said, no. He says, because for the same reason they sent 18-year-olds
Starting point is 00:10:33 to war you're too dumb too young and too inexperienced not to know to charge we around here have been in a bear market since 1968 this was 1978 at the time i think a big secular bull market's coming we've got we've all got scars we're not going to be able to pull the trigger so i need a young inexperienced guy but i think you've got the magic to go in there and lead the charge first of all what incredible foresight from this guy nice mentor there recognize that And maybe it was – Probably knew that he was pretty good. He had some good skills as an investor.
Starting point is 00:11:08 Yeah, I mean he probably had the idea that Druckenmiller was going to be special. But just the way he framed this, the fact that so many people were old at that firm, might be scared to make bold decisions, it's just incredible foresight from him. Anyway, so while he was in charge there, he made a big – Druckenmiller. He made a big investment that totally worked out in his favor. I'm going to talk about that in a sec, but that kind of helped parlay the rest of his career. It helped lead to other successes as well. So after that successful bet, he was asked to give a presentation at a dinner in New
Starting point is 00:11:45 York. Someone at that dinner came up to him and recommended that he should start his own firm instead of working at a bank. He said his quote to the guy was, start an investment fund, I'm worth $4,000. the guy was like, I'll pay you $10,000 a month just to talk to you. So he started this, I guess you can call it a consulting business. And he started to make a little money off that. And then he kind of experimented with the idea of starting to raise money. And he actually went about it, tried to raise as much capital as he could
Starting point is 00:12:18 to start his own investment firm. And after about a year and a half, he said he'd raised $900,000 in committed capital. And that was enough for him to decide to start Duquesne Capital Management. I think it might be called Duquesne Family Office now. Keep in mind, $900,000 at that time, worth a little bit more today. This was in 1981, and he was 28 years old at the time that he started Duquesne Capital Management, eventually. And I'm not sure if he came across Soros or Soros came across him, but they're two paths crossed. And Druckenmiller says that he really sought Soros out as a mentor. So the first mentor was kind of serendipity. It just turned out to have a guy that was his boss that believed in him and it really worked out for him. Then Soros, it's almost like the Buffett with Ben Graham situation where he really liked the way he invested. He went out, sought him out. And in 1988, Druckenmiller began managing the quantum fund for George Soros while also running Duquesne.
Starting point is 00:13:20 Did you find this a little interesting that he was running both at the same time? Yeah, a bit. But I always think, and Duquesne is a little bit secretive. It's hard to get numbers. It's not like Buffett where you're posting numbers every year or running a public equity fund. And the Soros fund, the quantum fund got a lot more headlines at the time just because Soros was the most famous hedge fund investor of the 80s and 90s. And I think what I've heard from, I don't have like sources in the industry, but just reading takes or someone with sourcing, is that Duquesne was really just a bunch of like small business owners.
Starting point is 00:14:07 It's not like institutional or anything. It's almost like, what's interesting is him and Dalio kind of got started in a similar way where they were doing research consulting, but they went across wildly different paths. Where Duquesne didn't really, I don't think was focused on raising money, just posted phenomenal returns, had their same investors, and the Bridgewater Fund was the opposite, where it's a lot of marketing. Yeah, and I think if you're – you have another job, it's probably hard to raise money from institutions. So I would guess it's probably a lot of family and friends that respected him. Why don't I just give it to the quantum fund? Yeah, exactly. But he ended up having success obviously with Duquesne and he actually had success working for George Soros as well.
Starting point is 00:14:57 The other thing here is it's kind of interesting. If you are sort of a long-term investor or you invest really kind of based on gut feel in a way, like you're predicting trends or it's not something super time-consuming, I guess, so it makes sense to me that he would be able to run both. It's not like he has a team of 10 analysts where they're trying to track every single move that's going to happen the next day. As far as time commitments go, I could see how he's able to manage both. And I bet he probably shared a lot of the same investments across both portfolios. Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. I'm sure there was tons of overlap because as he mentions, um and he does say this that he is saying it selfishly to he's he's like all the ideas when i was running quantum were essentially me and soros was kind of half retired and that's from 1988 to the year 2000 so i'm sure the portfolio overlap was either highly similar um but as we'll
Starting point is 00:16:02 get into what's funny is that soros's personal account was actually outperforming both duquesne and quantum uh and i guess the segues into this next session here because of the way that soros sizes up his investments um i guess we'll get into it what he learned from soros uh as a mentor here real quick okay yeah you have something to add ryan i mentioned that he sought out soros and in that speech he gave a piece of advice that i thought was really cool and if you're young i think you should really take this he says if you're early on in your career and they give you a choice between a great mentor or higher pay take the mentor every time it's not even close this is i mean his career kind of embodies this where if he got paid a little better at pittsburgh
Starting point is 00:16:50 national bank he might not have ever got the long-term returns of working under soros adopting some of the lessons that he saw from soros and really running duquesne on his own yeah yeah it is interesting okay so what did he learn i guess from soros i think there's really one thing we have a few quotes here and he sums it up but we can go into more details he says there's one thing i learned from them is that when you're right you know something you really feel it you can't have enough so he's saying position sizing make it large if you see a large one-way bet uh the full quote is for those who follow baseball i had a higher batting average sword soros had a much bigger slugging percentage. When I took over Quantum, I was running Quantum and Duquesne.
