YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Singer

lines on the record: 40
first: 2025-02-26
most recent: 2025-02-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“My advice to those people has been and is unchanged over a long period of time, that I value a broad classic liberal education. They should not take business courses in college. They should take as much history. Political science, philosophy, religion, as they can fit in. So what I try to convey is you can specialize in business the tools of business and trading, I mean now hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, you know, high-tech, whatever. I mean, that's the golden goose. But in all of that, what comes out if you specialize too soon, you get this narrow deep skill set, and you're not equipped for the things that are actually happening in the world. And so I think that stood me in good stead and being a lawyer has stood me in good stead. Although my partner is not a lawyer, he thinks like a lawyer, which is good.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to read science fiction, but I mostly read trade. We search. That's kind of It's kind of overwhelming at this point, given how complex markets are. Don't have time to read fiction.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the point. If governments are supporting or endorsing cryptos, it's an alternative to the dollar as the reserve currency. And countries around the world are, as you know, not happy with the privilege that the US government asserts as the reserve currency country of the world. They'd like alternatives. Now, it's not interesting. The dollar sits there astride the world with all the abuses of that astrideness. is conjuring or supporting an alternative to the dollar. It makes my head spin.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“point that we have recently made is that it is true that central bank money Is conjured out of thin air. Doesn't ex But what is also true about central bank money is that it is sovereign, it has sovereign support. You pay the taxes, you pay your army in that money. To the extent that governments embrace Crypt This crypto or that crypto or all the cryptos or several of the cryptos They are embracing alternatives to sovereign money. And therefore, Is the money supply going hog wild now? Because of all these cryptos and all of this support of governments”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, talking about during COVID also, but after COVID, you know, this year, this fiscal year, over 6% in the US, 6% of GDP deficits. So I think there's valuations, this AI is way over its skis in terms of practical value being brought to users. I mean, there are users and there will be additional uses, but it's way exaggerated.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just about as risky as I've ever seen. I think the long period of time since the last major market event has lulled people into thinking that there'll always be bailed out, that there'll never be another bear market of 1974, 1987, 2008, 2007-8 and leverage is building and building, risk taking is building. And those statements apply also to governments. It's absolutely astonishing this NERP, the negative interest rate policy in Europe and Japan and Switzerland. And ZERP for... What, ten years in the US? It's crazy. It's crazy. And in the pandemic, You added to ZERP, you added these shockingly high spending deficits. We're talking about deep recession type spending programs, spending deficits, support programs, at a time when there was no real recession I'm talking about.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but we weren't patient. We had no place to go. Patience is not patience is not sitting, you know, metaphorically speaking shackled to.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not patient. I tell you why. They never accepted our offer. negotiate with They never put a deal on the table, never sat down with us. They were an example. And there have been some in the corporate area. They were an example of just stubborn, haughty, entitled, I mean, the nerve of us.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a second try at the same offer. Like three years later. At the end of those two offers, there were like 60,000 bondholders, including like five hedge funds, of which Elliot was the largest. And by that time our basis was down into the teens or 20s, whatever, 30s, I don't know. It had kept trading down and down and down. And it was just in litigation for hold on.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to oversimplify, but I think my categories are broadly right. There's a category of countries that have nothing and you're not going to get anything and you're just being annoying by going after them. So Argentina is a real country, and after some period of time, I think it was in years, an extraordinary period of time for a sovereign restructuring. They came in with a twenty nine cent deal maybe it was thirty, thirty cents. Now a 30 cent recovery deal for sovereign restructuring Is a number. that might Appropriate for a Guatemala or a Honduras or something, Ecuador, I don't know. But Argentina, twenty-five percent of the holders, and the bonds kept, the debt kept plunging, 25% of the holders held out. The country said if you don't accept this offer, you get nothing. So they got a few percent more.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Argentina. Somewhere in the late nineties, early Os, the debt started trading down into the eighties and then 70s. It was still paying. And many people thought that they would go default. And we didn't. We knew that they had a history of default three, four times in 150 years. We also knew that they were coming out of World War II. I think the seventh, maybe the eighth, the largest economy in the world. So, you know, lots of resources, lots of capacity. We didn't think it was a good idea, and we didn't think they would default. They defaulted and the bonds, and we bought performing bonds. The bonds started collapsing and it was a long time, I don't remember the exact time, it was a long time before they gave their first... Offer. Now, sovereign restructurings come in different flavors.