CNBC: The Bull Case for Hedge Funds
The bull case for hedge funds, with Eric Jackson, of Ironfire Capital, and Paul Kedrosky, of Ten Asset Management
Last Update: Wed. Dec. 31 2008 11:35 AM
Eric Jackson's Blog About Longs, Shorts, Hedge Funds, Corporate Governance, and China
The bull case for hedge funds, with Eric Jackson, of Ironfire Capital, and Paul Kedrosky, of Ten Asset Management
Last Update: Wed. Dec. 31 2008 11:35 AM
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Labels: Bernie Madoff, CNBC, Eric Jackson, Hedge Funds, Ironfire Capital, Paul Kedrosky, Trish Regan
From TheStreet.com
By Eric Jackson
12/26/08 - 12:56 PM EST
The one group of investors that's been vilified more than any other by the business press and government officials alike in 2008? Hedge fund managers.
After years of rapid growth in terms of both assets and numbers of funds in operation, the hedge fund industry has taken a PR black eye this year. Media reports would have you believe that the industry is about to collapse in size, see its revenue drop dramatically through fee reductions and become heavily regulated to protect unsuspecting investors from another Bernie Madoff scam.
Hedge funds certainly make an easy target. They've had a bad year, along with every other retail and institutional investor. But the industry is about to grow dramatically over the next five years. This coming year will mark the beginning of the next wave of this industry's growth.
The 12 months of 2008 have proved an abysmal year, and every investor can't wait to be done with it. While hedge fund managers have done terribly, (with the exception of maybe Bill Miller) no one in the media seems to criticize the mutual fund managers or other wealth advisors for lousy performance.
It seems to be an unstated opinion in many articles that hedge fund managers should know better than other investors. One simple reason for this, a reason that draws endless attention and criticism, is hedge fund manager compensation. It's true that the best-performing fund managers over the last few years have been well compensated.
I don't have a problem if a hedge fund manager, the CEO of Yahoo! (YHOO Quote - Cramer on YHOO - Stock Picks) or the head of risk management at Citigroup (C Quote - Cramer on C - Stock Picks) gets paid boatloads of compensation year in and year out, on two conditions: (1) they should only be paid well based on their direct contribution to the performance of their firms, and (2) that performance should be "real" performance, meaning that there is real value created, not some illusory accounting profit.
Hedge fund managers have an advantage over those who hold the types of positions mentioned above. First, as with a sales rep, you always know how a hedge fund manager is doing. With the exception of managers that dabble in private equity or illiquid assets, which are more difficult to manage on a daily mark-to-market basis, any hedge fund investor could get a daily report on how a manager is performing.
And hedge funds -- even the big ones -- are still small shops. If a fund has a good year or a bad year, its manager, whether it's Stevie Cohen or Bill Ackman, gets the credit or the blame. They don't get to punt responsibility to a foreign office or a snowstorm that kept away retail shoppers.
The second advantage hedge fund managers have over others when it comes to their compensation is that their performance is "real" at the end of each calendar year. Simply put, the market value of your portfolio this year gets measured against last year's market value.
Whether or not these profits were aided by leverage, hedge fund managers must perform in order to be compensated. While others can use their political skills to keep their jobs, hedge fund managers have to live with their fund's performance and the consequences that performance brings.
After a disastrous 2008, the big commercial banks are holding back recently injected capital from taxpayers to pay out year-end bonuses. However, few hedge funds (with the exception perhaps of the 10% that made money this year) will pay out bonuses.
What's more, many of the hedge funds that lost money for their investors this year adhere to "high-water marks." This means they have to make back their 2008 losses in 2009 before they are eligible for future bonuses. Investors get made whole and their managers only get bonuses when they actually deserve them. Citigroup investors sure wish they could get that kind of arrangement.
Hedge fund managers -- unlike mutual fund or other private wealth managers -- get paid for performance, not assets. Their incentives are perfectly aligned with their investors. They make calculated bets and expect to be highly compensated only when they succeed. This arrangement has attracted and will continue to attract talent. The best managers will migrate to hedge funds because they can be more successful financially.
They also accept the financial and reputational pain of performing poorly. Even with less leverage and more regulation, the hedge fund industry is still the best game in town for the most talented managers.
And it's also the best game in town for investors -- which is why the industry is set to begin its next wave of growth in the next five years. The most sophisticated investors still need help managing their money. They are not going to hoard Treasury bills forever.
Do you want to invest in a mutual fund manager incentivized to grow assets but not necessarily performance? Would you not, if you had the opportunity, want to invest in the best qualified money manager?
It's true that Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme has shaken the trust of investors in all money managers, and that will have a fallout effect on hedge fund managers. However, the hedge fund industry will be much bigger in 2013 than 2008.
