Hedge fund woes don’t slow stock pickers’ meeting
Beginning today, some 600 hundred people who have written big checks will attend the 7th annual Value Investing Congress in New York. The two-day event is a chance for investors, lesser-known money managers and financial advisers to rub shoulders with William Ackman, David Einhorn, Jim Chanos, Leon Cooperman and other titans in the $2 trillion hedge fund industry.This year’s conference, after offering some steep discounts on tickets, is fairly well-attended, even though many of the featured speakers are nursing hefty losses.In fact, the conference’s principal organizer, Whitney Tilson, is the manager of T2 Partners, a small hedge fund that is down 30 percent for the year. Ackman’s $10 billion Pershing Square Capital Management is down 16 percent for the year.But those attending the conference did not seem to mind that many of the speakers were having off-years. Maybe that has something to with the fact the Value Investing Congress is focused on managers who specialize in finding stocks that are unloved gems where payoffs can be years down the road.”Value investors tend to look longer ahead than a hedge fund guy and maybe they are more forgiving,” said Jason Slocock, a private investor who came from London.ANOTHER CUP OF JOEThen again, the biggest buzz during the first day of the conference did not come from a manager identifying a beaten-up stock to buy. It came when Greenlight Capital founder David Einhorn, whose $8 billion fund is down 6 percent this year, told the crowd about a stock he was betting against.Einhorn wowed the crowd with the news that his fund was selling short shares of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc, a company that not too long ago was a darling stock of the hedge fund set. Some of the coffee company’s early boosters included John Thaler’s JAT Capital and Philippe Laffont’s Coatue Capital. William Danoff, a top mutual fund manager at Fidelity Investments, also liked the stock.Shares of Green Mountain immediately plummeted 10 percent on the news that Einhorn was shorting it because of concerns about the company’s accounting practices and business prospects.”If you get one usable idea it can pay off handsomely and pay for conferences for the next 20 years,” said Allen Benello, a portfolio manager at hedge fund White River Partners in San Francisco.Still, the ideas being touted here are hardly exclusive as they are now available not only to hundreds of other conference attendees, but also to anyone with an Internet connection. Indeed, news of Einhorn’s short bet was a hot topic on Twitter, even as the manager was still going through his lengthy presentation.Many at the conference were waiting for Tuesday’s presentations when Ackman, one of the industry’s biggest stars, is scheduled to speak.Chanos, a famed short-seller, on Monday warned investors not to simply chase a beaten down-stock believing it has hidden value. His presentation to the paying crowd was called, “Beware the global value trap!”Chanos, who runs Kynikos Associates, said, “If I can’t work out how a company is making money after reading their 10K three times, we open a file on it.”Other featured speakers included Cooperman, whose Omega Advisors is down 12.36 percent, and Eminence Capital’s Ricky Sandler, whose fund is off 6.53 percent this year. The list of speakers even included Vladimir Jelisavic, co-founder of Longacre Fund Management, a one-time $800 million fund that recently announced plans to liquidate because of poor performance.GENIUSES AMONG USEven with those sorry numbers, investors said the conference offers attendees a chance to walk among greatness. “You have ideas here you don’t get in the office,” said Brian Cann, who works at RBC DS Private Investment Management in Ontario. “It is like when you can be sitting there for hours and nothing happens and then you and your colleague go to the pub and suddenly you have 42 new ideas,” he added.Conference organizers said this year’s attendance beat last year’s event. But organizers had to offer heavy discounts off the original $4,000-plus ticket price to woo people to come.
