YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Keefe

lines on the record: 106
first: 2023-10-15
most recent: 2023-10-15
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

“Yeah, I mean, it goes back to Anthony Dignas, an irreplaceable capital. It's an enormous responsibility. And that statement that I make, I think, speaks for itself. Mugger's probably right. There's probably 100,000 too many of us in this business. And who knows, I won't be surprised if that changes over the next 10 years. And that the number actually shrinks for the size of the fee pool shrinks. It's a low-calling if you're in this for the money. It's a high calling if you're in it to serve others. And I am insistent on this notion that investment management is a calling”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are you going to look back at when you hang up your spikes? How are you going to evaluate yourself? You know, a great thing about this business is there is a scorecard. It's unlike being a lawyer or an accountant or a million other businesses. You've got a scorecard. So you'll know on the last day exactly how well you did and told her a long period of time.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And why shouldn't, in the way you invest, love your neighbor as yourself? I mean, there's so many ways you can think about that. It means giving them the portfolio that you would have. You'd be surprised. You may know this, but you'd be surprised at how many people in this business have personal portfolios that don't resemble their actual portfolio that they market to their clients. Or are they loving others as they love themselves and the way they build their portfolios? No, I don't think that they are. You know, then it comes back to this notion of service and who you're serving and understanding and being aware of who you're serving and being coldly clinical when you ask yourself that question. You know, if you're not in this.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, these are the things that I try to communicate to my kids. Look, you know, it does emanate from my Christian faith. Love the Lord the God with all their heart and with all their soul and lovely neighbors as they self. And I think that in one, there's a wonderful quote from, I can't remember if it was a Jewish theologian, but I'm going to ask you to help me with this, William. He said, He was asked to repeat the Old Testament while standing on one foot.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Politicians, and so they were talking to people and hanging out with people all the time who aren't telling the truth and they know they're not telling the truth. Tell them you never have to do that. Some of them are paid not to tell the truth. And they say, you don't ever have to do that. In my business, one of the wonderful things about this business and one of the unappreciated things about this business, but one of the things you learn having come up through the brokerage side of the business. Never have to do anything that's wrong. No one's forcing you in this business to do something wrong. No one's forcing you to buy a crummy business. No one's forcing you to buy a business with unethical managers.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most satisfaction if I do this right would be found in the values that my children hold and that if they have values that direct them to serve others before themselves, then try to understand their obligations to the rest of the human race. I think that I will be able to consider myself a successful father. And that's certainly the most important job that I've got on this planet. I try to communicate investment values to them because I think there's a seamlessness of your personal values and your business values. And I try to communicate this to my children. That's unethical. Now, they live in the Washington DC area. They go to school with people who are lobbyists.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Arthur or Arnold and I have that in common. But regardless what you're doing. Want to give them 110%. When you towed up the scoreboard, and I am a Christian, and I believe in Christian values. And when I meet my maker, I mean, there's going to be an accounting. I want to tell the people that I work for and just for that they got 110%. I want my kids to know that they should give 110%. I want to give 110% to them and I want to give 110% to my wife who enables much of what I do from a business standpoint.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing I had in common, probably the only thing that I have in common with Arnold is that I was a garbage man for a couple of years. That's the term we used to use. But I did it when I was in college. And one thing I learned from that job, which was actually a great job, by the way. It's a great summer job this year. You don't get an internship credit for it, but it was a lot of fun in some ways. But what I understood was I wasn't going to do that forever. There were guys in that truck for whom this was their employment apex. I understood that because of my parents or because we born good health or had enough intellectual capability to go to college, then I was going to go down a different path. But I understood even back then that that was just pure blind luck.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I just point out to all young people you are competing whether you understand it or not, whether you're a barista at Starbucks or an investment manager or a lawyer or a doctor or whatever you do, whether you sweep floors or not, you're competing. And so you might as well be aware of that and do your absolute best. Regardless of what your task is, however menial it is. And let me just segue here for a moment. You had your interview with Arnold Vanderburg a few weeks ago.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Huborists who didn't wind up squandering the reputations eventually. Maybe Churchill's the exception, but there aren't too many others.