Starting point is 00:17:37 He was running his personal account, which was the size of an institution back then. And he was focusing 90% of his time on philanthropy and not really working day by day. In fact, a lot of the time he wasn't even around. And I'd say 90% of the ideas he were using came from me. And it was very insightful. And I'm a competitive person, frankly, embarrassing that in his personal account, working about 10% of the time, he continued to beat Duquesne and Quantum while was managing the money and again it's because he was taking my ideas and just had more guts now people get scared about this type of thing and yes it can go poorly if you are doing it if the ideas are bad i guess but i think one of the big lessons from
Starting point is 00:18:20 drunken miller and what he learned from soros and i would say that we'll go back to even before he met him, he did know this, but he kind of sort of took the strategy and almost put it on steroids. And he's like, look, don't be afraid to even be more aggressive. But a lot of people are, they'll look at a portfolio and say, you got to be diversified. You have to have, you know, I mean, a 5% position, like that's big. Or they'll look at something like that and say, no, you got to have like 25, 30 stocks or you have to own all these index funds and you have to have exposure to bonds or you have to have exposure to real estate. And what he says is that if you see something, because what's the point if you're going to spend all this time?
Starting point is 00:19:07 If you see something that is a really great one-way bet, low, low downside and very high upside, you should not be afraid to make it a large position in your portfolio. Yeah. And the other thing is when you start a fund, we kind of experienced this to some degree. When you start a fund, it's really tempting to want to diversify early, right? You don't want to have some big down period early on, betting super heavily on one thing because you just want to kind of play it cautious. and you think maybe over time, I'll come across something that's a big bet. We're going to talk about this here in a second. Druckenmiller from the jump knew exactly what he wanted to put money into and instantly generated good returns from it. And he kind of believed in his research. He didn't second guess himself and have all the diversification principles that people espouse today at a lot of business schools. So yeah, like you said, I think he'd learned a
Starting point is 00:20:09 ton from Soros and that really showed. Okay. So we're, yeah, we'll talk more about the philosophy later, but let me go through the performance stats again. And then Ryan's going to go through some of the biggest bets and successful investments he's made. And then we're going to go through the philosophy and what we've learned. So to reiterate for anyone, I know I talked about it at the beginning, but his stats are fairly simple to me. For 30 years through 2010, or maybe 2011, but right around that time period, he posted an average of 30% annual returns for 30 years. So that some are higher, some are lower, but the average was 30% annualized over 30 years and with no down years. So that is how, as I mentioned in the beginning,
Starting point is 00:20:52 someone who started with him for $1,000, which I believe, what was the total starting there, ryan 900k so someone probably started with 10 100 100 000 um if you put a thousand dollars with him at the start it would turn into 2.6 million dollars in 2010 or 2011 pre-tax again the post tax was like 300 000 so quite a bit less it's not a tax efficient strategy um now that's 26 million dollars if you put in 10 000 and 262 million dollars if you put in 100k of course the taxes matter here and i thought that speech was kind of funny where they're like yeah they say hedge funds aren't tax efficient but the returns get cut in it's like 20 of what the number is and i'm like yeah i think i don't i think the that strategy isn't tax efficient but it still works um but it's
Starting point is 00:21:41 literally off the charts of what the efficient market hypothesis hypothesis hypothesis people say would be even possible, similar to Buffett, Berkshire, and Munger's performance over the long term. Yeah. Give some of these numbers here. I mean, I'm sure people can extrapolate. You mentioned that $1,000 turned into $2.6 million, but for the people that may have invested $100,000 at the start, that turns into $262 million. It's not tax efficient, but that is still absolutely astounded yeah and the post-tax returns so buffett over the same in the last 30 years from that speech then they gave turned a thousand dollars into 177 000 now that's i believe 20 to 25 years after buffett started so the pile was bigger right it's a little bit of a handicap for buffett
Starting point is 00:22:38 but he still basically doubled the returns which is quite good and we'll talk about i think maybe at the end as a little teaser here whether um drunken miller is better than buffett now we don't have his updated returns uh but i think there's a good argument you can make a good argument for either either or especially given as we'll talk about his portfolio today he struggled after a little bit after the great financial crisis but the last few years given what he said and what he says he's owned and what his 13 f say i think his performance has been very, very strong the last few years. Finchat.io is the complete stock research platform for fundamental investors. They have all the standard financial data on more than
Starting point is 00:23:24 100,000 stocks globally. And beyond that, they have company-specific segment and KPI data on more than 1,500 stocks. So to give some examples here, you want to see Netflix's average revenue per member over the last 10 years? They've got it. Do you like to track YouTube's advertising revenue. They've got that too. If you want to see Celsius's revenue that comes from Costco, how much of their revenue comes from Costco, they also have that. So the breadth of FinChat segment and KPI data truly is one of a kind. I use FinChat every day to track and manage all my investments. I also use it to discover new investments. And if you want to get 15% off any paid plan, go to finchat.io slash chitchat. That's finchat.io slash chitchat to get 15%
Starting point is 00:24:10 off any paid plan. The link will also be in our show notes. Why don't you go through some of the famous investments here, Ryan? Yeah, we're going to walk through some of his best investments or maybe not necessarily his best in terms of total return, but at least some of his most famous because, as we mentioned earlier, not all of it is publicly available. but let's start with actually when he was back at the pittsburgh national bank so in 1979 i mentioned that there was this investment that kind of made him uh popular kind of put him on the map so 1979 the shah of iran goes under i'm not sure how all this actually mechanically worked out but
Starting point is 00:24:53 basically when the shah of iran went under the concept was that oil was going to the price of was going to shoot up. So he says, I'm 26, 25, excuse me. I don't have any experience. I don't know anything about portfolio managers. So I go, well, this is easy. Let's put 70% of our money in oil stocks and let's put 30% in defense stocks and let's sell all our bonds. The list he proposed went up a hundred percent while the S&P was flat. That's when they decided to name him chief investment officer. Yeah. It just has a little note there for the listeners. The reason they would sell the bonds is that and it ended up being right is this oil shock was highly inflationary which would cause the fed to raise rates more and then lower bond prices would go
