https://www.fool.com/investing/2023...=Warren Buffett Just Beat the,The Motley Fool https://finance.yahoo.com/news/carl...aiX9NWPktnDXmH5OqA6-2lZGgzL23-W6y4e38roWO5kai According to a quick google search it seems the guys know what they are doing. Please check also in Bloomberg - I would also be interested in official data. We all know internet statistics can be bent and should be taken with a grain of salt
I don’t think IEP is the same as icahns private investment vehicles. Berkshire is a closed end fund. Warrens compensation comes from his equity ownership. He has publicly quipped that he wish he charged fees. invest in these guys not for their past performance but what you think their future performance will be: do you think ackman will be able to produce the results he has in the past? Do you think Berkshires private businesses are undervalued? Do you think his public value investments will outperform? With Berkshire you can run his public portfolio easily.
Annualised returns including dividends 02/10/2015 (starting point on Bloomberg) - 04/06/2023: Pershing Square Holdings (PSHZF): 4.32% SPY: 10.76% Why would I try to copy that.
If I pay someone to manage my money, it matters to me what return he delivers. It may sound crazy, but yes that is how I look at investments.
My hope was that for a very few select individuals, past performance would be at the margin slightly indicative of their ability to beat S&P 500 going forward. I have no other variable that I would trust besides long term past outperformance. Buffet, Icahn and Ackman have all beaten the S&P 500 by a wide margin early in their careers. Otherwise they would not be billionaires. Whether that performance is statistically significant when compared with the fact that they are 3 investors out of millions of investors, I do not know. I have not done the statistical test. My intuition says no if you choose a critical significance that reflect that they are 3 out of millions of investors. Based on the record that is publicly available, at least the investors in their publicly trading vehicles have not beaten the S&P 500 for a very long number of years. Ackman has widely underperformed for the 8 year record available and Icahn has delivered the same as S&P 500 for 36 years. Based on this it would not make sense for me to choose any of them and pay a large management and performance fee to Icahn or Ackman instead of just investing in SPY. I have no trust in my ability to predict when they will outperform. That is my view. You are of course welcome to disagree.
Pension funds are more than happy to pay 2/20 to achieve 10% net returns. They are scouring for actively managed vehicles that can absorb their billions in assets. That's mainly why these large hedge funds exist producing mediocre returns. They are a place to park institutional assets.