market folly

Playing catch up after the holidays, we wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to see Bill Ackman's presentation on his latest short position: Herbalife (HLF).

The Pershing Square Capital Management CEO gave the pitch at a recent special Ira Sohn event.  In a very thorough and detailed presentation (334 slides), Ackman labels the multilevel marketing company a pyramid scheme.

Making the media rounds after his presentation concluded, Ackman noted that he has an "enormous" short position, over 20 million shares and that they began shorting around 7 months ago. While HLF shares originally plummeted from around $40 down to $25 on news of Ackman's short, they've since rebounded up to $32.

Some readers may recall that we also previously flagged when Greenlight Capital's David Einhorn surfaced on an Herbalife earnings call and started asking questions.  His brief cameo caused the stock to plummet on sheer speculation that he was going to short the company.

There still has been no word from Einhorn whether he is long, short, or not involved at all in the name.  Ackman also commented in a recent media appearance that he had not spoken to Einhorn about the HLF position.

Embedded below is Ackman's presentation on Herbalife (HLF) entitled, "Who wants to be a Millionaire?"




You can download a .pdf copy here.

The Pershing Square founder also created a website for his pitch: www.factsaboutherbalife.com if you want to see the full webcast of his talk as well as other resources he's posted up.


For more from this hedge fund manager, we recently posted up Bill Ackman's presentation on everything you need to know about finance and investing.