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How the 0.001% invest

economist.com

51–60 of 216 posts

Re: How the 0.001% invest

#51
post #25

The article only considers new investment. Jeff Bezos may be worth $150bn, but approximately $125bn of that is in Amazon stock. He's 80% invested in Amazon. Does it really matter where the worlds richest man puts the other 20% when he could afford to lose it all on moonshots and not give a damn? The risk-reward trade-offs you and me make while investing just don't apply to Jeffs personal investment decisions, and the…

His wealth concentration is actually quite higher, around ~94.7% in AMZN stock. Bloomberg has him currently at a $132b net worth, with $125b in Amazon. The rest is Blue Origin and The Washington Post, with his cash position at 'only' an estimated $2.45b. Given the absurdly high valuation of Amazon - and as a fan of humanity pushing into space - I'd like to see him sell some larger blocks of Amazon while the stock mar…

I'm not so sure if he could easily liquidate larger block of stocks without affecting price/panic much. Maybe in long period of time by periodically selling minor amounts. Amazon is Jeff and Jeff is Amazon, I wonder what would happen and how markets would react if he disclosed even slightest hint of his exit intentions. Also fan of humans conquering space though, and would definitely love to see that happen.

Re: How the 0.001% invest

#52

The family offices I've worked with do pretty much everything. Part of the reason to do everything is that you have the freedom to do so. I literally called a friend on behalf of another friend to get him a bridge loan for a house once. A free mandate makes for more interesting work, plus as the manager you can stick things in illiquids that have no mark-to-market. That's the uncharitable view, of course. The charita…

The SEC remedy against bad hedge fund owners in the show Billions is the threat of turning them into family offices

Re: How the 0.001% invest

#53
"If you invested in a very low cost index fund — where you don’t put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years — you’ll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time" --Buffett

Re: How the 0.001% invest

#54

The family offices I've worked with do pretty much everything. Part of the reason to do everything is that you have the freedom to do so. I literally called a friend on behalf of another friend to get him a bridge loan for a house once. A free mandate makes for more interesting work, plus as the manager you can stick things in illiquids that have no mark-to-market. That's the uncharitable view, of course. The charita…

The SEC remedy against bad hedge fund owners in the show Billions is the threat of turning them into family offices

Yeah I saw some of that show. The thing is if you're a MFO you're handling other people's money.

Re: How the 0.001% invest

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His wealth concentration is actually quite higher, around ~94.7% in AMZN stock. Bloomberg has him currently at a $132b net worth, with $125b in Amazon. The rest is Blue Origin and The Washington Post, with his cash position at 'only' an estimated $2.45b. Given the absurdly high valuation of Amazon - and as a fan of humanity pushing into space - I'd like to see him sell some larger blocks of Amazon while the stock mar…

I'm not so sure if he could easily liquidate larger block of stocks without affecting price/panic much. Maybe in long period of time by periodically selling minor amounts. Amazon is Jeff and Jeff is Amazon, I wonder what would happen and how markets would react if he disclosed even slightest hint of his exit intentions. Also fan of humans conquering space though, and would definitely love to see that happen.

[deleted]

Re: How the 0.001% invest

#56
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not quite sure how sites do it, but, lots of sites manage to enforce the article limit across even incognito and even across browsers... i pasted an archive.is link ( http://archive.is/o3LVk ) which is quite reliable for me and 99% of the time someone else already archived it.

So that's what those are supposed to do? Everytime I click on one I get an error, currently it's "Error 1016 Origin DNS error". Never actually saw what's behind that site but it does not seem like a working domain.

Are you using Cloudflare's DNS servers? Yeah, it doesn't work with that, for some reason.

Re: How the 0.001% invest

#57

Back when I was fantasizing about what I'd do if I won the lottery, I looked into family offices a bit and concluded that there's basically no point as far as the investing advice goes. It's still likely a good idea for some of the ultra-wealthy for estate, tax, and philanthropic purposes, but on the investment side? The standard passive indexing approach used by middle class individuals scales in a cost-effective ma…

Indexing might make sense for a portion of your assets but if you have enough wealth to consider a family office, your investment goals are much different than a standard retirement account. Whether it's a different time horizon or simply having enough money to invest in assets that aren't available to you in your company's 401k, things are different.

