market folly

At the Milken Institute Global Conference, prominent hedge fund managers gathered on a panel about activist investors and the search for alpha.  The panel consisted of:

- Jeff Ubben, ValueAct Capital
- Barry Rosenstein, JANA Partners
- Clifton Robbins, Blue Harbour Group
- Chris Teets, Red Mountain Capital

In it, the fund managers talked about the different styles of activist investing.

Rosenstein said that, "I'm happy to be friendly as long as the company does what I want them to do."

Robbins contributed, "I think that there's been a palpable change in the last four or five years generally in the attitudes of boards and CEOS in their willingness to listen to large stockholders."

Ubben took issue with activist investing being 'daytrader fodder' and labeled it as 'bad.'  Ubben revealed he had built an eBay stake at $50 and wanted to buy more but Icahn's involvement pushed shares higher.  He says Carl's a great stockpicker, but the activist situation there was a non-event.

Ubben later noted that he thinks activist investing is too short-term these days rather than building a company over the long-term.  Robbins agreed with him.  However, Rosenstein took the other side of the argument.

Embedded below is the full activist investing panel from the Milken Institute Global Conference:



For more on the subject, head to Mason Morfit's lectures on activist investing (he's part of ValueAct with Ubben).