October 20 -- 21 2007 article in WSJ page A11 talks about House Sam Zell, the real estate virtuoso at Master investor is supposedly some kind of genius. He built up his company, Equity Office Properties, a real estate investment trust out over decades and sold it to Blackstone for $39 billion in February of 2007. By August, the value of these properties had no doubt plummeted due to the real estate crash.
As a result, and for other reasons I suppose, Zell is considered some kind of genius. But when asked, he says that he did not know that the market was sitting atop. Rather, he says that he felt Blackstone offered him more money for the company than it was worth so he took it. If he's telling the truth, then he avoided disaster in the real estate market by blind luck. The story doesn't look too impressive to me: typical relic, that someone who gets lucky is called a genius.
That was not what happened, in my opinion, when Marty Zweig called the market bottom on Wall Street week before it happened, I believe this was in the early 1980s. He made the call about six months before the actual market bottom and stuck with it the whole time when everyone else in the country felt that stocks were equivalent to the Black plague. He was fully invested through that period. I saw him accumulate gray hairs during that six-month period. That was a combination of genius and guts, something real, not just luck.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment