YouSaid · the spoken record

Zack Oliva

lines on the record: 57
first: 2022-04-03
most recent: 2022-04-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“To balance a checkbook taught by the football coach. So we didn't learn a whole lot about compound interest in there. So sadly, he passed away from cancer really heroic battle about four months ago. So all the proceeds from this book go to scholarships for high school students and everyone should go buy a copy.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the people who actually, the only person who really got me involved in your show many years ago was a good friend of mine named Sal Ponzio, who was a fantastic entrepreneur from Youngstown, Ohio. He also had a very promising career at Ernston Young, and we were best friends since really since preschool. And he wrote a book called Fit Finance, which is available on Amazon. And it's a book that he wrote for high school students and college kids on everything from compound interest to why you need to start your 401k now to how to get out of debt along with things like the psychology behind investing and spending. Basically, who took all the lessons that he had learned by his in his mid-30s and said, you know, just the kind of guy he was, I wish I would have known about this when I was in high school. Our personal finance class in high school was.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So I appreciate you having me on. This has been a lot of fun. I've been a big fan of your show for many years. So this is a really great experience for me. The easiest place to find me is ZachsNotes.com. That's Z-A-C-Knotes.com. I write there, I have links to other stuff. It's kind of a central point to connect. And value line is an amazing resource. This is what it looks like. They send you this big binder. It used to be weekly updates that you would get on their universe of stocks. They're switching to monthly. The next thing I know they're going to put everything online, which will really be the bane of my existence. I'm very much a paper guy. But yeah, it's a great resource and everyone should check it out. Anyone interested in gram style investing should also check out a website called NetNetHunter.com. It's a really good resource. One last thing I want to mention is one of”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And CEOs got to where they are partially by being great at sales. And to me, I don't like that math. There's not a big enough margin of safety in that math. What's the first thing that you would look at in a business to see if management was doing their job? If all you had was the data.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it might be an unpopular answer, but I don't put a lot of faith in, not faith, that's not the right word. I don't put a lot of weight into meeting management or talking to management. I think that there's plenty of data points to look at. Like, well, I mean, one of them, return on capital, whether or not a company is profitable, are they diluting shareholders? What is the executive compensation and the performance scheme look like? whether there's shareholder lawsuits against them. Those could tell you a lot about management. So my dad always told me kind of his motto was listen to what people say, but watch what they do because that's what they're really like. And so I look at those data points and make a judgment on management. You know, humans are very impressionable, myself included, right? So”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, maybe it's that I'm really, I don't know. I don't know. It's just always been a, I love working in the industry. It's fascinating. And again, there's awesome people and companies that are doing amazing things. I just have never really looked at it as something that I would be interested in investing in. And I can't tell you why. I have an answer for you, obviously, that I gave. But I don't know.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Better left to specialists like Josh Young, right? Who is just on your show, who loves investing in the industry, has great relationships with a lot of folks that are really, really bright in the industry. And he's really a specialist in this field.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know how the sausage is made. It's really just a preference. I think there's some amazing operators and entrepreneurs in the oil and gas industry. It gets a bad rap right now. But really, I found it to be just full of folks who are very hardworking, take a lot of pride in their work. But as a rule, I tend to stay away from natural resource production companies. Service companies, I just feel are much more within like natural resource service companies are much more within my circle of competency running a service business. I can understand what levers should be pulled or if those levers are pulled, what that would look like for the business. And it's really just a personal preference. It cuts down on the amount of stocks that I have to look at too, which is always good. I think that area is probably”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're statistically cheap, but you don't know how long they're going to be cheap for, right? And so, like you said, sometimes things take a while to work out. It could take a year to work out. So I usually try and buy, and then I set a reminder for two years in the future. And I say, okay, this is when unless, you know, my broker, I get like a big blinking notification, like something crazy happened. I have been blessed, and it is a blessing talking to some of my friends, I rarely check the market and I rarely check my holdings whenever something really good or really bad has happened, that information tends to find me one way or another. I've never been like I've never had my stocks on my phone. I've never, I don't log in every day and check to see where things are at. I don't know why I don't do that, but I just, I've never done that.