Tremendous David Einhorn Speech Monday At The Value Investing Congress

I really respect David Einhorn because he has evolved from a pure value investor into recognizing the importance of macro.  Anybody who doesn’t recognize that at this point is going to pretty useless going forward.  Buy great companies with high free cash flow and big moats!  Hoo-ray!  It’s a new world, y’all and Einhorn gets it.  His speech Monday at The Value Investing Congress is a masterpiece:

The lesson that I have learned is that it isn’t reasonable to be agnostic about the big picture.  For years I had believed that I didn’t need to take a view on the market or the economy because I considered myself to be a “bottom up” investor.

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Now, the question for us as investors is how to manage some of these possible risks.  Four years ago I spoke at this conference and said that I favored my Grandma Cookie’s investment style of investing in stocks like Nike, IBM, McDonald’s and Walgreens over my Grandpa Ben’s style of buying gold bullion and gold stocks.  He fear the economic ruin of our country through a paper money and deficit driven hyper inflation.  I explained how Grandma Cookie had been right for the last thirty years and would probably be right for the next thirty as well.  I subscribed to Warren Buffett’s old criticism that gold just sits there with no yield and viewed gold’s long term value as difficult to assess.

However, the recent crisis has changed my view.  The question can be flipped: how does one know what the dollar is worth given that dollars can be created out of thin air or dropped from helicopters?  Just because something hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it won’t.  Yes, we should continue to buy stocks in great companies, but there is room for Grandpa Ben’s view as well.