Starting point is 00:25:37 down yeah and he even said if i was older more experienced maybe i would have sized this a little differently i wouldn't but my naivete ended up kind of benefiting me in this case so that kind of put him on the map and it came at a time when the s&p 500 was flat so really helped him there And then in 1981, this is directly after he started Duquesne Capital, Ronald Reagan became president and he named Paul Volcker to run the Federal Reserve. As many people know, anyone that keeps up with kind of financial history, Paul Volcker was absolutely keen on taming inflation. Inflation at the time was about 12% and everyone thought it was going to go higher. so Druckenmiller describes the situation. He says, Paul Volcker had other ideas. He had raised interest rates to 18% on the short end, and I could see that there was no way this man was going to let inflation go. So I had just started at Duquesne. I had a small amount of new capital. I took 50% of the capital and I put it into 30-year treasury bonds yielding 14%, and I owned
Starting point is 00:26:35 nothing else. And sure enough, the bonds went up despite a bear market in equities. Right out of the shoot, I was able to be up 40%. That helps for a number of reasons. First of all, it's always nice to be up 40%. But second of all, it's even better when everything else is down and you're up 40% because it becomes so much easier to raise capital that way as well. And well, and you can take those winnings and probably buy some fairly cheap stocks. And it's one of there is another lesson that he tries to expose and i don't know if it's one that individuals can take away the most because i i only invest in stocks but investing across various asset classes and having the skill set to look at all the different types of asset classes
Starting point is 00:27:27 can help you make money even if say equities go through a really bad or you know a rough stretch and that can help like you mentioned the the 40 return is nice on its own but then when you sell your position you have you're not down 30 looking for another investment idea in the stock market you know in equities you have you're up and you can find these cheap stocks it's just it's similar to you know like the long short strategy is stuff like that i will say for any commenters so they're gonna this wasn't really important part of it but just to be clear volkor was already the the fed chair um i don't want anyone giving any gotchas ryan but he was already the fed chair he got re he got confirmed so by okay uh reagan reagan which i yeah which probably
Starting point is 00:28:20 what i'm guessing drunken miller was looking at is that okay he got confirmed we already know his strategy to crush inflation as my number one priority with nothing else matters that's why i wonder you put on that bet yeah i wonder if he actually started duquesne with the idea that this was going to be the big investment interesting so he had this idea first because the people were talking to him for a couple of years about raising money that is interesting and that's smart by him that's smart by him yeah because the first few years are very important yeah anyway So that was kind of two big ones early on in his career. Do you want to go through the investment that he's perhaps most well-known for, the British
Starting point is 00:29:05 pound bet? So this one was in the quantum fund at the Soros Asset Management, whatever it is. And I guess we'll just talk about it. It's kind of hard for me to understand the foreign currency stuff, but I think I understand his philosophy here, which was there was extremely low downside, minimal downside, and a lot of upside. So they were able to put on a low-risk, highly levered bet. Here's the quote. In 1992, in August of that year, my housing analyst in Britain called me up and basically said that Britain looked like they were going into a recession because the interest rate
Starting point is 00:29:41 increases they were experiencing were causing a downturn in housing. At the same time, if you remember germany the wallet fallen in 89 they reunited with east germany and because they were super worried about inflation because of their history they were obsessed with the deutschmark and they didn't want another inflationary experience so the bundesbank which is the german bank they were getting growth uh you know they're raising rates like crazy that all sounds fine and this is still the quote except the douche mark and the british pound were linked and you cannot have two currencies where one economic outlook is going down and the other outlook is going up he said it i'm sure he's visualizing with his hand but he said one way
Starting point is 00:30:26 and the other way so in august of 1992 there were 7 billion in quantum i put a billion and a half short the british pound and then soros convinced him to make it 15 billion correct so let me just hop in here there's some of this speech that had been they weren't able to interpret it and throw it into the um transcript but basically the deutsche mark and the i believe was the british pound were combined so when one was a little more a little less worried about inflation germany was like we're not going to do this anymore and i didn't include this in a quote but they they eventually broke off if i'm not mistaken and that was sort of his catalyst to say i'm going short the pound the the pound is going to get devalued yes yeah that i get confused on
Starting point is 00:31:20 the foreign exchange stuff uh the foreign currency investments i can't say i understand the the full dynamics of what is happening uh i get confused so i'm not gonna pretend i understand that we could have maybe got something wrong there even though i was just trying to read that but i understand Druckenmiller's philosophy for why he was so excited about this bet, because he understood that there was no to minimal downside. I remember reading an interview with the two of them where they said, look, there was about maybe a chance for a 2% loss on the currency bet, given the way the central banks were acting and given the way the economies are going. And there was a good chance that they were going to see really good gains you know from the the uh breaking the
Starting point is 00:32:07 british pound so they decided to double like put 15 billion dollars into this bet with you know so if they're wrong they would lose four percent but when they were right they not only saw you know gains from 100 of their portfolio but they lowered up to two times their portfolio yeah let me let me just go through the actual uh quote here he says so fast forward to september next month i wake up one morning and the head of the bundesbank helmet slash schlesinger schlesinger i know i'm saying that right sorry uh if i'm not has given an editorial in the financial times and i'll skip all the flowers it basically said the british pound is crap and we don't want to be united with this currency so i thought well this is my opportunity so i decided i'm going to bet like
Starting point is 00:32:52 Soros bets on the British pound against the Deutsche Mark. It just so happens he's in the office. He's usually in Eastern Europe at this time doing his thing. So I go in at four o'clock and I said, George, I'm going to sell five and a half billion dollars worth of British pounds tonight and buy Deutsche Mark. Here's why I'm doing it. And that means we'll have a hundred percent of the fund in this one trade. And as I'm talking, he starts wincing, like what is wrong with this kid? And I think he's about to blow away my thesis. And he says, that is the most ridiculous use of money management I have ever heard. What you described is an incredible one-way bet. We should have 200% of our net worth in this trade, not 100%. Do you know how often something
Starting point is 00:33:31 like this comes around? Yeah. And I think, look, most people, you don't know enough about currencies. We don't to make any sort of bet, but everyone else would make the mistake of saying, well, let's make this 10 of our portfolio where if you see something you might see it once a decade that you can really understand there's an opportunity there you want you might not size it up to 200 uh given that there might be different downside risks compared to a currency bet versus like an equity bet or something like that but you could make it a large position especially if you're an individual and you're not managing you know i don't know i mean i guess we'll say we'll save these takes for the philosophy section why don't um do you want to go through this last one yeah