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the market prices things like this sometimes, and it's really a matter of just finding them and digging into what the story is. And also, you know, these are, you know, I don't like buying them one at a time. I kind of like buying them using a basket approach, right? I'm all in.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or get acquired, then that's great. And they ended up getting acquired. Then it went up 800%. And then when I sold it, it went up another thousand percent, I think. So sometimes stuff like that happens. I guess you can make the argument that one of my best investments actually turned into one of my worst investments based on that, right? If you think about it from a business owner's mindset, if your buddy has a business, right? Small business, maybe they do $10 million a year in revenue, they lost their biggest customer, but your buddy says, look, the overhead's low. I got to get this off my hands. We're only going to do $5 million a year in revenue now. And I'll sell it to you for $5 million, but I've got $40 million in stock. And cash, you would be like, dude, yes, what is that? What's the catch?”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a non current holding a few years ago. It was a service company and they were like an outsourced customer service company for like AT&T, Comcast, things like that. It had been in business for over 20 years. And this is an example where when I found it, it had just lost its biggest customer, which actually represented half of its revenue. So it was a pretty big loss, right? It was trading for less than a dollar a share. It had $2 a share in cash on the books. No debt. Oh, and it had $9 a share in total assets. And it was on sale for less than a dollar. So I just thought to myself that the market was really pricing this thing as if it had lost all of its customers and that they were immediately going to go out of business. And I thought, man, if they just add one new customer, right?”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll give you two examples. One, large cap a few years ago Chipotle had a, it might have been out by you in California. There were some folks that got sick, right, from food poisoning. And the stock, the media frenzy, the stock tank so much, it was trading near the value of the real estate that Chipotle owned. You almost got the entire business for free. That was a no-brainer. That was a one-foot hurdle. You had to ignore everything else, though, right? This is systemic. There's problems with the supplier. If you looked at the facts, assuming that Chipotle even recovered and lost 50% of their business, you still would have done well. So I think that was like a 40 or 60% gain in like five months. Another company called support.com.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's true. I mean, I have friends that are analysts at investment funds too, and they're like, oh, we had to buy this because we had to get that 5% boost to close out the quarter. And so it's really how difficult do you want to make things?”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can drive a truck through the valuation that as long as the business doesn't go out of business and if you're buying below liquidation value it almost doesn't even matter so those are the things that I look for but I think Toby's probably right. I mean I think that Fidelity had a study that came out years ago that looked at their top performing accounts and it was people that were dead and people that forgot their password And so like how hard do we really want to make this I think as humans we like to see patterns and things that sometimes aren't there and again there's a big difference between correlation and causation right so I think and this also goes back to cloning how hard do you want to make this”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And once a year he would go down to town, he would get a newspaper. He would buy a few stocks trading at their 52 week lows. Call his broker, place the order, and then go back to his cabin for the next year. He did really well. So again, I don't know if that story is true, but that is how I think about investing. The things that I look for, I guess, on a quant style would be, you know, I'm looking for low PE ratios. I'm looking for, I'm really looking at the current assets and the total liabilities and trying to get a gram style. Gram style discount. I don't like debt. I don't like stocks that are being diluted by shareholders or diluting management. So that's something that I pay attention to. But I'm not putting together these DCF models for the next 10 years.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a fantastic book, and everyone should go read it. And Toby's probably right. I have a few anecdotes for this. So first, in the last interview before his death, Ben Graham said, look, the best way to do this is by low PE stocks. I know I wrote this book on security analysis and the intelligent investor, et cetera, but really you could do this buying low PE stocks. And there was a, not recent, but a daily journal meeting in the past where Charlie Munger said, look, If you just buy a company that's trading at two times book and is doing 20% return on capital every year, your life is going to turn out. Your investing life is going to turn out really good. Lastly, I don't even know if this is a true story, and I cannot find the story anywhere. But in the last few years, I read a story about a guy who lived in the mountains in a cabin, I think it was in Colorado.