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In our lines of business, if someone is not burnt out or bored or Fading in terms of capacity. The experience and wisdom is so, so needed. In today's world especially, the layer of understanding beyond the spreadsheet and the horrible lawyers telling you you have a 95% chance of winning that antitrust suit and then you lose and you get dark and hostile thoughts to all of your advisors. So it's that, I don't know, I don't like this one. Why, Paul? Why? Just don't like it.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No cake, no champagne. No, no, no, no. What I want to say on this topic of fun is you can't get bored by not losing serious money. The reason for burnout Sharply diminished. You know, that's what happens. I mean, it's not just horrible divorce or terrible tragedy in the family. Burnout is, I think, largely. People just are drained of emotional energy by adversity. And you can't predict markets. So that's another A dominant cause of me seeking never to lose money. Because if I want to be risk averse, I have to be risk averse all the time.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's funny. Why are you eight years old? I get this question. I get this question. And the reason I'm basically, this is a little different, this format, but the reason I basically get this question is that I dig in, I'm enthusiastic about it. I get into it. It can't be boring. If you think about what you read about in the newspaper, which is largely distorted, parenthetically, wow, they're doing all kinds of different things. There's no cookie cutter thing at Elliot. So there's challenges and sometimes it's, you know, we never have a position profit celebration. Never.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, he was proud of me no matter what to be perfectly candid about it. No, I'm not doing it to make my father proud. No, I keep doing it because I think we do it well.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The constitutional as well as ability by permission as well as the capital, the excess capital, to take advantage of those opportunities. That's a pretty cool thing to do. So if you don't lose large amounts of money, so the capital is like a ratchet effect. You make a buck, you keep it. You try to make another one. My clients never held me to a benchmark. Obviously, you have to make some money. The brilliance of our approach is that We don't benchmark ourselves. It's what I just told you Don't lose money, and whatever's left Hopefully, it's a rate of return.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They tend to lose their judgments. Their sloppiness in accepting the state of play of the world when the skies are blue turns into a clutching darkness when the headlines and the stories and their friends are in trouble and suffering terrible losses. And so I knew the judgment is impaired. I also knew that if you could keep your not only your head and your judgment intact, but your capital intact These rare periods of time when there are special opportunities, I mean those last few weeks in 08, unbelievable. Everything got cheap and then they collapsed. I mean, seriously, go back and look and look at it. So if you had the”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At one point it was down 88%. So my desire never to lose money again was a combination of wanting to get my mother's money back and the feeling of real Devastation, I mean, losing base, and my best friends, $10,000 here, $20,000. So when we formed Elliot with, when I realized that I could manage money and make money all the time. The convertible hedging was a very good strategy, very underserviced, high standstill rate of return, no real good valuation models. It was all on the fly and all relationships with the street. And along the way, so what I just said is not the full answer to your question. Along the way, what I observed was that when people have losses, meaningful losses, they tend to lose their minds.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might as well. And I think my psychology background titillated the admissions committee. And so the way my father and I dealt with my training was a retail pharmacist. He's in the drugstore every day, 12 hours a day. We traded speculative mining stocks and tech stocks. And I promise you, you could not name a way to lose money that dad and I did not hone to the finest edge short selling, long puts, short calls. I was an early adopter of the CBOE, the options exchange. And that culminated in a catastrophic loss in the 74 bear market, where I was long stocks that I was certain because of my intellect. The research, I certainly would go up, and I held them on margin. At one point, and I'm talking about $50,000 from my mom's special stash in the bottom of the...”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. Elliot was formed in 77. When I was accepted after college to Harvard Law School, the greatest moment of my dad's life, he was a retail pharmacist, a chemist, whatever. And he was sure I was going to be some really big shot, and he was sure that I had to learn how to invest because I was going to be a financial big shot. I was a psychology major in college and I had no idea why I was going to law school, but Harvard Law School was.