Value Investor John Rogers on the 3 Year Anniversary of March 9th Low

it has been three years since the march 9th bottom and a rally it has been, the s&p 500 is up more than 100%, a doubling if you will of the s&p 500. 100%, is that a doubling? will this rally hold, john rogers is the chairman and ceo of aerial investments and he’s the chair of the president’s advisory council on financial capability. it’s a pleasure to speak to you. good to be back. are we on a trend, it’s been three years? i think so. all the companies we’re talking to these days seem very optimistic about the economic recovery and we’re very, very excited. at the same time if there was one caveat that you would throw out, what would that be? i think like everybody you hope that there’s no kind of middle east confrontation whether it ends up having a military action that forces oil prices substantially higher. that would be a worry. you are on the boards of many different kinds of companies, so you have a unique insight in to how these companies would be impacted by higher oil prices. at what price is the level that’s being thrown around in the corporate worlds, when companies start getting concerned? i think the $5 a barrel, you know — a gallon, $5 a gallon. yes, $5 a gallon, thank you. that starts to get worrisome and i do think that it is a sort of psychological barrier. i think as the year goes on, we’ll do better than people anticipate. john, it’s brian sullivan, i hear you about $5 gasoline and that could impact about people’s money to go to sporting events, didn’t you just add a big share of madison square garden? yes, we’ve been buying it aggressively. we think it’s a terrific franchise. there’s only one madison square garden, they have the huge amount of real estate in manhattan. worth a lot of money. and all the media, you know, things that they own. it’s a terrific, terrific company. so, is it a real estate play, then, or is it a jeremy lin play? it’s partly a real estate play. but it also is #zt jeremy play. you know, john, you’re a basketball aficionado, you know lin will cool off. i think you’re right. it’s already starting to happen. he’s kind of small. he’s not as big and strong as a lot of the guys in the nba today. it will be tougher for him, but i still eve that the franchise is intact and the knicks have great teams and great players. so, i’m looking forward to the madison square garden doing very, very well. among your other portfolio changes recently, you sold out of your position in tiffany’s and you say it was because of valuation. what do you see as a headwind for tiffany as it goes higher and did you replace it with another sort of luxury-end stock that may be more fairly valued? well, we found that tiffany’s was very, very expensive. there’s so much good news there. they’ve been doing so well all around the world, and they just got all the good news baked into the price of the stock. what we’ve been trying to do is work on those areas where there’s still value, so companies like gannett in media sectors and only six, seven times earnings. they just raised their dividends. announced another big stock buyback, we think it’s a wonderful franchise and also a company like lozar in the financial services area. financial stocks got hit over the last year, they have the great investment banking franchise and emerging market franchise ask a great restructuring business, those are some of the bigger businesses and some of the favorites that helped us recently. wow, lozar is not a name we talk about much. thanks for bringing it to us. we appreciate it. we’ll look at madison square garden. we’ve heard of it here, thank you, john rogers.