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just micro cap, small cap, I'll even look in barrens and look for PE of one company. And I'm just looking for big obvious opportunities. And I still pick pennies up off the ground when I see them on the sidewalk, right? So I'm looking for free, essentially, or discounted money, basically.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Example of a big obvious so a big obvious opportunity would to me would be a company that's been in business for 10 years or so, decent profitability, unloved industry, maybe an unloved story behind the company. And they're trading for less than the amount of cash that they have in the bank. To me, you know, on a per share basis or market cap or whatever, to me, as long as there's other things there, the management's not diluting shareholders, they have little to no debt, obviously. They're not trading at an all-time high, which at that point they wouldn't be at all. I just look for big, obvious opportunities. And I just try and keep it simple like that. I mean, there's, I'm trying to think of like there's, I don't use screeners, I use a value line. Few websites, but mostly like on the weekends I'm looking through.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I make sure I'm nice and relaxed. I make sure I have a checklist to make sure that I'm not, I didn't show up to work to buy something. And I'm looking for big, obvious opportunities. I'm trying to think of a...”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, it's less work, right? You find the compounder, you don't have to spend your days looking for these gram style investments. I think he's doing what Nick Sleep and them did, where they find two or three amazing businesses and you just let it ride for a while, which is a great idea. But also the gram style stuff is fun for me right now.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you split off, and it's amazing, and you have more confidence and you can bring those styles into it, right? So, yeah, I think it's an interesting concept.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're cloning the approach and the strategy, which has evidence that it works, but you're just trying to be the best investor that you can be using that strategy”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's going to be a lot of originality within there too. So I would call it maybe structured originality is important, but I think it's really important to clone people in the beginning. And essentially I'm cloning Benjamin Graham's approach right now. That's how you build a circle of confidence. There's a framework there for building the circle of confidence. I don't know anything more about investing than Benjamin Graham did or Warren Buffett did when he got started. I don't want to be those guys. I want to be the best investor that I can be. So I don't want to wish I had Warren Buffett's life. I don't wish I had anyone's life but my own. So there's a difference between cloning, I think, and thinking that you're going to be someone.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, so on the originality, I think that it really helps to clone people and to clone investors in the beginning because it gives you a solid framework. And within that framework, you will find your own originality. So if you took maybe the five top grateful dead cover bands in the world and you put them all next to each other,”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I usually get a phone call. I think I'm going to start investing in real estate, or there's this crazy macro situation going on that I really think I can take advantage of. And I just say, you know, go walk your dog, stick with your style. It's working. The market will keep up. It's proven. And I think also having a beginner's mindset and not getting overconfident is important. You don't need to know everything about everything, nor can you. I think with a simple investing style, it really is important to be questioning that, right? But also at the same time, trust in it. That may be very contradictory.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Using a simple process, Joel Greenblatt said that the hardest part about investing is the waiting. And I agree, like you said, sometimes with these net nets, it could take a year for them to work out. But is that really a long time or does it feel like a long time because you're checking every day? Why isn't anyone buying this? Why isn't anyone recognizing the value in this idea? So a good friend of mine told me that it doesn't matter what business strategy you pick. Pick one with a lot of evidence behind it and then just go execute on it. And it's probably the best advice that I've gotten in the last decade. Usually when I hear of investors who were very successful and then not, it seems to be because they got away from that simple style of investing. You know, I can tell one of my friends who run investment funds are bored.