Bill Ackerman & Pershing Square Capital

When the COVID-19 epidemic broke out in 2020, there were four circuit breakers in US stocks within 10 days, and many investors lost all their money in this catastrophe.

However, there was an investor who made nearly a hundredfold return by betting on the market collapse in this epidemic, making a profit of as much as $2.6 billion in a month.

He is the well-known hedge fund manager Bill Ackerman.

In 1966, Ackerman was born into a wealthy Jewish family in New York.

In 1988, he graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and then studied for an MBA at Harvard Business School.

After working in real estate with his father for some time, Mr Ackerman founded a hedge fund with Joel Greenblatt in 1992, which did quite well, but decided to close it in 2002.

Two years later, Ackerman founded Pershing Square Capital with an initial capital of $54 million.

Ekman has many investment stories, the most interesting of which is his bet against Herbalife, which was later made into a documentary entitled Zero cost: the Truth of the Direct selling Pyramid.

In 2012, Ekman found that Herbalife, a maker of nutritional supplements, made a profit not by selling products but by recruiting referrals. He thought the business model was worthless, so he decided to short Herbalife and even predicted that Herbalife's share price would fall to zero.

However, another investment guru, Carl Icahn, took the opposite view, buying a lot of Herbalife shares, and the matter turned into a long-distance war between two people.

In 2013, the two billionaires even had a live altercation on CNBC.

Herbalife's shares soared 51% for the year in 2017. Then at the beginning of the following year, Ackerman decided to close his position at a huge loss. This is the end of a five-year war between the air and the air.

Bill Ackerman is recognized as an "activist investor", which even led to his scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

(note: when you are an activist / equity investor, you will try to use every shareholder's right to influence the company's direction, strategy, value added, etc. This means playing a very active role in both the board of directors and management. )

In March 2022, however, Bill Ackerman announced that he would no longer engage in aggressive short selling and was ready to lead his company into the next era, focusing on long-term, "quiet" bets.

Bill Ackerman's portfolio is generally very concentrated, with only 10-15 positions. Like Warren Buffett, Ekman believes that excessive diversification actually leads to "diworsification" (a combination of the English words diversification and worse). When you have strong beliefs, you need to dare to bet.

Pershing Square Capital has achieved great success since its inception. Compared with the s & p 500, the annual return is impressive, with a compound annualised rate of return of 16.1% from January 2004 to august 2022, compared with 9.7% for the s & p 500 over the same period.