Starting point is 00:34:15 we'll talk the last one unsurprisingly kind of could given his i call it expertise on not only the equity markets but also housing commodities there's basically anything to do anything to do with the economy and finance here's a quote of what happened with the housing market he said an analyst from bear stearns came in and showed me some subprime situation the whole housing thing we were able to figure out by mid-05 that this thing was going to end in a spectacular housing bust. We were lucky enough that it turned out to be correct. My returns weren't very good in 06 because I was a little early, but 07, 08, they were a lot of fun. I'd say 05 is kind of the same time Michael Burry found it out too. So what's interesting is that if Druckenbauer was
Starting point is 00:35:00 one of the big short investors, they would be like, you know how they ride that CNBC likes to even today. Big short investor says blank about the housing market. What's funny is that, oh no, this is just another trade for him because he is able to call all these things so clearly. And what's interesting is, I think I don't need to read the full quote. Yeah, okay. Here's a quote that was related to what he was looking at with his team in the 2000s. So he said, I want you guys to try and block out where Fed funds are and just consider this economic data and let's play a game. We've all come down from Mars. Where do you think Fed funds would be if you just saw this data and didn't know where they were? And I'd say of the seven people, the lowest guess was 3% and the
Starting point is 00:35:47 highest was 6%. So we had great conviction that the Federal Reserve was making a mistake with way too loose monetary policy. We didn't know how it was going to manifest itself, but we were on alert that this is going to end very badly. And this was about, I think he was talking about with his team in kind of 03, 04. With the post.com bubble, the Fed was super loose with their monetary policy, and it kind of led to the housing bubble. We don't need to go through that full history today. But what I think is interesting is, you know, Druckenmiller, you hear him talk, people ask him about his macro views all the time. And it's because that's exciting. It gets clicks. But what's interesting is, you know, he talks about kind
Starting point is 00:36:28 the debt levels with the United States, that type of stuff. And he always says, I try not to have the debt levels and all that stuff inform my thinking or cloud my thinking. When looking at the macroeconomic stuff, it's not necessarily saying, okay, well, I need to make a bet on what interest rates are going to be. He kind of understands, okay, the Fed is probably in a very loose monetary position. so we need to be on high alert for thing for a fat pitch that can materialize and they're looking they're waiting and a couple years later they find the housing bet and they're able to see okay
Starting point is 00:37:10 connect the two dots yeah this is probably a housing bubble you know all that good stuff i think that's a good lesson is to not not like keep the macroeconomic stuff if you understand it It can help you, I guess, not make mistakes and be on the lookout for when maybe the economy is overheating. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair. Let's try to sum up his overall investing strategy. Let's talk about some of the lessons here and what we can really take away.
Starting point is 00:37:43 Because I know people are probably listening to this thinking, listen, that British pound bet sounds really cool and all, but I'm never going to make that. So, and we're in the same camp, don't worry. But I think there's still some valuable takeaways. Why don't you start with kind of the summary in terms of his investing strategy? Yeah, so it's hard to pin down. He's not writing letters like Buffett. It's not all that stuff.
Starting point is 00:38:06 It's kind of just speeches, honestly, that he gives every once in a while at charity stuff and at universities. But I think if we piece together what he has owned, some of his winning bets in the past, what he's talked about working for him, I think the strategy can be summed up to me in three major lessons that any investor can take away from. First, be asset agnostic. Don't be afraid to invest in equities, fixed income currencies, or commodities, and to be long or short. Now, I will say for Ryan and I, I think for these next two, we're pretty good at trying to learn those two but for this one i am i am like still afraid i'm still afraid to go beyond just being long equities and you know maybe i have time to learn that but what do you think
Starting point is 00:39:00 ryan do you think it's worthwhile for individuals to try to learn more about because everyone just usually learns you know getting long stocks owning stocks for the long term do you think it can be helpful for individuals to try to learn more about these other currencies and or sorry these other asset classes and not just going long but going short for some of them maybe it's not the most useful uh if you're invested in any companies that are dependent on certain commodities i think understanding why commodities trade the do is probably important but i do think equity only investors can learn a ton by studying fixed income investments even if they don't actually invest in them, it can help you analyze equities better by understanding what the actual
Starting point is 00:39:48 company's debt load is like, understanding what their financial obligations might be. And one of the best ways to do that is to actually study the bonds themselves. So I think by understanding bonds and fixed income, you actually become a better equity investor. If you have any aspirations of being a fund manager, yes, this would be my biggest piece of advice would be understand multiple asset classes because that is really what allows you to perform well when things don't look so great for an individual asset class. When we started Arch Capital, we had companies we liked, but a lot of them, the valuations had become a little stretched. And maybe we still liked them over the long run, but there was
Starting point is 00:40:37 certainly some risk in the short term that there could be valuation compression or multiple compression or equity markets in general could do poorly. And that's exactly what happened. But had we been better fixed income investors, had more exposure to that, maybe we could have shifted some of our allocation that way and helped out of it. So I do think it can really help to study fixed income. Yeah. And I would also say another thing to learn, even if you're not going to be shorting stocks, which, you know, can add stress. It's more time consuming. It's not for everyone. But I think understanding how a good short seller operates, which we've done interviews in the past, we did one specifically on short selling that you can go back and look up and
Starting point is 00:41:19 anyone contact us if you can't find it, we'll send you the direct link with the, and I'm apology, George, I'm forgetting his last name, but the founder of Upslope Capital, go check out their work. They do some, publish some good stuff out there on how short selling works or, you know, how to be a good short seller. Even if you're not going to do that, it's good to understand because then it can help you avoid making mistakes with your longs because then you can identify those fraudulent companies out there. But let me continue. So the first one I'd say is asset agnostic. Don't be afraid to learn about all these different asset styles that you can invest in because the bigger your pool, the more opportunities you are to find good stuff.
