Time Arbitrage by Investment Master Class
“Human nature desires quick results, there is a particular zest in making money quickly, and remoter gains are discounted by the average man at a very high rate” John Maynard Keynes
“The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation” Seth Klarman
"I would say our edge is the willingness to take a longer view of a business." Glenn Greenberg
Time Arbitrage
“The longer you can extend your time horizon the less competitive the game becomes, because most of the world is engaged over a very short time frame” William Browne
“We arbitrage time horizons. Our time horizon is long while for other investors it’s short. When they are panicking we must not panic” Chuck Royce
"We rely on concentrated research to identify great businesses that are trading at highly discounted valuations because investors have over-reacted to negative macro or company specific events. That's the time-arbitrage part of the strategy, taking advantage when the market reacts to short-term factors that have little impact on long-term intrinsic values" Bill Ackman
"One thing I think we would say is that we arbitrage time-horizons. Our time horizon is long while for other investors it's short. When they are panicking we must not panic" Chuck Royce
“Time-arbitrage just means exploiting the fact that most investors - institutional, mutual funds or hedge funds - tend to have very short-term horizons, have rapid turnover or are trying to exploit very short term anomalies. So the market looks extremely efficient in the short run. In an environment with massive short-term data overload and with people concerned about minute-to-minute performance, the inefficiencies are likely to be looking out beyond, say, 12 months." Bill Miller
"If everyone else is dashing around pricing assets on the bias of the next three months, then they are likely to misprice assets for the longer term. So an opportunity for time-arbitrage arises for the investor with a longer horizon" James Montier
“If you look carefully, almost all Old Money secrets can be traced to a single source: a longer-term outlook.“ Bill Bonner
“Greenlight believes the traditional investment horizon is too short because equities are long, if not indefinite duration assets. When we make an investment, we usually don’t have any idea how long we will be invested. If the downside of an opportunity is no short-term return or “dead money”, we can live with that. We are happy to hold for more than a year before succeeding. In practice, some “dead money” opportunities work out more quickly than we expect. A portfolio where some investments work quickly, some work more slowly, and the rest retain their value generates exciting results” David Einhorn
“We’d ideally like to see value created within a year’s time, if not sooner, but we are not short term opportunists. As arbitrageurs of value we are content to invest in longer-term opportunities.” Russell Glass
“Our goal has always been to seek reasonable returns over a very long period of time. I don’t know why anyone would look at a short time horizon. In my life, I invested over decades. Looking for short-term gains doesn’t aid this process.” Irving Kahn
“What we do from others is to maintain a very long time horizon. In our industrry this is a luxury, as many other investment firms have clients that don’t let them do this. As a result of having a very long time horizon, we can sit back and logically imagine a very different environment than the one we are in today. We are looking for themes that will produce epic investment results” William Strong
“It’s still true that the biggest players in the public markets – particularly mutual funds and hedge funds – are not good at taking short-term pain for long-term gain. The money’s very quick to move if performance falls off over short periods of time. We don’t worry about headline risk – once we believe in an asset, we’re buying more on any dips because we’re focused on the end game three or four years out.” Jeffrey Ubben
“Time is our friend. Today there’s so much money chasing quarterly performance or driven by program trading, index funds or ETFs. That leaves a real opportunity for fundamental investors like us who are looking out two to four years to find inflections in businesses which aren’t currently appreciated by the market.” Joe Wolf
“The longer you’re willing to hold, the less crowded the opportunities are” Richard Perry
"The more I mature as an investor, the more I appreciate the absolute immeasurable competitive advantage time horizon has on Mr. Market." Christopher Begg
"One thing you can do as a value investor is to arbitrage time and to recognize that you're going to be early, but if you get the right price, it all works out in the end" Preston Athey
"Our edge is a longer term view and an ability to tolerate losing money before we make it" Robert Robotti
"We probably also have a longer term focus than most hedge funds. I would argue in a world where so many funds are so concerned about their returns this month or this quarter, to be able to look out one year, two years or three years really gives us a significant competitive advantage" Lee Ainslie
"Common situations that result in a mismatch between share price and share value .. may simply be time arbitrage, where we think the business performance looking out 18 to 24 months will be much better than the share price implies" Robert Alpert
"In a sense, value investing is a large-scale arbitrage between security prices and underlying business value" Seth Klarman
"Our thesis often is based on the passage of time. What makes a negative story negative may just be that the next three to six months - the time space in which Wall Street analysts live - don't look so great." Robert Kleinschmidt
"We are in the arbitrage business, but not in the traditional merger arbitrage sense of the term. We engage in time arbitrage. We tend to buy early, average down, and then wait until our thesis is proven correct, and then we exit. This can happen quickly or it may take years" Steven Romick
"We'll often find opportunity because the markt doesn't look out far enough to correctly value durable competitive advantages" Chris Davis
"We have a time frame that is typically longer than most investors have" Mohnish Pabrai
"Time arbitrage - taking advantage of the opportunity for long-term profit offered when short-term investors sell due to disappointing short-term macro or business progress - has been a major source of profitability at Pershing Square since the inception of the firm" Bill Ackman
"The inability of so many investors and managers to invest with a long term horizon creates the opportunity for time arbitrage - an edge in an investing approach that requires the commitment to long-term holding periods" Joel Greenblatt
"There must be opportunities if you can construct a platform that will allow you to lean against biases in general. For us, the most important bias was definitely focusing on time preference [time arbitrage]" Alex Magaro
"We are disinterested in short-term results and thus have the luxury of focusing our research and purchases on the much less competitive universe of stocks that have less promise of near-term appreciation, but that have exciting longer-term potential. This gives us a competitive edge" Ed Wachenheim
"The forecasting horizon trap lures you into spending all your time on what's more knowable - the same immediate horizon that occupies everyone else. If you fall into the trap, competing with all the other investors concentrating on these short term events, it is impossible to outperform the market. You have to escape to a longer term horizon" Ralph Wanger
"Time Horizon Arbitrage .... If there is a free lunch on Wall Street, we feel it is the time horizon perspective" Christopher Begg
“You have to extend your time horizon if you want any chance of doing well. The competition in the space really thins out. You have an opportunity to arbitrage time over others” William Browne