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's definitely pitfalls. First, I mean, you know, the whole great business is at fair prices thing looks great on a bumper sticker, right? But what's a great business? Is it the founder? What if he dies? Is it the product? Is it, do they have a lot of competitors? So I think what makes a great business is based on your experience over a long period of time. From my experience, I've arrived at the conclusion that for me right now, a great business is a monopoly with fat profits because I've seen everything outside of there fail or go away that I didn't think it was going to go. I have yet to find a net net like this, but if anyone listening to this does, please call me immediately. Another pitfall I think is that it can be Boring”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And his office was above, I think, a taco shop in Utah. And he was putting out like 40% returns. And so, you know, he left some breadcrumbs here and there that you try and learn from, but he had a very, you know, you look at some of his investments and they're so obvious in hindsight. Like buying Berkshire with leverage in 2008. Of course that would work. Berkshire was built for that situation. Of course, that would work. So he's made, I think he closed down his fund two or three years ago. He is a really interesting guy who didn't do a lot of marketing, didn't do a lot of PR stuff. He just did a lot of really great returns for his investors.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think what I love about Walter is he was really good at leveraging his time and he used that by having the right attitude and the right temperament. And as a business owner, and I'm sure you can appreciate this, the best leverage that you can have is the right strategy, the right decisions, and using your time effectively. That's what investing should reward. He was also incredibly organized. I mean, he managed over 100 holdings at once, which I actually have to dig into because that would be a lot to manage. Alan Meacham, he's a really interesting guy to study. There was an article that came out in Forbes probably a decade ago that called him the next Warren Buffett. I think he seems like a pretty private guy. And, you know, the article was really interesting. He started in high school investing, you know, studying Warren Buffett.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had low overhead, which I love. I think his overhead, he was running like hundreds of millions of dollars, was like 10,000 a year. He worked basically out of a closet at Tweety Brown. And his expenses were value line, postage, and his phone line. He didn't have any assistance or analysts. I think eventually his son started working with him later in his life. Oh, and he worked nine to five. A friend of mine said that Walter wins for greatest return on time. And I think what's lost today is that isn't that what investing is all about, a return on your time? Or is it this, you know, hashtag grind, hashtag, you know, working 18 hours a day, building out these DCF. Spreadsheets, reading these analyst reports if you'd like doing that stuff, that's great, but I'm terrible at Excel.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can really be that, you know, time is the multiplier there. He had simple rules. He avoided debt. He bought mostly what Buffett would consider to be generals. And I mean, he worked for Ben Graham, right? So bought generals and stocks trading below book value. He tried to buy at a multi-year low. He never talked to management. A friend of mine thinks that he was a simple guy with a great temperament for investing. And that's what I love about investing. You don't have to be Warren Buffett. You don't have to be Charlie Munger. You don't have to be, you know, Carl Icon as long as you have the right attitude and the right temperament. And you don't have to be the smartest guy in town. You don't even have to be the smartest guy in your block. You just have to have patience, discipline, and the right temperament and not deviate from those things. And those things will carry most of the weight.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Walter, in my opinion, does not get the love that he deserves. I mean, this is a guy, he worked as a teenager for Ben Graham and basically as a runner and didn't go to college. And he outperformed the market for 50 years. If you would have invested with him on day one, like $100,000, that would have turned into something like over $100 million over those 50 years. If you had invested in an index fund of the S&P or the equivalent, that would have returned something like 10 or 11 million dollars. So also Walter is a fantastic case study in just the nature of compound interest, right? And I think his average returns were 16% and the markets during that time were 9 or 10. So really just beating the market by a little bit over a long period of time.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then does the rate change? Does it float with the risk-free rate? So then new investors that come in are then paying a different rate if they come in, you know, their high water mark is different three years from now. So I just said, you know what? Easy decision. Let's just stick with the six and let's just let it roll.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's what he decided at the time based on a very young buffet and it worked for him and he kept it. I don't know what the most appropriate thing is to base it on. Do you?”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually got negative feedback when I started the fun about the Buffett fee structure that some folks said, well, in this day and age, because hedge funds are like a thing, right? And I live in Houston where it's private equity funds and investment fund funds galore, no one's going to take you seriously if you don't charge a management fee. I don't know if that's true or not. I think that if people do think that way, it means we're probably not aligned. So it probably does a good job screening folks out that I maybe wouldn't want to be partnered with anyways. But yeah, it's an interesting topic.