Starting point is 00:41:55 Now, the second one is thinking in probabilistic scenarios and waiting for a fat pitch. I think everyone understand maybe not everyone i think this one is what a lot of people can learn but i think fail to do so this one's anyone can learn this one expand on that a bit what do you mean like it's not hard to it's it's not like okay i need to spend years and years being a professional at a the pittsburgh national bank and learn about fixed income and commodities and and all that all that sort of stuff right but you can understand this concept by reading a single blog post. The future isn't certain for a stock or any sort of asset class, but there are, you can weigh things in probabilities and say, okay, I'm waiting to look at something I understand
Starting point is 00:42:43 and I'm waiting for it to be a fat pitch, which means slow downside, extremely high upside. And then the third lesson here is when the fat pitch arrives, you want to quote, act like a pig, as he has said before, and bet much bigger than the diversification heads and everyone else would recommend they say you should. Here's the quote he'd say on this stuff. The first thing I heard when I got in the business, not from my mentor, was bulls make money, bears make money, and pigs get slaughtered. As an aside, one of my friends said this to me the other day. That's not even investing. And I was like, yeah, I guess that is what it is. I famous quote. Can you hear the quote here? Druckenmiller says, I'm here to tell you I was
Starting point is 00:43:26 a pig and I strongly believe the only way to make long-term returns in our business that are superior is by being a pig. I think diversification and all the stuff they're teaching at business school today is probably the most misguided concept everywhere. The mistake I'd say 98% of money managers and individuals make is they feel like they got to be playing in a bunch of stuff i could not agree with this more you never really have that many good ideas no one does and maybe you're in look if you look at his portfolio today it has a lot of stuff in it but sometimes yet essentially i think his philosophy can be summed up to waiting waiting waiting then when the fat pitch arrives bet big and don't be afraid to be aggressive when you see an
Starting point is 00:44:18 opportunity. Yeah. I mean, this is really the biggest lesson I took away from studying Druckenmiller in general is when the fat pitch is there, have the confidence to bet big. The difficulty obviously is getting good enough, studying enough pitches to recognize when one really is a fat pitch as opposed to just kind of a mediocre one. And I think that really just comes with time and it comes with studying businesses over and over again yeah or other assets don't forget ryan that's true that is true and now there's another thing that i i'm curious your thoughts here i'll go i'm gonna go through it one way that i think drunken maker drunken miller makes a lot of money is getting into assets before they hit what you might call a momentum
Starting point is 00:45:09 trend and being able to identify what you might call the KPIs or whatever you think he sees that's going to start making the stock ripping higher before everyone else. So first, I'll say what is momentum? And according to Investopedia or all these sources, momentum is the speed or velocity of price changes in a stock, security, or tradable instrument. Momentum shows the rate of change in price movement over a period of time to help investors determine the strength of the trend. Stocks that tend to move with the strength of momentum are called momentum stocks. So it's i guess that's just a lot of words to say a stock is moving higher rat like quickly and the momentum uh what is it called factor yeah the momentum factor essentially says stocks that are
Starting point is 00:45:55 in momentum you know they stand to have that momentum and keeps going until until then it's a weird thing but it's been empirically shown in a lot of stocks and that i think it makes sense Once a trend starts and once people see an idea, everyone tries to start crowding in there. But I think part of Druckenmiller's strategy is trying to look pre-momentum and find things that can materialize into a long-term secular trend, momentum trend, whatever it is. Let's look at his, you know, you could look at the oil and defense bet in the late 70s, where he said, okay, there's a catalyst on this. Now it's going to turn into a bull market for oil and defense stocks, right? Or you can go to his NVIDIA trade today. I think he's trying to find like getting into a secular grower or momentum stocks before
Starting point is 00:46:44 they turn into momentum stocks. And I think this quote sums it up perfectly for his strategy. And this is probably the second big takeaway, I would say, before, after the probabilistic thinking and position sizing. Excuse me, this quote. It doesn't matter what a company is earning, what they have earned. He taught me that you have to visualize the situation 18 months from now. And whatever that is, that's where the price will be, not where it is today. Thoughts, Ryan?