Here are some other fearless predictions for the industry:
Hedge funds are not going away. They're actually going to greatly increase in size over the next five years. The level of dissatisfaction in mutual fund managers and private wealth managers will cause investors to seek out better-performing investment vehicles for their cash. Although there will certainly be changes to the industry as a result of the events of 2008 -- including hedge fund failures in the next six months -- the future looks very bright for hedge fund managers and their investors because their interests are so well-aligned.
Posted by Unknown at 5:50 PM View Comments
Labels: Bill Ackman, Citigroup, Eric Jackson, Hedge Funds, Ironfire Capital, Stevie Cohen, Yahoo
From TheStreet.com
12/22/08 - 10:33 AM EST
YHOO , C , AAPL , HPQ (Cramer's Pick) , GOOG , MSFT
By Eric Jackson
The press has shown little mercy in criticizing Yahoo! (YHOO Quote - Cramer on YHOO - Stock Picks) this year. And deservedly so.
The four reasons most often cited for the Internet company's missteps over the last four years have namely been the people at the top:
(1) Terry Semel;
(2) Jerry Yang;
(3) Sue Decker;
and (4) the Board of Directors.
They all received glowing press coverage when Yahoo! was riding the general ad market recovery and shift to digital ads in 2002 to 2004. But now they are being slammed in various business media for their actions, and in some cases inactions, that have since led to stagnation and decline.
It's normal to blame organizational failures on the leaders at the top -- consider Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers, Vikram Pandit at Citigroup (C Quote - Cramer on C - Stock Picks) or even a market-maker like Bernie Madoff. Group leaders and their choices are, in the end, responsible for group actions and outcomes.
But there are four other reasons to account for Yahoo!'s decline in the past four years: (1) A lack of product leadership; (2) self-isolated leadership; (3) a culture tolerating non-performance; and (4) the use of a matrix organizational structure.
Each of these problems traces back to choices made, consciously or not, by senior leadership. Until Yahoo! recognizes and understands these issues, the company won't be changed. This is why the choice of the company's next CEO is so important.
The right CEO will see these issues clearly from Day One and change them; the wrong CEO will be oblivious to them. Unfortunately for Yahoo! shareholders, the people selecting the next CEO will be the people on the board who've missed the four reasons for the company's recent poor performance of late.
Even though they had moved on to exciting new jobs, they expressed regret about the current state of Yahoo!, especially since they felt that they had gained a lot from their time at Yahoo!. Each person agreed that the company was fixable and that the decision about who will be named as the next CEO was critical. Most were pessimistic that the company would achieve its potential.
Here are their top four reasons for Yahoo!'s decline:
1. Lack of Product Leadership
Google (GOOG Quote - Cramer on GOOG - Stock Picks) had search. Apple (AAPL Quote - Cramer on AAPL - Stock Picks) had the Mac. Yahoo! has always had a collection of multiple products, and that has been a blessing and a curse.
It's a blessing because -- unlike AOL, which had just the dial-up business -- Yahoo! has always had multiple revenue streams that were mutually reinforcing (e.g., home page, Finance, Mail, Search). It's never been a one-trick pony.
But the multiple products are a curse because, from Yahoo!'s founding, the company has had its fingers in a lot of pies, and that has hindered it from developing a corporate focus. Through Bubble 1.0 and Bubble 2.0, the Yahoo! M&A machine was always humming to suck up venture-backed firms at healthy valuations. Integrating them cohesively was a different story and left a string of disparate businesses under the Yahoo! roof.
Several former Yahoo! employees complained about the lack of vision and the lack of product leadership from the top executives to string all the pieces together. Said one, "I always wanted to know 'what's our North Star?'" They felt that there was a lack of focus from the executive team about what Yahoo! did that created value and what it should be moving toward to better create more value.
In their views, the next CEO needs to be great at products. The core of Yahoo! is a great user experience and great products. Discussions about undertaking a search deal with Microsoft (MSFT Quote - Cramer on MSFT - Stock Picks), spinning off Asian assets, and closing the revenue-per-search gap with Google are secondary.
2. Self-Isolated Leadership
Several years ago, I worked with Dartmouth Business School Professor Sydney Finkelstein on building a consulting practice based on the research from his book Why Smart Executives Fail. He researched more than 60 one-time industry-leading companies that in the end drove off a cliff in terms of their performance.
These companies' executive team members always looked great on paper: the best business schools, the perfect career trajectory, many achievements to point to. Yet, these same people were responsible for bringing down their companies. One key reason for this -- common across all the failures -- is that the top executives got rid of or discouraged anyone around them who voiced a different perspective than theirs. This appears to have happened at Yahoo!.
