“Our bread-and-butter business is finding undervalued stocks. It's becoming increasingly difficult, but you can find them if you look hard.” – Leon Cooperman (Trades, Portfolio)
In addition to being a highly successful investor, guru Leon Cooperman (Trades, Portfolio), chairman and CEO of New York-based Omega Advisors, is an advocate of education. “I try to give back to those organizations that have affected me over my lifetime,” he has said, and there have been many of those. He is also a senior member and past president of the New York Society of Security Analysts.
Omega manages more than $6 billion in assets.
“New York is the mecca, the financial center,” Cooperman has said. “I determined many years ago that if you want to make money on Wall Street, you work there; you don't invest there. They just pay themselves too well. I would rather look elsewhere for investment opportunities.”
He began his career as an analyst at Goldman Sachs. “I then spent close to 25 glorious years with the firm,” he said, before leaving to form a private investment partnership, under Omega’s direction, in 1991.
His investment philosophy can be summed up in a single quote: “If you buy things at the right price, that's half the game.”
Along with guru Joel Greenblatt (Trades, Portfolio), Cooperman is a founder of Portfolios with Purpose, a virtual stock selection competition. Deloitte handles the contest’s financial audits.
Born in the Bronx to Polish immigrant parents in 1943, Cooperman was the first in his family to receive a college education, earning his BA from Hunter College in Manhattan. He earned his MBA from Columbia University’s Business School, and he has an extensive history of providing financial support to his alma mater. In recent years, he has given $25 million to Columbia to use in its campus expansion; he also created the Cooperman Scholarship Challenge in 2007, helping create more than 40 need-based scholarships.
And, in 2010, Cooperman and his family gave $5 million to Birthright Israel, which sends young Jews to Israel to promote Jewish heritage.
Sometimes his support for education and his desire to make money coincide. Last month, GuruFocus reported that he added a 10% stake in Aspen Group Inc. (ASPU, Financial), a Denver-based online, for-profit adult education company, to his portfolio.
He is known nearly as well for his philanthropic activities as he is for his investment acumen, but his generosity has its limits.
In November 2011, nearly a year before President Barack Obama was re-elected, Cooperman wrote, with “a great sense of disappointment,” an open letter to the president lamenting the “class warfare” against billionaires that was being waged by Obama and his “minions.”
In the letter, Cooperman acknowledged his “good fortune,” which he attributed to a “life of hard work,” but asserted that “I have been able to give away to those less blessed far more than I have spent on myself and my family over a lifetime.”
“To frame the debate as one of rich-and-entitled versus poor-and-dispossessed is to both miss the point and further inflame an already incendiary environment. It is also a naked, political pander to some of the basest human emotions – a strategy, as history teaches, that never ends well for anyone but totalitarians and anarchists.”
“Capitalism is not the source of our problems, as an economy or as a society, and capitalists are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be,” Cooperman wrote and urged Obama to “to throttle-down the partisan rhetoric and appeal to people's better instincts, not their worst.”
Although a devotee of guru Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio) (“Warren Buffett influenced me tremendously. I’m an expert in his writings and his views”), Cooperman doesn’t agree with him on everything. “A lot of companies Warren Buffett owns would not be considered value in the classical sense,” he has said. “A company can be growing at an extremely high rate but happens to be trading at a very reasonable multiple. Or that same company can be giving you your return through a fat dividend.”
Cooperman’s largest holdings are in companies that, by and large, most people would recognize. His portfolio includes 82,015,028 shares in Washington, D.C.-based Sirius XM (SIRI, Financial). He also holds 65,627,288 shares in New York-based Chimera Investment Corp (CIM, Financial). He holds 46,787,740 shares in Oklahoma City-based SandRidge Energy Inc (SD, Financial), 39,782,957 shares in Sprint Corp (S) and 16,885,215 shares in Gulf Coast Ultra Deep Royalty Trust (GULTU, Financial).