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That caused him a different set of skills for money managers. A number of people were sold out of that position because when you misunderstand the risk and lever something up that you never should have levered up that way because you misunderstood the essential characteristic, you can have devastating losses. We, I I had a lot of pressure to one the trade, but I kept the trade. And it's just, it was in 2008. There were a lot of do or die positions back then.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we got involved in that horrible trade, a dealer showed it to us and the dealer had several other people in the trade. The pricing was minus 2% inflation per year for seven years, minus 2%. It's the kind of thing where you look around the trading room and ship it in, right? Okay. To make a long story short, long, painful story short, that thing went from and implied in the prices minus 2% per year at the worst minus four and a half percent per year. To make this very, very straightforward in terms of arithmetic, the JGB i, the inflation linker went down thirty percent in price. That trip to where We still held it. We lost a garb of money. And it was going to mature just six years or so in the future, but we had lost like 30% of the principal. And these things are marked to market every day. So”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was an arbitrage position in Japanese. Index linked bonds, inflation linked bonds Now this arbitrage was perfect. JGB's Japanese government bonds full faith and credit against. JGBs that had the, as I recall, the principal amount adjusted for actual CPI movements. The Japanese CPI, Consumer Price Index, never moved much.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one that's moderately horrifying is a peer who will remain nameless sold us a late stage bankruptcy in a deinking plant somewhere in the northern United States late stage denotes the risks mostly gone in a complicated workout bankruptcy process and the de-inking was their business You know waste paper and you're going to de-ink it and use it again and that's good for the environment it's good for the human race it's good for the galaxy suffice it to say that it wasn't late stage there were important bankrupt elements that hadn't been settled and the de-inking plant didn't really work So aside from hating the person that sold it to me, it's just a mistake. And we lost. It wasn't that big a position, but we were much smaller.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even those don't work out exactly all the time. But sometimes the worst trades, and I don't mind mentioning them, it's a kind of a form of therapy and a pedagogical exercise. The worst trades are the trades that you misunderstand the risk. You put it into the wrong category. I'll give you two brief examples, one moderately horrifying and the other. Done really, really bad.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes it's bad luck, but more frequently it's we missed something. We The hedges weren't They weren't the right hedges, the tracking error was much more than we expected. At the beginning of my career, 77, 1977 to like 1987. Hedging was much more simple because we were long a convertible bond and short, the stock into which the convertible was convertible. So that's very straightforward. Tracking error wasn't really a factor. We've become much more sophisticated in hedging, in creating bespoke hedges for different kinds of trades.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So the meaning of that. To your latest question is in the infrequent and now a distant memory, in the infrequent seriously adverse financial market environments, these people have very few Investment outlets that actually perform on that.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not the, I mean, I have a variety of political and philosophical and philanthropic outlets for my compensation. And I do think... We do make the world a better place, not in every single situation, but this style of investing, it enhances the possibility and the probability that enterprises can service their customers. Competition is good having multiple outlets is useful. We happen to, I mean, I'll tell you the most basic answer to your question. There are layers of answer to your question, but at the most basic level, we have like 100 universities, we have hospitals, we have charitable trusts. Yeah. And among the elements of what I just told you is because of our, we're not an activist fund and everything else is window dressing. We are an absolute return fund.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's important to at least get this right in our minds because the media Love's battle, and they love to take down successful investors, rich people, whatever. So the colorful way that it's generally framed is attack. But let's cycle back to near the beginning of our conversation this morning. Fewer and fewer, literally, fewer and fewer people are acting like owners. And fewer and fewer companies are accepting the notion that the owners have anything to say to the management and the board. It's kind of shocking, and therefore we are among certainly in terms of numbers, among a short list of people who do call for accountability. And when we win, the shareholders win. The days of greenmail are long gone.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Proportion of cases in which we're adding value is, I believe, close to 100. The proportion of cases in which it's reflected in action, movement of structure, capital structure, etc. directors is probably, this is just a guess, it's a majority, it's like 70%, something like that. It's not 90%. It's not 80.