According to those I spoke with, executives often didn't engage in detailed discussions with lower-level managers responsible for areas that were under-performing. "I would have liked to talk to them more," said one ex-Yahoo!. "I had one good conversation with [one Yahoo! executive] and one good one with [another executive] in [the last few years]. That's it. I know others tried to educate them on the issues. Nothing came of it."
There was not enough debate about key decisions made at Yahoo!. The last six months have seen a steady drain of senior talent. One employee contrasted that with how President-elect Barack Obama has selected key members of his Cabinet: "He's put former rivals around him in Clinton and Richardson, who definitely don't agree with him on some issues. You know they're going to speak up. You also could see any of them leading the country if necessary. We definitely don't have that depth of talent on the Yahoo! senior team."
One group that Yahoo! executives were not shy about consulting in the last four years: the consultants. "There were way too many consultants and too many planning sessions. We needed more execution," said a former employee.
3. Tolerating a Non-Performance Culture
It's obvious that every company has a unique culture. No one working there would be able to tell you step-by-step how it was created, and yet they all live and breathe it every day. The best cultures give that company an amazing advantage vs. its peers. The worst cultures hang around the company's neck and are next to impossible to shake.
"When I first started at Yahoo!, people cared. They'd challenge you if they disagreed. That changed," said one ex-employee. Another added, "Transparency about problems or mistakes used to be rewarded. Not anymore. There were some people who made mistakes and ended up getting promoted."
Over time, it appears most employees stopped pushing for the changes they wanted to see. When they tried and it fell on deaf ears, they backed down. "I think a lot of people also knew they wouldn't get similar jobs elsewhere and decided to keep quiet." The tone got set from the top, and it trickled down to permeate the organization.
4. Matrix Organizational Structure
One of the recommendations that Yahoo!'s consultants made a few years ago was to institute a so-called matrix organizational structure across the company. A matrix structure was popular about 10-15 years ago, especially in engineering-oriented companies. It seeks to overcome the complexity of a large global organization by assigning multiple bosses to employees in different geographies working on similar product or functional tasks. In other words, you report up to two or more bosses -- a product or functional boss and a geographical boss.
The intent of a matrix structure is that you understand what your local peers are working on as well as what your functional peers are working on globally. In theory, the company becomes tighter-knit, despite its size.
In practice, matrix organizational structures have greatly fallen out of favor in the last five years because they create confusion about who is responsible for certain actions. The "shared" ownership of tasks and projects across multiple groups and bosses means that it's difficult to go back and assign blame for and learn from failures. Whose throat do you choke? "It was hard to point out who specifically was responsible for mistakes because of that," said one former employee.
Thankfully, this structure has recently been done away with and products have now been centralized. Combined with the risk-averse culture described above, the legacy of this structure has been deadly for Yahoo!.
Yahoo! executives and directors aren't the first "smart" ones to fail. Otherwise, Professor Finkelstein wouldn't have a book full of stories on Enron, Worldcom and Webvan. The solutions for Yahoo! senior executives, based on the lessons in the book, are:
Posted by Unknown at 11:25 AM View Comments
Labels: Eric Jackson, HP, Ironfire Capital, Jerry Yang, Mark Hurd, Matrix Organization, sue decker, Sydney Finkelstein, Terry Semel, Why Smart Executives Fail, Yahoo
By Eric Jackson
12/11/2008 1:59 PM EST
GeoEye (GEOY - commentary - Cramer's Take) operates three geo-spatial satellites that take images of Earth up to a color high-resolution of 0.5m. The company sells these images to governmental and commercial customers. Starting next month, these images will start appearing on Google (GOOG - commentary - Cramer's Take) Maps and Google Earth.
The stock trades at a major discount to its earnings potential next year and should appreciate considerably in the coming months. Yesterday, after the close, GeoEye announced a $144 million contract with its largest customer for 2009; this almost equals its trailing 12 months of revenue.
GeoEye is part of a duopoly in the U.S. with DigitalGlobe (a smaller, private and less well-capitalized competitor). GeoEye had been doing $183 million a year in revenue with 45% operating margins until six months ago, when the company gave up some market share to DigitalGlobe, which launched its newest satellite in the fall. GeoEye's revenue and earnings have recently dropped, as customers opted to use DigitalGlobe's newer satellite. The market has punished GeoEye's shares -- especially during the recent selloff of small caps -- taking the price from a 52-week high of $37.37 in January to below $19 yesterday, near its 52-week low.
A number of events are about to happen in the coming weeks -- beginning with yesterday's new contract news -- that should dramatically reverse the direction of GeoEye's shares.