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Management fee. Sometimes people just can't give up the management fees. So I found that funny, but I get it. If you're just starting out and you need to pay the rent or you need to feed yourself, like I'm not knocking it. It's just a situation or rather a structure that I find works the best for how I'm wired and for how I look at performance.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I really think that everyone wins with this structure. And fourth, lazily, I just saw that Monisha Pabri was doing it and I heard him talk about it a few times. And then it just became such an obvious no-brainer to me because of a lot of the reasons that I mentioned. And I just think that obvious decisions are the easiest ones. You know, one thing that's interesting about this is Guy Spear a few years ago, probably in the early 2000s maybe, He did a blog post where he basically said, hey, if you have a Buffett part style fee structure in your partnership, please write in. I want to hear from you. And he posted the results of that on his blog. And most of the folks who wrote in said, I have a buffet fee structure, but it's modified and I charge a half a percent for management fee. Or I have a buffet partnership and I have 1%.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To keep costs low, and I really can't think of a better incentive than the fact that they come out of my profits. So I don't have nor I desire to have a bunch of analysts, Bloomberg subscription, investor's relation person. I have a few websites subscriptions like NetNetHunter and I subscribe to ValueLine. And outside of that, my costs are pretty low. Really, I think the biggest asset that I have is not technology. It's my brain. And so I just try and really protect that. I'm also an entrepreneur at heart. So I love getting paid for performance. It's kind of how I'm wired. And I don't like if I'm not doing my job and getting people returns, I don't see why I should get paid for that. And so the way I look at it, you know, when I'm doing well, my partners are rewarding me handsomely, but they're also getting, you know, they're getting great.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the fee structure and the buffet partnerships was basically a 25% fee to him, performance fee, above a 6% high watermark. So in some partnerships, he shared in the downside. He didn't do that very long. And for example, if he only made 5% in a year, he had to make it up in the next year to get his fee. So it didn't just inspire me. I mean, I copied it. And there's a few reasons why. First, I don't really need the management fee. So I've run businesses before besides the law firm, besides this investment fund. It's basically a vehicle for me to manage my money, my family's money in one place, and have partners participate alongside of me. So I'm not really worried about the management fee. I don't need it to pay the rent or for a Bloomberg subscription or anything like that. Second, I really wanted an incentive on myself.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man, I don't know. That's kind of a battle between titans. Carl Icon is a legend. And the picture also changed, right? From when Buffett bought to when Carl originally kind of got involved in Oxy and some of these other oil and gas companies. You were a the market has changed a lot since then. So I guess I don't have any really big insight besides that it's kind of funny. And it seems like Carl's always kind of trying to catch up to Warren. This is just another.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saying, yeah, I used to do these net net stocks, but they don't exist anymore. And I'm like, well, yeah, they do. You can find them. And it's great when you do. So yeah, I don't know if that's a misconception in the market. I think it also could be the times. Like if I look at Large group of people say the folks that attended my wedding, then they're not looking for net nets. They're looking to do options trading these days. They're looking at the fang stocks. They're trying to buy Tesla. They're trying to invest in Bitcoin. It takes a while, I think, as an investor to get to wrap your head around net nets. And it's a leap of faith, right? It's a leap of faith in the market and in an investing process. I'm satisfied with the evidence that exists on it and the performance, but other people may not be, and that's their prerogative.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that because of the way that the market is structured and the major participants in the market, right, some funds have Where they can't participate below certain market caps, or it just doesn't make sense for them to go look into companies below, say, $100 million, right? So you have smaller funds in there that you compete with because you're always competing with someone on the other side of every transaction. And you have, I don't know, I like to think of retired dentists maybe being on the other side. But I think it generally in the small and micro cap space, there's a lot, but there's always exceptions to that. I'm pretty sure, I don't remember the exact year, but in the 2000s, Apple was a net net. So, you know, I don't know if I really want to be the poster child for like, hey, everyone, go out and buy net nets because they're out there because that would, you know, be competitive. But I've read in books in the last, you know, several years with famous investors who got started in gram style investing and they're in print.