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, since I'm going to define successful as we get a meaningful percentage of what we ask for and the stock reflects it, not just in 20 minutes, but I mean, you know, over a period of time, that we actually, our ideas actually add value. It's the only way we can maintain our reputation that gets the stock to say, oh, Elliot's in this, here's their thesis. Nobody else has been able to unlock that key. The stock is worth more. And of course, it's not a question of short-termism because the actual short-termism doesn't add... But it's not short-termism when the market instantly, overnight or in a couple of days or a few days, understands that you are adding long-term value. Adding enterprise value, the strategy is better, your ability to compete is better”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in other words, we're not crusaders. We're not just speaking to hear ourselves speak. We're not engaged to read about ourselves in the FT tomorrow morning. We have a goal. We have a thesis. If our thesis is right and the company takes steps, which is not always, I would say getting all of our requests Not rare, but it's not. Dominant as the dominant outcome, but were generally pretty right, and the things we suggest generally are accretive to value. And so the company that engages with us, it's a minority of those companies which stiffarm us, I mean, knock down drag out proxy fights or lengthy litigations doesn't really help anybody, but sometimes it happens.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“72 right now Oh. And we have the wherewithal to back our thesis and pursue our approach. So everyone, almost everyone, sorry, picks up the phone. The advisors all tell them, Elliot, you should pick up the phone. You should engage with these people, your deal makers, and you hear them out. And they do. And so some of the approaches are under the radar screens, some of the approaches we will file, will disclose a position. Others we don't disclose to the public. We disclose to the company that we have a position depends on the rules, and it depends on what our strategy might be. But a discussion, a detailed discussion of, and a deck, my guy's like writing decks.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it's a very interesting question because one thing that is just crystal clear and endemic, hardly anyone tries to stiff arm us. Hardly anyone. There's the occasional and there's a playbook for that. You know, we have one firm, one fund, and it's large.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not always right, of course, on the details of our strategies, and sometimes we're just plain wrong. But if we're right and there's a segment, an important segment of the leadership, the board of directors, the management, who actually agree with that, then it's a fairly smooth path to getting things done.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The perfect situation is a company. And this exists. You may be surprised to hear it, but it exists. A company which has an open door. And by open door, what I mean is something's been going on for a long time. The founder or one generation from the founder feels a moral obligation to the local shareholders or the original shareholders or the family doesn't want to give up, doesn't want to give up the longstanding strategy or capital structure or alignment or location of headquarters. Any one of a number of reasons why when we come knocking, we not infrequently find what I am accurately calling an open door in an open door. It's a different discussion. But if we're right, I mean...”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We try to ascertain the local landscape in terms of culture, in terms of the culture of capitalism and the culture of corporate control, corporate change. We try to understand the board of directors and the management of how they got there, what their strategies are, why they're failing. I mean, we don't get involved with highly successful companies that can't be improved, really.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the steps are very prosaic. We develop ideas from a variety of sources given our position in the marketplace. Sometimes people bring us ideas. Sometimes the street brings us ideas. Sometimes we ferret out ideas ourselves. The first thing we do is in an iterative process, we develop a set of questions different from every in every industry and run down the questions. We talk to a lot of people, former employees, customers, Wall Street analysts. A consequence parenthetically of the trend towards index investing is that there's less coverage, research coverage from Wall Street. And when I say Wall Street, I mean the global investment banking firms and firms that supply research. But we try to become as informed as possible.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as you know, the trend away from active investing, and by active investing, I don't necessarily mean activist. Active investing just means you open the mail from the company in which you invest, you try to figure it out, you try to understand the company's strategy, and maybe you'll call the company up and lob in some suggestions. But active investing is next to passive investing or index investing. Index investing now accounts for a plurality of money that's managed, particularly equity money, around the world.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Activist investing is taking a position largely in an equity security of a company and trying to engage with the company to improve outcomes, control or influence outcomes, better outcomes to unlock value. It could be management changes that are requested. It could be capital structure changes, finance strategies and tactics. Anything that will make the company earn more money, be better positioned, more rationally, deploy assets.”
2025-02-26 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Paul Singer: Activist Investing, Market Risks and Avoiding Losses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source