Recall that the primary reason for GeoEye's stock slide this year was that its nearest competitor launched its latest and greatest satellite. In the geo-spatial imagery industry, higher-resolution images keep improving. GeoEye is now about to leap-frog DigitalGlobe's technology, as it launched GeoEye-1, the newest and most advanced geo-spatial satellite in space, in early September. GeoEye-1 will have the best images in its industry in full color for the next 18 months, until DigitalGlobe puts up its next-generation satellite. However, if DigitalGlobe fails to go public during that time, there is a possibility its launch gets delayed, and that would give GeoEye an even longer advantage.
BCC Research estimates that GeoEye's industry market is increasing from $1.9 billion this year to $3.2 billion by 2012. The key buyers of geo-spatial images are U.S. governmental agencies such as the National Geo-spatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) and Homeland Security. The NGA is GeoEye's largest customer, accounting for half of its revenue last year. The NGA also paid half the $500 million in costs to launch GeoEye-1. The agency is therefore expecting to continue to buy a significant amount of images from GeoEye in the coming years. The NGA's investment came, in part, from a presidential directive for governmental agencies to rely as much as possible on buying services and products from best-in-class companies, as opposed to replicating such services or products internally.
Earlier this fall, the Pentagon floated the idea of building and launching some new geo-spatial satellites of its own to supplement its reliance on GeoEye and DigitalGlobe. This plan was quickly quashed by Congress in November, because of budget concerns. This clears the decks for increased business for both GeoEye and DigitalGlobe in the coming six years.
In yesterday's announcement, GeoEye signed a service-level agreement with NGA, whereby NGA will pay $12.5 million a month up to $144 million in 2009. These payments are for planned purchases of images from GeoEye-1. There might be more. If the payments stay at just that level, they will represent a doubling of GeoEye revenue from NGA compared with 2008.
NGA still needs to certify the quality of the images from GeoEye-1. The images are at a high resolution now, but GeoEye is trying to make them even more finer-grained. This certification is expected to happen on Dec. 15 or slightly thereafter. Once that certification takes place, many other commercial and governmental customers for GeoEye's images will likely begin to strike their own deals and purchase the images.
GeoEye's trailing price-to-earnings ratio yesterday was below 9. Its forward P/E, assuming it does $250 million in revenue next year with 45% operating margins, is 3. Other satellite and space/defense companies trade currently at forward P/Es of 7 to 21.
The key reason why the stock has been at depressed levels since the launch is that it wasn't yet clear that the satellite was operating properly. Yesterday's announcement suggests that NGA is ready to spend money on the new images from the satellite once it certifies the images. NGA's planned spending next year almost equals GeoEye's 2007 total revenue of $183 million, after which the stock hit its all-time high of $37.37. That stock price was achieved prior to worries about delays in the launch of GeoEye-1 that depressed the stock.
The table has now been set for significant revenue and operating margins to accrue to GeoEye over the next 18 months, as NGA, Google and other commercial and governmental customers purchase these images. It is highly unlikely that a technical flaw will crop up this long after the launch. The customers who buy these images (e.g., governmental agencies and Google) are also much less affected by the broader economic malaise compared with most companies operating today.
Assuming GeoEye can double its sales and earnings by the end of next year and is rewarded with an increased price-to-earnings multiple more comparable to its related peers, I believe it could trade up to between $60 and $80 by early 2010, up from its current price of $19.
Days before GeoEye launched GeoEye-1, the company announced a relationship with Google. GeoEye would provide its images from GeoEye-1 to no other online portal except Google. Google is not under any restrictions, meaning it could still buy images from DigitalGlobe. No financial details about the agreement between GeoEye and Google have been released. The first hint of what those details might be won't come until early February, when GeoEye holds its fourth-quarter analysts' call.
However, here is what we do know about the relationship and about Google's interest in space:
In GeoEye, you are getting a world-class leader in a growing and recession-proof industry. Its stock has the chance to triple or even quadruple in the next 15 months. What's more, you're getting a call option on a potential buyout by its partner Google. Put it together, and you have a compelling entry-point at these levels.
Posted by Unknown at 11:37 PM View Comments
Labels: GeoEye, GeoEye-1, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, NGA
From TheStreet.com:
By Eric Jackson
12/11/08 - 09:59 AM EST
With the market's tumultuous last few months driving down the price of equities, activist investors around the world have seen their stock investments take major hits.
Posted by Unknown at 10:12 AM View Comments
Labels: Activism, Activist Investing, Arthur Levitt, Bill Ackman, Carl Icahn, Greenlight Capital, J-Power, Pershing Square, Relational Investors, SEC, Sprint, Take Two, Yahoo