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“White, you've already hit the genetic lottery. And I explained this to my kids, that Been born, if not on third base, you're near been born on second base, and it has nothing to do with money, it just happens to do with circumstance. And you need to understand that. And so I have no physical disabilities. I don't think I have any crippling mental disabilities. I had incredibly good parents, good siblings, wonderful people with whom I worked, great mentors, and people who took an interest in me. And so if you understand these things and believe them, you will be humble. And you also, just as a practical matter, need to understand there's probably tens of thousands of people who are smarter than you are, who are doing exactly the same thing. And they're reading exactly the same stuff. How are you going to have an edge over that? So you better stay humble in life and in business. I don't know if any people of Greek.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you're probably talking about, sir, there's only two kinds of people in the investment business there are people who are humble and people are about to get humble. Yeah, you know, the Andorphins start flowing when stocks are doing better than everybody else's and knowing that happens for a period of years, it can make you think that you're smart. Or we all like to feel good about what we're doing and we all like having a better batting average than the next person. But that can be fleeting in this business. And we're all humans. And we're going to make mistakes. And virtually all of us, and I'm sure this applies to you, it certainly applies to me, or the beneficiaries of an enormous amount of luck. And we probably don't realize quite how lucky we've been to borrow off its line. If you're born in the United States and you're a male and you're”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably this moment, I hope he's on his tractor out in his place in the plains, Virginia, where he's most comfortable. But yeah, that's exactly correct. There are no small mistakes. And so that's why I'd be an awful farmer if I were a farmer. I'd wind up cut my leg off of a chainsaw or something like that. You have to be focused and pay attention. The farmer is the original preservationist of capital because they can't make mistakes because mistakes are always counterfeit. So people like Lowe and other farmers that I know are wired to think about what can go wrong and what do I need to do to scotch the wagon against this type of catastrophe.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. And that's why I wouldn't be a good farmer. By the way, Avener's founder Charlie Makele is a good farmer.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because on a farm, if something goes wrong, there's only one figure to point, and that's at you. You can't control the weather. You can't control disease. You can't control anything else. But you can control your effort. So that's the lesson that I learned from Lou, which is to be like a forward-thinking technologist study is, but also make sure that you've got a plan B, make sure the animals are taken care of. Make sure that something is not going to destroy what your work so carefully to build. So it's this combination of farm boy ethic and technologist that I think has created a unique character in this terrific capital allocator.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And National Jash for NCR had to buy its way back into the cash register business after micros effectively took all of their market share. Well, micros actually started the digital industry that created other participants that eventually took all of NCR's share. But he started this business practically in his garage. They had small unexceptional quarters in Beltsville, Maryland, but they built it into the behemoth of the industry. And it was through shrewd capital allocation, putting your head down and doing the right thing every day. And like I said, Lou's got that sense of responsibility that comes from growing up on a farm. When you grow up in a farm, you're always thinking, who's going to take care of the animals? What happens if I'm not there? So it's not an obsessive, compulsive desire to control the business. It's just an overwhelming sense of responsibility for what happens.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the point is, always, ancestors have grown up on this farm. Well, he went to Johns Hopkins on a full ride, got a degree in electrical engineering, knew exactly what he wanted to do afterwards. He knew his glittering personality. He could be a good salesperson. So he became a salesperson first for Armco Steel and then for Hewlett Packard, first Intel microprocessor came out at some point. And he just realized that he could probably to use his words do some damage with one of these things, but wasn't certain how. He and some friends saw that the mechanical cash register business, which really had one participant, national cash register, was ripe for disintermediation by a digital product. And so they effectively put NCR out of the National Cash Register, out of the cash register business over the next three decades.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Lou is the first one off the farm, and he knew he was going to get off the farm. In fact, I think he told me there was a dispute with his father when he was stacking hay in a barn in a hot summer day. And there's all the dust floating around. And it's just hard, brutal work. And I think he told his father, I said, You know, I'm going to have a job in an air conditioned office someday. I don't think his father liked that.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they did, and Loop saw on their future in terms of hotel management software. And that helped fuel decades worth of growth at microsystems. And to this day, I'm sure is an important part of the company's success, although it's inside Oracle. It's a mouse inside the Oracle elephant. We don't know exactly how well it's doing, but I presume it's still doing well. But Lou grew up on a farm in Maryland with a dirt road running out in front. They'd go out and kill a chicken for dinner. I mean, it's that kind of farm, not a gentleman's farm by any stretch of the imagination.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Micro, and I'll get back to his origin story in a minute. They made one significant acquisition during the entire life of the company. It was a small German software company called Fidelio, but he pounced, it was done on a predatory basis. It was done on a favorable basis. There were willing sellers. They didn't have to sell.