价值投资传奇 Seth Klarman 访谈：风险、市场与投资哲学

Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. This [music] is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

What can I tell you about this week's banger? Seth Klarman, legendary value investor out of Boston at the Baupost Group. What a fascinating discussion about risk, about the current environment, about the Boston Red Sox, about just about anything that affects portfolios, distressed assets, stocks, bonds, real estate. I thought this was fascinating and I know you will also. With no further ado, my conversation with Seth Klarman.

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Seth Klarman, welcome to Bloomberg.

It's so great to be here. Thank you, Barry.

Thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this for for forever. Um, before we get into your investment philosophy and the development of of Baupost, I have to roll back a little bit to to your early days. Economics from Cornell, an MBA from Harvard. What was the original career plan?

So, I was always drawn to investing. Even I was very young kid, I was interested in the baseball statistics. I became aware that there were these other columns of numbers in the newspaper and asked my neighbor what those were and started to understand and follow the stock market a little bit. So, of course I had no idea what I was doing, but I was paying attention from quite early age. I didn't really ever develop a career plan, but I was drawn to the stock market.

I I think I I've I'm drawn to puzzles, Barry. I I I like doing word puzzles every day. I like solving math puzzles. I subscribe still to something called um a math puzzle book published by Dell. And um stock market's a big puzzle. The financial markets are a big puzzle. How does it all work? And how does the performance of the companies get reflected in stock prices? And how can an investor outperform um everybody else?

And so all of that is a piece of what what drew me in.

So I'm interested in in how you first found that be beyond the newspaper stock price pages. You grew up in Baltimore. Your parents divorced when you were relatively young. Mom was an English teacher, later a psychiatric social worker. Dad was a health economist at at Johns Hopkins and NYU. Was it just simply thumbing through the sports pages literally to the next set of pages where the stocks pages?

That's literally the the numbers on the page attracted my attention. Um I I would say you know, I think my origin story is a lot like other people in who who ended up in the investing business, like Warren Buffett, like I think Todd Combs, um like many others. Uh drawn to small businesses, wanted to make money. So I was delivering newspaper routes for the Baltimore Sun papers. Um I had a snow cone stand in my driveway one summer.

I uh mowed lawns. I raked leaves. I shoveled snow. I did little carnivals for the neighborhood kids, whatever. Um I sold candy at religious school on the um on Tuesdays and Thursdays because the kids were starving after school. And I would buy it up over the weekend and bring it to school and sell it for a for an arbitrage profit. Um so it was just the pattern of of being drawn to small business and making money and over time that led to an interest in stock market.

I bought my first stock with some Bar Mitzvah money when I was around 10 years old.

Well, couldn't have been Bar Mitzvah money if you were 10.

It wasn't Bar Mitzvah money then. It was a present, but then Bar Mitzvah money continued to be piled piled in.

10 years old and

I bought a share of Johnson & Johnson.

Uh-huh. Still have it?

Uh do not still have it. It split three for one, but ultimately I presumably have traded that in for something else that that I that I liked better.

So so let's fast forward a little bit to the Baupost origin story, which isn't that far ahead. You're only 25. The urban legend is you co-founded Baupost, but reality you were brought in to manage money uh for the four founding families. Still at 25, that that's a kind of shocking thing. Oh, we have all this wealth. Let's bring in this kid to run our portfolio.

Right. And and I I would say the same thing if if I were if I were in their seats, I would wonder well, how does this kid know how to do that? Um so I I don't think people should generally be starting investment firms at age 25. And of course, I really didn't start the firm. The firm was in the process of being created. The four clients of the firm that came together, the founders, had the idea that they would build a firm that might go um and make investments itself, might hand money to others who were in the business already of making investments.

So I think they wanted to build kind of a an institutional structure framework for how to have make sure the money got managed well, given what was then back in the early '80s, a highly fraught time as as you know from history. Um the volatile markets, uh long history of underperformance of the stock market, and and real economic uncertainty, stagflation um at some point and and getting worse. Treasury bond yields were getting higher and higher.

So, it was a really fraught moment and I think they wanted to make sure that the money they had not only was kept intact, but was accounted for. Clip the coupons and collect the dividends and all of that. The founders were all selling businesses around that time. So, the serendipity was I was a student at business school. Bill Poorvu, the PO of Baupost, was my real estate professor. And he and some friends were selling Channel 5.

He was a big investor in that. The Metromedia, largest sale at the time of a TV station to Metromedia. It was the ABC affiliate in Boston. A third friend had a computer publishing and consulting business. All that was getting sold. So, they had this pile of $27 million and the basic job offer I got wasn't come run a fund. It was come join us and let's figure out smart things to do with the money.

So, eventually you become the the lead partner there. I don't know if CEO CEO is the right term.

I wasn't CEO for the first seven or so years and then I became CEO and effectively got control of the firm as sort of a handshake deal where we agreed that if I worked hard and did well for the clients that they would recognize that with a stake in the business. So, I had no stake the day it was formed and ended up with over half.

Ended up with over half. That's amazing. 40 something years later.

much less because I'm I'm a big believer in sharing the pie with my team.

Makes [clears throat] a lot of sense. Let's talk a little bit about the timing. You mentioned there was a lot of turmoil and stagflation the previous 16 years. I want to say the inflation-adjusted returns were something like down 75% 66 to 82 something along those lines. 82 was the beginning of a historic bull market. How did that affect how you thought about risk? How you thought about um opportunities? What were you What did the markets look and feel like in in '82 when I imagine most people were still pretty bearish?

Yeah, so and I think Malcolm Gladwell would look and say 1982, what an interesting time to start an investment firm. That certainly was a wind at your back in terms of being successful. The challenges and you know you know this um how it works in the markets is you had no idea that you were at the beginning of a long bull market. What you felt was the market hasn't done that well for very you know for a long period of time and people were very skeptical about it and you could always point to I think this is probably valuable insight is you could always point to things at any moment that don't add up, that seem overvalued, that seem risky.

Um and yet we get through most of those things. So at the time it didn't feel like a gimme, it didn't feel like a a layup hand. Um but what what ended up happening was you know we tried to make money apart from the market. We weren't buying an index, indexes weren't big then anyway. We weren't buying the market.

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