Starting point is 00:47:11 This is the one I have the hardest time with, to be honest. He has obviously done a really good job with this. And you see that especially in his portfolio now where it's pretty much – it's real AI cloud heavy. And we can go through his portfolio if we want a bit here on the show, but Microsoft and NVIDIA are some of the largest holdings. He did a really good job recognizing this, but it would have been really tough for me to hop on the AI trend idea early on here. And I think in general, I like the idea of trying to forecast what might happen to this business. I think the only situation where I've had this in my personal life, my personal investing career, is maybe with Amazon, where I thought some of the cost pressures they were seeing could subside and the earnings potential could be very different in 18 months. But it's really – I tend to have a hard time with this one. It's hard to predict things 18 months out, like a big change.
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Starting point is 00:49:24 That's firmreturns.com slash chitchat, and it'll get you 20% off. earlier in the show you heard us talk about the investing platform public.com that's where you can trade options with no commissions or per contract fees and you get a rebate of up to 18 cents per contract nerd wallet recently gave public five out of five stars for options trading if you want to see why go to public.com and start getting a rebate of up to 18 cents per contract traded this is paid for by public investing options are not suitable for all investors and carry significant risk full disclosures are in the podcast description us members only yeah i'd say he's not necessarily saying you can do this with every stock but i'm saying
Starting point is 00:50:06 you know it's just i think it's good to think about whether it's difficult or not where the earnings over the last 12 months do not matter and what's going to cause something like Nvidia to move higher starting when he bought in, I forget when he first bought, but he sized up his position, I believe, late 2022 or early 2023 when we started seeing this AI trend. I think he kind of said, look, if this AI thing's real, this is what he said in interviews, if this AI thing's real, Nvidia is likely going to run for a long time. And what's interesting is I think he's thinking more simply than even we are. We're trying to go, I don't know, what if it's a bubble? What if there's all this spending? What's the ROIC going to be? What's the blah, blah, blah,
Starting point is 00:50:58 blah, blah? What's the downside? What's it actually trading at? What's its earnings multiple? And he's like, look, if the spending is there, it's going to run likely for a couple of years and then I'll get out. Yeah. I think the big takeaway for me with this, and it's kind of similar to yours where it's like not necessarily pre-momentum maybe it is but it's reacting to world events so this was kind of my big one of my big takeaways for investors um from looking at Druck is just actually pay attention to geopolitical things um big incidents that happen around the world the we talked about the Shah of Iran that that or Iran that being sort of his catalyst for buying oil stocks early on. I think it was in 1978. He has this quote. He was
Starting point is 00:51:49 talking about why he loves investing. He says, the thought that every event in the world affects some security price somewhere, I just found incredibly intellectually – I assume this part got redacted, but I think it's intellectually stimulating. He says, to try and figure out what the next puzzle was and what was going to move that, that's what he really liked. So when there's a big event that can actually change the demand for certain businesses' products, like we saw with AI and the demand for NVIDIA's chips, I think that's something that investors can actually implement in their own personal portfolios. I agree. And I would also caveat, don't remember what he says about finding a fat pitch. I want to go through maybe some ways that he tries to be cautious. And he has, even though it's honestly, it's people say that they him and Buffett have way different strategies. But if you look at his portfolio, he bought and held Microsoft. He's held it for a long, long time. I wouldn't say it's that different in that regard. He just likes to play more in other asset classes.
Starting point is 00:52:59 But I would say he also focuses on the downside a lot, and you need to be cautious. You can't be just going willy-nilly because turning your portfolio into a zero and making a mistake on these quote-unquote fat pitches is how you blow up. And he says time and time again, I have a couple of notes here on this. He said in a recent interview, I think my record is knowing not when to play as much as when to play. So basically, when he says play, he means investments. And I think when there is a lot of downside, a lot of uncertainty for future scenarios or general cloudiness in a sector asset class, he tries to stay out of it or stay neutrally exposed to it.
Starting point is 00:53:38 He plays not to lose when looking at these things. For example, right now he says he's confused on foreign currencies. I won't pretend I know anything about that, but that's essentially what he said. I don't know the details of why he thinks it's confusing. but when the opposite occurs and he gets conviction in an outcome with minimal downside, he will swing bigger than most people think
Starting point is 00:54:01 or think they should do. For example he did this with maybe the cloud stock he did this with the AI stocks or really just NVIDIA they did that recently with them and some of the other examples that we give historically also if you're looking to get into shorting
Starting point is 00:54:17 he's been good at this over the long term but he said And I would just say this as an example, as a lesson for shorting strictly on valuation. Quote, I was short $200 million in dot-com stocks. I lost $600 million. All of these companies eventually went bankrupt. Shorting's tough, and there's more than that to this valuation.
