Compilation of all Leucadia shareholder letters

[ashish82]

Super awesome! Thanks very much!

[Happy]

Thank you!

[bizaro86]

Thank you very much for this! I'm up to 2006, and just starting to hear about how subprime just isn't cheap enough to be interesting, and is probably a bubble. Exciting stuff.

 

Interesting to me how much their strategies varied over time. At the beginning they benefitted significantly from reorganizing/debt exchange, which gave them a huge increase in book value right of the bat. In the 80s they participated in LBOs, owned securities, bought manufacturing businesses/insurance, and took greenmail. In the 90s they went big into distressed insurance and sold out for huge gains, and did subprime auto loans, which they stopped doing well before the crash as they felt they weren't getting fully compensated for risk. In the 00s there were some big commodity investments. It seems to me they caught the cycle in each decade. They didn't seem to focus on macro, just cheap businesses.

 

Very inspirational, I'd be very interested in seeing what take-aways others have from this great resource.

[scorpioncapital]

It's interesting as a historic document, but I don't feel that Leucadia today has any resemblance to these events. It's under new management and looks quite different.

[bizaro86]

It's interesting as a historic document, but I don't feel that Leucadia today has any resemblance to these events. It's under new management and looks quite different.

 

Certainly, I wasn't appreciating it for insight into Leucadia, rather looking for strategies and thought processes that have been effective in the past.

[Grenville]

The letters are a great compilation and an excellent read!

[scorpioncapital]

What I find striking is their evolution. The first 5-10 years you couldn't tell what was happening. It looked like a pretty cut and dry financial company. It really hit home the message that you have to really know the management in these situations and what it is they are doing. It didn't seem at all clear, only later did the letters become more "folksy" like Buffett's letters.

[bizaro86]

What I find striking is their evolution. The first 5-10 years you couldn't tell what was happening. It looked like a pretty cut and dry financial company. It really hit home the message that you have to really know the management in these situations and what it is they are doing. It didn't seem at all clear, only later did the letters become more "folksy" like Buffett's letters.

 

Yeah, I probably wouldn't have invested in them in the early 80s even if I'd been investing then. The "we're putting money into LBOs run by our old buddy the principal of the Jordan Company and not disclosing any of the terms or deals" is something I would have found pretty off-putting.