#75: The World According to a Maverick, Beach–Biding Stock Picker – John Hempton
2 min read
John Hempton is a renowned short seller and the Founder and Chief Investment Officer at Australian-based hedge fund Bronte Capital.
Selected links
- Follow John: Blog | Twitter
- The Money Miners, by Trevor Sykes
- ‘Three Australian Asset Price Bubbles’, conference paper by John Simon
- Once in Golconda, by John Brooks
- The Go-Go Years, by John Brooks
- Manias, Panics, and Crashes, by Robert Aliber and Charles Kindleberger
- Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay
- This Time Is Different, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff
- The Land Boomers, by Michael Cannon
- Bronte Capital’s December 2017 Client Letter
- Fooling Some Of The People All Of The Time, by David Einhorn
- Bronte Capital’s June 2011 Client Letter
- ‘What is Amazon?’, blog post by Zack Kanter
- ‘Drug Short’, the Netflix Dirty Money episode featuring John Hempton
- Bronte Capital’s March 2010 Client Letter
Topics discussed
- Why Marc Cohodes is John’s model of how to pick stocks and how not to run a portfolio. 3:44
- Why did John move from Sydney to Adelaide while he was at university? 7:22
- How John met his mentor Ken Henry and became an expert on tax avoidance. 9:48
- When and why did John first start trading stocks? 15:11
- The intoxication of bull markets and the sobering powers of financial history books. 16:36
- Leverage is for the young. 22:18
- VoiceNet — the first fraud that John discovered. 26:13
- The email that changed John’s life. 31:32
- The sorry tale of Bre-X. 44:22
- Portfolio management is key. 53:00
- Why John would rather be Warren Buffett than the greatest of the short sellers — and some basic portfolio heuristics. 53:50
- How many frauds does Bronte short on average and how many could it potentially short? 1:03:53
- How does Bronte balance its longs and shorts? 1:05:51
- The story of how John landed his first job in finance, at Platinum Asset Management. 1:09:00
- How John finds short ideas through dodgy brokers’ notes. 1:17:52
- How to get hired in finance. 1:19:07
- Learning from books. 1:24:49
- What lessons and anti-lessons did John learn from Kerr Neilson? 1:29:39
- John’s early retirement, quick comeback, and the birth of Bronte Capital. 1:40:53
- What sort of characters does John look for when searching for frauds? 1:47:43
- Bernie Madoff’s golf scores. 1:59:52
- John’s tussles with Chinese frauds — and the techniques he used to uncover them. 2:01:56
- How John used fake receivables to identify a dating company fraud in the UK. 2:11:23
- Why did Chinese frauds suddenly become harder to knock-off? 2:21:20
- The red flags that helped John identify Valeant Pharmaceuticals as a fraud. 2:25:23
- The morality of short selling. 2:30:23
- How does John structure his days to generate ideas? 2:41:54
- What should young investors or non-finance people do to break into the industry? 2:49:15