Few of us know who Morris Mark is. For the starters, here is the introduction to him in www.hedgefundnews.com, which ran an article on one of his interviews in 1999
Greg Speicher provided an interesting introduction to Morris Mark and the interview in his website www.gregspeicher.com:
Here is one teasing Q&A from the interview:
Read the complete interview.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Morris Mark spent a few years as a lawyer before entering the securities business in 1968 as a securities analyst with First Manhattan Company. He joined Goldman Sachs' Research Department in 1974, where for almost ten years he was a senior executive specializing in real estate and financial services. Beginning in 1980, he was also with the firm's Risk Arbitrage Department. Morris Mark was voted on more than ten occasions onto the Annual Institutional Investors All Star Team in the Real Estate Investment Trust and Building categories. He is a co-founder and past President of the Real Estate Analysts Group and the Real Estate Investment Trust Analyst Association. In 1985, he started Mark Partners and Mark Asset Management which focus on seeking long term gains through a fundamental research based approach to stock investments in a wide range of businesses. The firm runs a domestic partnership, an offshore fund started in 1989 and separate accounts with total capital under management in excess of $2 billion. Since 1985, the partnership has achieved a net annual compound rate of return of 24%. Morris Mark spoke with HFN Publisher, Antoine Bernheim, in mid-July 1999.
Greg Speicher provided an interesting introduction to Morris Mark and the interview in his website www.gregspeicher.com:
1999 interview with investor Morris Mark. Mark cut his teeth with First Manhattan, an investment advisory firm founded by Sandy Gottesman. (Per wikipedia, Gottesman, “began a friendship with Warren Buffett in 1962. He was an early investor in Berkshire Hathaway and today owns 19,000 shares worth $2 billion. He joined the Berkshire Hathaway board of directors in 2003.”) Morris Mark is also the mentor to value investor Ricky Sandler who runs the successful value oriented hedge fund Eminence Capital. I posted the interview because it is a good example of a sound investment process and how a great investor thinks
Here is one teasing Q&A from the interview:
Q. Could you describe the criteria that may cause you to buy a stock or sell it short?
A. We owned Coca-Cola because we thought it was a great business, run by terrific management and at the time we purchased it we thought the valuation was reasonable. We felt it was particularly well structured to benefit from the emergence of a more privatized and a more global economy. We sold it three years ago because the valuation it was trading at in relation to our anticipated rate of earnings growth on a near to long term basis seemed to be well discounted versus our rate of return objectives. Generally, we would sell a position when something bothers us, otherwise the sale is likely related to valuation. We do not do a lot of shorting. First, we prefer to invest our time and attention to find things that are fundamentally attractive because the appreciation potential tends to be significantly greater than finding things that are going to fall apart. Secondly, we like to keep our investment structure pretty simple. Whether we are long or short a particular investment, we regard it as an investment. So if we have enough investments that make sense from an appreciation point of view, that may take as much of the assets as I want to allocate to investments.
Read the complete interview.