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody's heard of Lou Brun, but that's because he's never needed anybody else's capital because he's been a private investor most of his life. Only wrote a couple of public companies, but he's got an extraordinary five decade or five or six decade career compounding capital at extremely high rates. And he's extremely smart, incredibly hardworking, very funny. He's got all the tools and he's also a decent human being. He's not in it for the money. I have a better car and a fancier house, despite the fact that I'm just an aunt in his world of value creation. He makes it and he gives it away. Makes it, gives it away. He's a deeply spiritual person. And I think it's easy to give it away also if you know you can make it. But he can. He just has the gift of capital allocation.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“During that period of time and subsequently, we accumulated a 6% position in the business. And they turned out to be the necessary piece of software for the hospitality industry. So that's example one. Example two was American Tower during the dot-com bust. Microsoft wasn't bought during a period of market turmoil bugs when everybody hates simply hated in the stock. So to go back to”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We wound up accumulating 6% of a company called Micro Systems, which you and your listeners use every day. They're the little cash register you see at Starbucks and other places. It's a point of sale, but the real value, and that's the tip of the iceberg, the real value in the business is the hospitality, IT, and software that runs hotels, restaurants, casinos, cruise ships, Oracle in 2016, I believe it was, for over $5 billion. But we were able to buy it as a net net in 1991 because their EMI office, which happened to be in Kuwait, was shut down by the initial Iraq invasion, which caused a temporary interruption in their earnings. And the stock literally declined from literally debt. Free, profitable business to a net net, those things no longer exist”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is important. And I would just finish out the analogy that I was starting with I have a bunch of coyotes in my place. They don't hunt unless they have an enormous overwhelming advantage. So they're an example of a good business model. That's how you ought to invest when you have an enormous overwhelming advantage and you ought to, those opportunities come along infrequently. So I think clearly our best investments have the name in periods of great extreme market distress. Our very first one, Cognitive, we haven't talked about occurred in 1991 during the initial Riyan conflict.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to wait until that big fat salmon comes along, my analogy that I learned from a lifetime in the woods is apex predators hunt rarely, but what they do, they take down big game. I mean, lions sleep or lie around 22 or 23 hours a day. And they don't feed often. But when they do, they feed big. And so I try to apply that analogy to the investment process. We don't feed often, but we try to feed big when we do.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you're alone in the woods with a view of the mountains, it can inspire in you an understanding that there are timeless things. The mountains don't change, not in least in ways a week or observable over short periods of time. You can see marketplaces taking place on the floor of the forest. There's competition for resources. There's winners and there's losers. So we see echoes of what we're doing in our business life every day. I mean, in the forest, there's good business models and there's bad business models. And there's also in one of your podcasts, a very recent one, there was some discussion, someone mentioned Munger's admonition to be a spear.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be clear, it's not a form, and I'm not a farmer. It's a lot of raw land, mountainous lands. It's quite remote. I don't own a tractor, but I have always felt comfortable in the outdoors. It's a great place to cleanse your thinking. It's not just a matter of getting away from the ring fonts. I think it's a way of being alone with your thoughts. I think it was, again, I can't remember which one of your podcasts it was, or it's mentioned by Ton Combs can do quite well, I think, with Run this gigantic portfolio plus a bunch of operating businesses, including GEICO, I think.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and you have to understand business realities as well. You know, when Markell was a small insurer, I mean, they had no equity compensation at all, but as now a business with tens of thousands of employees, they've had to migrate towards a compensation plan that includes equity. So that's not because there's been a philosophical shift, but it's just a business reality. But if you ask them about it, they'll explain it to you. Tom and Steve. Tony and the late Alan Kirshnow explained it to you. This is simply about business reality. It doesn't necessarily, it's a reality that emanates from being a larger as opposed to a smaller business.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll organize ourselves according to our values. I mean, your values wind up showing up in the long run. I have another saying is that there are no secrets. That I mean you might be able to conceal something from someone today, but it's going to come out eventually who you are and what you are and what your values are.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The owner of the capital, me, Peter Keefe Avenue near the intermediary, and the person to whom I'm outsourcing the capital, who's Tom Gainer or Steve Dodge or Satya Nadal.