Re: How the 0.001% invest

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His wealth concentration is actually quite higher, around ~94.7% in AMZN stock. Bloomberg has him currently at a $132b net worth, with $125b in Amazon. The rest is Blue Origin and The Washington Post, with his cash position at 'only' an estimated $2.45b. Given the absurdly high valuation of Amazon - and as a fan of humanity pushing into space - I'd like to see him sell some larger blocks of Amazon while the stock mar…

It doesn't matter as he can easily borrow tens of billions against his Amazon shares.

Debt always matters when it's that large of a sum. If he borrows $10b over six years against $65b in shares, he would have been dramatically better off liquidating $10b worth of stock over ~18 months when it was worth $125b-$145b and having zero debt. He's 54, has been at the helm for 24 years and isn't going to run Amazon forever, the market isn't going to freak out if he sells a few points more of stock.

Is Amazon heading toward an 18 PE ratio against $20-$25 billion in profit? $360b-$450b market cap, versus a $778b market now (already down ~$250 billion from the highs). At some point in the near future will their profit growth stagnate, Microsoft or Intel style, for most of a decade; and will their multiple compress over time with that stagnation? Historically that's the very likely outcome (or far worse).

The stock market goes down with the next recession, the very high S&P 500 / market multiple gets chopped down to a more reasonable historical level. After several years pass and the smoke clears, Amazon's AWS growth has slowed considerably, its online retail growth is single digits, and the market awards it a mature slower growth 15-20 style PE ratio.

There has never been an exception in the tech world, when it comes to multiple compression. The compression monster comes for everyone. Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Apple, Facebook, Google, etc have all suffered it. There will never be an exception. Amazon isn't going to get an 80 PE ratio on $20b in profit, the market will squeeze it perpetually down. It's very likely the party top is already over (the next time we see such absurdly low market-supporting interest rates, it'll be because of a recession, and stocks will have plunged accordingly).

When it comes to the cost of funding Blue Origin (which is very high), I think he will have wished he sold more stock while it was on the moon during this stock market bonanza, where even very low growth stocks like Intuit are still fetching hilarious 50 PE ratios.

And these are the reasonable scenarios. The dangerous scenario, where you're nuts to borrow $10 billion against stock, is where Amazon is disrupted (AWS particularly), or the economy gets really bad and Amazon gets a 16 PE ratio against $18 billion in profit (still not actually a bad outcome even then). In that case, Bezos is now borrowing $10b against ~$45b in shares or less. Non-trivial leverage, even for that much wealth. Or you could just easily evade all the major risk scenarios, sell off 1.6% of the richly valued Amazon stock - just 10% of your holdings - and fund Blue Origin debt free for a decade or so without concern (hopefully to the point of self-sustainability). And you do it while the market is bubbly, precisely because shareholders are far less likely to care then.

Re: How the 0.001% invest

#59
post #44
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not particularly convinced by the risks stated here. Both of your points are made in the article?

They mentioned presumably 'reasonable' risks, or else they wouldn't have mentioned them at all. I'm just not convinced they are even reasonable enough to bother mentioning. The third issue (tax) is where the potential issues are, and got virtually the same length paragraph.

My impression was that they mentioned the obvious risks (and by obvious what the public and pundits might fear), and then immediately went on to say why it's not an actual risk.

Re: How the 0.001% invest

#60

The majority of the world's richest people have their wealth tied up in companies they either founded or inherited.... if they are investing their capital they have limitations most of us do not have to face. If I go from having to invest $1m to $100m to $100bn, my investment universe shrinks each time. For example, a small investor can invest in companies with market cap of ~$50m+....not possible for Warren Buffet.…

The way Bill Gates is doing it makes sense to me, and I imagine many of the super rich probably find a similar model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Investment It financially does not make sense to have all eggs in one basket, the risk is inordinate. This has been mathematically proven over and over again. When you're smaller and aiming for big returns, go for it. When you're bigger, your universe is a bit different.
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