Starting point is 00:54:41 Because I would just say that as a caveat before we get any cowboys out there trying to replicate Drunken Miller and then blowing up their entire portfolios. Yeah. Yeah. I think, so we've been going for a little over 50 minutes. I think we've talked mostly about all, we've kind of summarized his philosophy. We've pulled some investor takeaways. Do you have anything else that you want to talk about in terms of things you learned from him? No, I don't think so until we get to the wrap up session. I think let's go through what his equity portfolio looks like today. And then what's our last question called? final takeaways and whether he's the best ever yeah yeah so there's not really a lot to talk
Starting point is 00:55:26 about for his current portfolio i mean he has the big i'll talk about the big three positions but the rest is all in these tiny little he seems to have a ton of starter positions so it's hard to take that much away his largest position is microsoft his second largest position is coupon that's at 12.3 percent 11.2 percent of the portfolio third largest position is nvidia but he also has call options it looks like on a video as well and then he owns eli lily the rest it starts to get smaller and smaller basically he's done a phenomenal job playing the ai and cloud computing trend and then he seems to just really believe in the coupon as well which that's great because i need confirmation bias yeah i i will say actually the 13th
Starting point is 00:56:16 um a while ago when he owned coupon and then seeing that it was down and seeing that he's been under for a long time was um an indicator for me that i need to research it more so i will say i am using him for a little bit of confirmation bias on this one but i'm sharing for the video watchers on youtube or spotify we have a nice little visualization of his portfolio i will say i believe it could be honestly a small part of his overall portfolio at any given time just because i think it's a few billion dollars for the equity portfolio but he also might be shorting stuff he might be in international markets and he might be in different asset classes and i i have no clue i really have no clue how big the duquesne family office is and
Starting point is 00:57:04 given his returns i honestly sneaky he sneakily might be unless his philanthropy is super aggressive which i think it actually might be he might be one of the richest people in the world interesting yeah i don't know but i i think there's not a lot there's not enough data out there that's what i mean i i don't think he's as rich as buffett but he might be richer than people think but yeah i wanted to share this chart uh which is one of the nice visualizations you can make with our sponsor finchat you can see that when he sees a like ryan mentioned something he thinks is a fat pitch quote unquote whether it was microsoft a while ago whether it was nvidia a while ago and what or whether it's coupon um and he's also an eli lily so i think
Starting point is 00:57:50 that's another secular trend that he's trying to go after with the weight loss drugs where i think he is seeing that as a longer term trend than people think but i'm not sure his exact thesis there he'll bet big on those but then he'll have a lot of starter positions a lot of smaller stuff a lot of stuff that maybe he'll stay neutral and that doesn't necessarily matter where he's described before just trying to hit singles over and over and over again and then he'll go for the home runs when he sees a good risk reward present itself. Okay. I think it's wrap up time. Is Druckenmiller one of the best investors ever? Any other lessons that you want to take away as well? Yeah. So let me go through the lessons first. I think there are some good takeaways.
Starting point is 00:58:36 One, don't invest in the present, invest in the future. And I would say to even take that further, He uses 18 months as an example, but I would say look at various timeframes. I know we all want to be the magical, oh, I just look on a 10-year time horizon. And yes, that's ideal. We want the best way for individuals, I think, to make money consistently or get good returns, especially if you're not going to be an index investor, is to buy and hold quality companies at a reasonable price and hold them for a long time. But I think he is a lesson here is saying, look, if you want to avoid blowing up and having your positions go down 50, 60, 70 percent, look at some shorter term time periods as well as longer term time periods.
Starting point is 00:59:22 Maybe look at, OK, what do I think this could do over the next 18 months or what do I think the numbers look like over the next 18 months as well as the next three years and as well as the next five years and how much confidence I can have in that. Other lesson, think in probabilities, not black and white. Lesson, I think even if an outcome occurs, don't just result on what happened. I think today, Carvana has been a very, very good stock the last year. I would worry that investors are kind of taking the wrong lesson from that and saying, look, the outcome is good, but I just took on a ton of risk to get there. I don't know if he would identify Carvana as a fat pitch. back at the beginning of 2023 even though the returns have been phenomenal and various things
Starting point is 01:00:08 like that i just there's a lot of ways to look at the world and probabilities but i think in general or excuse me the investing world and probabilities you know it's like okay what could the outcome of this uh individual stock fear what you know more macro stuff for different asset classes or my uh position sizing across my portfolio a lot of stuff just thinking in probabilities and not saying okay well x stock is guaranteed to be the best because they have been the best in the past you see that time and time again and it comes back to that quote i've watched the big short too many times but you hear that one at the beginning of the mark twain quote about you don't get in trouble uh with what it's not what you don't know it's what you know for certain
Starting point is 01:00:55 right that is actually wrong i'm paraphrasing but i think drunken miller would agree with that a lot and that applies to his investing philosophy is look we're thinking in probabilities i'm not afraid to change my mind i'm he always lays out like various scenarios especially for macro stuff or whatever he's laying out various scenarios of what could happen and he's saying look we're positioned because we think it's going to be like this but it it might shift and well you know we might see one fat pitch but a lot of the stuff we're just thinking in various probabilities on how to not lose money. Let's see. Yeah, go ahead. Let me interrupt here. It's been fun to study Druckenmiller. I don't know if I'll take away that many lessons that are that applicable
Starting point is 01:01:42 to my personal portfolio. I will say this is a great example of how there's a million ways to make money in investing. We looked at someone like Norbert Liu where the strategy is quite different it's very individual stock focus find undiscovered businesses hold them for a long period um whereas this is very top-down approach the one lesson that i will probably end up pulling from looking at jack and miller is that hopefully this doesn't hurt me in the long run uh don't be afraid to bet heavy when i feel like there's a fat pitch and it's not yeah i think that's what something everyone can look at. But the thing is, is it a fat pitch? That's always the big question. I think Buffalo would say the same thing, right? He doesn't assist diversifications
Starting point is 01:02:35 for losers, basically. I'd say lesson two is learning how shorting works. You don't even have to short to have it help you. Learning how all this other stuff works. I think people that just focus on, okay, I'm just investing in growth stocks, or I'm just investing long only with a 10 year time horizon, or I'm just investing in deep value stocks, whatever it is, they get that you can get blinded and hurt and hurt doing that. And maybe I'll leave one before we get into the final question of whether he's the best ever. He has this quote, I don't think I'll read the full thing. But he says, what are characteristics you would look for in hiring an investor? And maybe I think listeners would like this. First thing is passion.