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The CEO, first of all, can't tell you everything that he knows. And they can't give you a wink and a nod. But they've got to do what Dodge told us in this meeting 20 years ago, 20 plus years ago. They've got to tell you what they can. And, you know, and just give it to you straight on. Then you've got to make an assessment whether that person is telling you the truth or not, whether he's telling you all the truth or whether he's shading something or nuancing something or withholding something. It's hard to do. It's very hard to do. But there are some people for which you can get an intuitive sense. Yeah, I like this guy and I really think that I wouldn't mind the people who entrust capital to me to meet this person because they would come away with a sincere belief that this person is sharing their risk, that there's a seamlessness of risk between”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm the least qualified person to judge someone based on their head of here. You know, the point is, you've got to be able to, look, you know, if you're going to be in this business for a long time, if you're either going to make investments or you're going to manage your own business, you better be a decent judge of people and human beings. And you've got to be willing to be skeptical. And because”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there's some people, and you've interviewed some people who don't think that it's valuable to visit management or to meet management, or they've just had to change their mind about that. And I understand that because there's very few managements are going to lead with the bad news. So some of them think it's their job to charm shareholders or fellow human beings. I mean, I'm prone to being charmed by the charismatic CEO. It's happened to me before. And it may happen again. I hope to think that I get better at this as I go along in a less charmable, but it happens. I can't remember who it was, whether it was on your podcast or somebody else's, but they said, you know, run away from the charismatic CEO. No, it wasn't that. It was the guy who used to run Medtronics, his name will come to me in a second.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't it true in your life that you associate with people of similar values and spiritual beliefs and awfulness and so on? Businesses are just coaches of people who are organized around an idea.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by this time, Tom is with the business, and he had a good storytell and a good record. So we got involved with Marquille purely because of the people. And that's been how many years.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marquill broke. And of course, it wasn't true. That wasn't going to happen. I mean, they had reinsured a bunch of it. And it just happens to be a pretty good line of business. But that's why I didn't get involved on the first visit. And I went back years later in the early 1990s and mid-1990s. The stock was many multiples of the IPO price and many multiples of the value when I first visited them. The book of business had diversified sufficiently and I knew a little bit more about these different lines of business. And when we got involved then, but it was the reason we're able to bend a little bit on the inherent difficult nature of the business was because we're enamored of the people who ran it. And we thought that they could run it the way Buffett had run national indemnity and the other insurance businesses doesn't generate an underwriting profit and build something up.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I shouldn't tell you in a breath. I originally met with the company shortly after went public in the mid-1980s. And I think I was with the Johnston Lemon research team at the time. And I met with Steve Markell. And at that time, they had this huge book of equine mortality. I didn't know anything about horses except I was scared to death of them. And I'm thinking equine mortality. Does that mean barn fire? Does that mean equine encephalitis? I mean, this sounds like something I can't understand, but it turns out that equine mortality is actually a pretty good line of business to write. It can bite you, and I hate to no pun intend or mix metaphor intended. But, you know, I stepped away from it because as a cell-scientific analyst, I had this nightmare about the headlines saying, you know, equine encephalitis sweeps through Kentucky.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kiss is ultimately a social business. By that, I don't mean have a drink, but your friend's got a social business. But, you know, we're reevaluating people as social animals. And that's part of the reason why we sit down and talk with people and try to get a sense for what makes them tick and get them off the IR script because we want to find out if they have a sense of how they're going to relate to their shareholders and potential shareholders. Do they view them as partners or do they view them as a constituency? Do they view them as people who are simply going to vote on a compensation package? And once you leave the meeting and the door closed or they go back to being purely self-serving people or trying to extract as much in the form of equity compensation from their shareholders as they can possibly get away with an ISS will permit. So this goes back to the Mark Hill story.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You want the people in Mortill Ventures to be earning to get their earn out for superior performance. But of course, you've got to expense that. So that's why the earnings didn't look as good. There was none of this nonsense about, well, adjusted earnings would have been higher were it not for this accrual for inerta. They just told you exactly like it was and gave their shareholders enough credit for being intelligent enough to figure out what the truth was on their own without being led by the nose and certainly without being given all this nonsense. But just at this, that, or the next. And in one of your podcasts, Charlie Monger calls it like it is, and it's a word that begins with B and ends in T. He's He's absolutely totally right. And if there are any CEOs or investor relations people listening to this podcast, stop doing that now.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have this mantra of more likely redundant than deficient, which are insurance terms or redundancy means you have excess reserves. Deficient is exactly the way it sounds like. You don't have enough reserves. So the mantra is more likely redundant than deficient. So I think it's echoed in the way they report the results to their owners or their business. I remember a few years ago, another earnings came out. They looked like they didn't compare well to the previous year or the previous quarter or something like that. But if you looked in the 10Q, the reason was they had taken an accrual for additional earnout payments to a business that they had bought in Mark Hill Ventures. That's good.