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Management, right? But they're trading for so low that they soon get acquired, which is good. So I think it really depends on, I think it's pretty situational. You definitely got to look into these things, obviously. But yeah, he probably did feel a lot of pain from those, especially because he was probably a lot more intimately involved with those folks than I am, for example, right? I mean, I could sit, you know, on my phone, on my couch at home and by stalking a company anywhere in the world these days.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it could be true. And I think the question with the net nets is, is it as bad as the market thinks it is? So, for example, there are some companies that I found where the law firm that I'm an owner of is a service business, right? We service oil and gas companies, essentially. There are some companies that I found that are trading below liquidation value. And I look into why and it's while they lost one of their key customers. That was 20% of revenue. And I sit there and think, like, man, I run a service business. If we lost one of our key customers, it would be bad, but it wouldn't be, it wouldn't shut us down. You know what I mean? So I think it really with some of these net nets, there's usually a story. There's been others that I've looked at that have had bad.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the desk, and like Japan and Asia is usually a pretty good place to find these net nets. And Pabriai said, look, you don't even have that handbook unless you're looking for these gram-style net net. So I think Buffett wasn't able to kick the habit.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a lot of control in their investments. Some people want investments where they know the founder and believe in the founder. Like you're in your interview with Ian. And so everyone's different. And so I think, you know, maybe he got bored. I know Graham got bored with the net nets. He would spend a lot of his time translating plays from Latin to Greek, Latin to French. Or Buffett wanted more control over his investments. But what's crazy to me is what an absolute machine he is. There was an interview with Alice Schroeder online after the snowball effect came out. And she wrote that even if he would see a general now, he would pick it up for his personal account. And then I listened to Amonish Pabrai video. It might have been one of your interviews when he said that he was in Buffett's office and there was the Japanese company handbook.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Analogize it from a business owner's point of view, I think the generals are probably the bread and butter slash keep the lights on style and maybe the workouts or special situations would be like new business lines or expansion you know if you're operating a regular business I don't think that you need to do both and you know Benjamin Graham he gave a few interviews right before he died And he basically said, look, I know this seems too good to be true that you can generate good consistent returns using this kind of net-net approach, but I haven't been able to find it for 60 years and I haven't been able to find otherwise. So I think that either in the beginning or the partnerships when Buffett started moving away from the generals into the workout situations, everyone's different, right?”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the availability of the generals, he would change up that allocation. So, for example, in 1957, he wrote that basically, hey, he wrote to his investors, if the market goes down, I'm going to buy as many of these generals as I can. I might even take out loans from the bank to do so. And so I think he loved the generals. I think the workouts probably provided him with more maybe intellectual stimulation and also probably provided him with more guaranteed returns, but they would take longer. So, you know, with the net nets, it's kind of like you're going for those returns and there's, you know, a lot of value there and you kind of strike while the iron's hot. Whereas with the generals, I mean, I think he wrote in his letters that they could take anywhere from five to ten years that he could see at that time to work out.”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, when I was introduced to Buffett at that young age, he was really focused on the great businesses at fair prices, right? And why wouldn't you be? You're one of the richest people in the world. Your universe is X, right? Not the cigar butts buffet. And so I really had to work my way backwards. So basically, I just kind of found out that I wasn't really getting the returns that I wanted. And so I thought, all right, well, what was he doing when he first got started? So if you go back and look at the partnership letters from the 50s, which are a great read, he was mostly focused on generals, which is today what we would call net nets, gram style, you know, basically he was buying assets at a discount, current assets minus all liabilities, or could he buy below liquidation value. So at the same time, he was looking for workouts, which we would call special situations today. Now, depending on...”
2022-04-03 · We Study Billionaires · TIP436: Is the Buffett Partnership Strategy Still Applicable Today? W/ Zack Oliva · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT