| Has billionaire Stan Druckenmiller been reading my emails? “Druck,” if you don’t know him, might be the greatest investor alive today. He’s low-key and rarely gives interviews. But his track record is astonishing… Druck strung together 30 straight profitable years from 1980 to 2010. During that time he earned returns of 30% per year. If you took $10,000 and compounded it at 30% per year for 30 years… you’d amass a $26.2-million fortune. And Druck has never had a losing year… ever! He made money in 2001 during the dot-com crash. He reportedly made $260 million in 2008, while most investors were losing their shirts. In a rare interview with Bloomberg, Druck was asked what he’s investing in today... He said: “We are long the disruptors and short the disrupted… it has worked beautifully.” If you've been following along this week, you know all about disruptor stocks. Disruptors are not ordinary stocks. They don’t come in and compete with industry leaders. They destroy them. They steamroll the competition… and often hand investors big gains of 3X, 4X, 5X, or better. Take a company like Adobe Systems (ADBE), whose PDF software transformed American offices… Remember Xerox (XRX)? It makes those big, clunky paper copiers. Believe it or not, Xerox was once a mighty tech giant. 30 years ago it was America’s 20th-largest public company. Today its stock chart is a sad reminder of what it’s like to get steamrolled by a disruptor. Xerox stock peaked at $168/share in the late 1990s. Today it trades for just $33/share… a wipeout of 80%, as you can see here: Canon (CAJ), one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of printers, is a victim of Adobe’s disruption too. In the past decade printer sales have plunged 30%, and Canon’s stock has been cut in half since 2007. Meanwhile, Adobe stock has surged 600% since 2010. That’s four-and-a-half times better than the S&P 500. And if you’d bought Adobe back in the late 1990s, you’d be sitting on profits of over 20,000%! Druck isn’t the only legend buying disruptors… Have you seen the movie The Big Short? It tells the story of a few clever guys who made a killing by betting on the US housing collapse in 2007–8. Steve Eisman, who was played by Steve Carell, was the mastermind behind the trade. His fund made about $1 billion from the housing collapse. In a recent interview, Eisman was asked, “What are the biggest opportunities you see today?” He said, “The disruptor vs. disruptee theme. [It] will last for a long time and there’s lots of ways to play that...” Druck and Eisman are what I call “bloodhound investors...” As you may know, many investors got rich by specializing in one strategy. Warren Buffett buys undervalued businesses and holds them forever. Carl Icahn is an “activist” investor. He buys big chunks of companies and influences CEOs to make changes. Neither Druck nor Eisman specialize. Instead, they seek out moneymaking opportunities like bloodhounds. Druck has famously made big money across all assets: stocks… bonds… currencies. Eisman made his fortune during the worst market crash since the Great Depression. You could say they’re agnostic in what they buy. They’ll go wherever the biggest profits are available. In a recent interview, Druckenmiller said, “We’re in the most economically disruptive period since the 1880s.” Clearly, these guys know the big money today is in disruptor stocks. I like to see two of the world’s smartest money managers on our side, buying disruptors. That’s it for today. Enjoy your weekend. On Monday, I’ll be back to tell you the one key trait common to all moneymaking disruptor stocks. Stephen McBride
Chief Analyst, RiskHedge | 