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Its nature is not a great business. It can be a very good business. But you can wipe out years of earnings in one day, in one catastrophe. And so it doesn't fit the characteristic that we seek, which is inherently superior business. But Mark Hill is populated by people that we believe are not only excellent capital allocators but thoughtful people who understand the primacy of their obligation to the owners of the business. And not only that, they think deeply about the relationship with the owners of the business, express all their communications with the shareholders, whether it's an SEC filing or an earnings report, are expressed directly in a straightforward manage. Matter, there's very few adjectives. They tell you like it is. In fact, their policy of reserving conservatively extends to the way they report to their shareholders.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now I can get them off the script is really important. But it's a nice segue. You ask the three, we talked about the three top positions. Microsoft plain old-fashioned value is a great business at a distressed price for the wrong reasons. That's number one. Path number two, American tariff was simply a great business, great managers. We were able to buy it at the right price because as one of your previous interviewees, Christopher Begg pointed out there were some clouds, not necessarily negative clouds that the original time of purchase, but people simply didn't understand the business. It was married and signed a larger business. So that's path number two, great business, great managers. Path three to Markell. Marquill is not necessarily a great business with all due respect to my main friends there, but insurance by its nature, property and counseling insurance by”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's incredibly hard, and it's almost impossible to do, and ultimately you have to go by your gut, particularly these days when I think CEOs feel so constrained by Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank. They're so scripted. There's a lawyer in the room every time that they're giving a conference call or talking to investors or an investor relations person taking notes.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's true. So my point is a rhetorical one, but you get the idea. And this goes back to Best of Binders study that 4% of the stocks account for 100% of the return. If you can find one of those 4% and believe you own one of those 4%, it ought to take a really super convincing argument to get out of them. You know, nobody has a good answer for this because nobody knows where the old-time forever top is in a business. You know, Chuck somewhat laconically says, you know, let him compound till they stop compounding. And I don't have a better answer than that, but I do know that these businesses are scarce, you want to pull down to it forever. It's the best I can come up with.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, it was a mistake. And it went up over 300fold at one point and is now still up 200fold at its current price. But it's like Microsoft, which has been public since the early 1980s or sometime of the 1980s. Well, I think it reached an all-time high within the past two weeks, which means in the 700 or 8,000 days at a public company, there's been 10 days of which it was a good time to sell Microsoft.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Management boredom. So ask Brad, what's the biggest destroyer of value among public companies? And I didn't even get the question up before. He said management board of them, which means they go out and they get some money and they go spend it on something stupid, boards and directors can't sit on the ANSR room. We're getting paid fees for something, right?”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To some conference up in New York, and I saw him on the other side of the street dragging out a suitcase. And so I crossed the street to join him. I said, It's a hot day in New York. What are you dragging your suitcase? He said, Well, firm needs to save money. He didn't have anybody with him at the time. So he wasn't being watched. So he was saving money. He was doing the right thing when people weren't watching, which is, you know, one definition. I love integrity doing the right thing when people aren't looking.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they buy as much of the bond as they could and short stock against it. But that strategy didn't work out. Steve was able to find $200 million by going to the private equity community, satisfied that obligation. And Stock since went from as high as $305 a share within the past 18 months. It's down a lot since then. The point behind that story William is that Steve acted honorably. He accepted full responsibility for what he did. And Steve did not do this alone. He had some great people around him because Steve was an honorable, good guy. He had honorable good people around him, not the least of which was Brad Singer, his chief financial officer. And I'll segue into a brief story about Brad.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The company's election. But if the company could not come up with cash, they had to come up with stock. So in 2002, nobody who was in this business, an American tower at that time was sort of considered a telecom stock because of who its tenants were, even though it was a real estate business. But it was banked on the telecom side. So the telecom bankers have been instructed to shrink their plugs. There's not $200 million available to take care of this bond. And so the arbitrageurs figured out, well, they're going to have to pay it off in stock. So the thing to do is short as much stock as you can by the bond and short the stock. Because if you drive down the price, they have to deliver theoretically and infinite number of shares to satisfy the $200 million bond. So you could own the whole business if you own.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he held his hand up not literally, but rhetorically and figuratively, and said, this is my fault. I did it. Nobody else is responsible. It's the worst thing that's ever happened to me in my business career. I think I can fix it, but there is no certainty here. And so, by the way, your listeners might be interested. The problem was a $200 million bond maturity that was looming that during the GO-GO years of a dot-com stuff some investment banker had foisted upon them. And it was payable either in cash or in shares of stock.”
2023-10-15 · We Study Billionaires · RWH034: The High Road To Riches w/ Peter Keefe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT