Dan Loeb: The Lost Art of Short Selling, and Why Stock Picking is Back

Legendary activist investor, Dan Loeb. He, of course, is the CEO and CIO of Third Point. The lost art of short selling Yeah. Has come back, and it's absolutely critical. Doesn't matter what you do. You have to be really selective. People talk about stock pickers market. This is a bond and credit pickers market. When we were small, our main tool was shame and humor. Dan Loeb turning up the heat on Nestle over the weekend. The shift has really been more towards a dare to be great message. Activism without proxy contest is like Catholicism without hell. You're very active on the Twitter as well. Oh, well. You found your voice. Lot lot of emotion brewing there. Can we actually start with that? Before Twitter, you were actually quite active, but they were in very different places. I mean you were in Wall Street Bets before Wall Street Bets existed. Can you just walk us through your evolution as a as a public persona? Sure. I mean there was this brand new technology that came out called the Internet and really shortly thereafter, long before Reddit or any of these other things, there were a series of chat boards. There was Yahoo, there was something called Silicon Investor, a few other ones and people would congregate in Kibbitz. It was done mostly anonymously and it was an interesting place to exchange ideas or was it was really the wild west. People could pretty much say or do anything, but there was a lot of there's a lot of substance there too. It's not actually that much different than from today. You did you engage at all in any trolling per se? Well some people use the term OG. Sometimes I say I was the OT. The original troll. Yeah, no I did. I mean it was it was fun. I didn't know I was one day going to run institutional money and have a big fund and you know, I was just having fun and and blowing off steam and and yeah it was fun. I mean investing is fun and particularly on the short side. I mean there's so much humor in it when you detect these companies, especially in the nineties. I mean that it was really unsupervised. There were some incredibly fraudulent companies out there and it was fun to uncover them and kind of taunt the management teams and ultimately, prevail. You have one story above others that kind of stands out in that era? I mean there were there were a bunch. There was, wow, there was a company called Actrade that I remember run by a guy who was like a repeat fraudster and we uncovered it and and, you know, I know we really got under this person's skin and ultimately it was really just a factoring company trading at 5, six, I don't remember what it is, some large multiple of book value. And they had created a new technology …