Starting point is 01:03:17 if you're not passionate some people are just going to run you over because they're going to be thinking about this stuff 24 7 and then the second characteristic he looks for is how they have done during a bear market i'd say those two things so he's basically looking at are you passionate about this thing and are you good at focusing on not and protecting the downside yeah and i do think it's different it's not exactly apples to apples what are the best characteristics for a fund manager versus what are the best characteristics to have for a personal investment account.
Starting point is 01:03:52 True. Because there's so much advantage as a fund manager to doing well in bad times. You can raise more money. You don't have to raise more money to buy new things, right? So if I'm just running my personal account
Starting point is 01:04:10 and stock prices drop, I can just add with my next... income that comes in it's hard to do that as a with a fund so i do think there's different skills required it's a little easier to weather a downturn it's a little easier to play in one asset class if you're just an individual and managing your own money that's true that's true and look he's putting up 30 returns not sure what the track record's been since 2010 but i know he said he hasn't put up the same sort of numbers but i think recently especially because he also talked about shorting the two-year uh two-year treasury bond at the exact opportune moment
Starting point is 01:04:51 uh which is probably not bad uh starting in 2021 inflation started getting hit i'm sure his performance has been absolutely astounding but look if you don't need you know what i mean he has more than enough money than he'll ever need and you don't need to match his returns to uh to get a good nest egg going is he the best ever well i would say given what i know buffett's returns have been since 2010 slightly trailing the s&p right i think or maybe just tracking it something around there not 100 sure i think i think it's about that if not it wouldn't be significantly higher but given the fact that drunken miller beat him significantly to 2010 And I would say through today, given the fact that he called the cloud, called Microsoft, called NVIDIA, and seems to have done very well in the bond market, although we don't know for certain, but shorting the two-year at the time he said he did, probably worked out extremely well.
Starting point is 01:06:02 I think he has likely outperformed Buffett since 1981. Does that make him better than him? I don't know. Buffett's gone longer. but if you look at the numbers he's been better than him since 1981 i say give me give me buffett now since 1981 yes but those there was a lot of progress for anyone involved with buffett in the 60s like from i think when did he start the buffett partnerships the early 50s it's We've got to credit him for how well he did early on,
Starting point is 01:06:44 and it doesn't always get reflected entirely in the Berkshire returns. But if we're just looking at who was the better investor, the Buffett partnerships, you've got to look at those results as well. Yeah, shoot, we should have brought those numbers up. Those are probably pretty much close to what Druckenmiller was doing because he was beating the broad market by about 20%, and Druckenmiller was probably also beating the broad market by about 20%. Um, the other thing is Berkshire is, or God Berkshire is a ton more tax efficient.
Starting point is 01:07:18 Yeah. But even after the taxes, he was beating him double, but at a smaller size. Do you think he was beating him in the quantum fund? Not sure. I would have to guess no, because he kind of blew it up. Right. Uh, part of it. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:07:32 He did make, we, yeah, I guess we forgot to talk about that. He went long some dot-com stocks and did hurt that. I don't know the exact returns of that. And then he stopped managing it in 2000. Yeah, and I don't think that was for a good thing yet. That does hurt his track record. But let me pose this question, Ryan. So he's younger than Buffett.
Starting point is 01:07:53 Buffett's like 90, right? And he's 70, something like that? Yeah, somewhere around there. Buffett's, I think, 93, yeah. Yeah, okay. Close things out. how many more we might not know for certain because we might not see the numbers for the duquesne family office how many more years of him from 1981 beating him would you have to
Starting point is 01:08:15 would there have to be for him to be the best ever 10 more years 15 more years eventually it's a little hard to measure now because the record is in public but we're kind of speculating on the last decade right right he might not yeah right yeah true i could be wrong it's speculating that he's done better than him but i'd say likely he's been better the quantum fund stuff does it is a blemish on his tracker let's be clear that is he may have done well with that but it ended right after he had the end of the quantum fund yeah right because he went long.com and then shortly after the fund closed or he stopped managing it so that's a bit of a blemish for me i'd say if he continued to do this for another
Starting point is 01:09:04 two decades and was putting up 30 returns yeah you could put him in that bucket for sure yeah the same level it's hard to tell though they're both really good i think that's and you can learn you can learn stuff from both you can also learn uh that they're probably a little bit better than us so be cautious don't be going putting 200 of your portfolio in a currency bet um the beauty of berkshire in my opinion is that you're not entirely reliant on continued great investments from buffett like new investments yes whereas if you're betting with truck you're betting that he can continue to do kind of pull the rabbit out of a hat in a sense when things go awry which is just when i look at berkshire like if i were offered an investment in both you know there's a little
Starting point is 01:10:00 more safety in the berkshire investment counterpoint though drunken miller has no down years for 30 years in the duquesne and duquesne portfolio yeah that's true that is a good caveat that is a good caveat so there's a the balance to both yeah you're right that it's a little bit more permanent but it is a little bit different because they kind of turned into an operating business. They're both good. I think that's a good way to wrap things up. Lots to learn from Druckenmiller. Hopefully, any listener enjoyed this episode. I know we went pretty long and hopefully in some good detail on his philosophy and anything you can learn for your own portfolio and trying to become a better investor as we're trying to do along with you guys.
Starting point is 01:10:42 If you have any recommendations for investors from all types, we'd love to cover. We're going to do this series probably once a month or once every two months, depending on our schedule. So we'll keep chugging along here and we can pretty much do it indefinitely. So let's close things out. Hit the disclosure. We are not financial advisors. Anything we say on the show is not formal advice or recommendation. Ryan, I, or any podcast guests may hold securities discussed in this podcast, may have held them in the past, and may buy, sell, or hold them in the future. Thank you everyone for listening, and we'll see you next time. I'll see you next time.

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