The Joe Walker Podcast (Jolly Swagman formerly)

The Joe Walker Podcast (Jolly Swagman formerly)


#69: The World According to a Maverick, Beach-Biding Stock Picker — John Hempton

July 08, 2019

John Hempton is a renowned short seller and the Founder and Chief Investment Officer at Australian-based hedge fund Bronte Capital.

Selected links

Follow John: Blog | Twitter
The Money Miners, by Trevor Sykes
‘Three Australian Asset Price Bubbles’, conference paper by John Simon
Once in Golconda, by John Brooks
The Go-Go Years, by John Brooks
Manias, Panics, and Crashes, by Robert Aliber and Charles Kindleberger
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay
This Time Is Different, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff
The Land Boomers, by Michael Cannon
Bronte Capital’s December 2017 Client Letter
Fooling Some Of The People All Of The Time, by David Einhorn
* Bronte Capital’s June 2011 Client Letter
* ‘What is Amazon?’, blog post by Zack Kanter
‘Drug Short’, the Netflix Dirty Money episode featuring John Hempton
* Bronte Capital’s March 2010 Client Letter

Topics discussed

Why Marc Cohodes is John’s model of how to pick stocks and how not to run a portfolio.
Why did John move from Sydney to Adelaide while he was at university?
How John met his mentor Ken Henry and became an expert on tax avoidance.
When and why did John first start trading stocks?
The intoxication of bull markets and the sobering powers of financial history books.
Leverage is for the young.
VoiceNet — the first fraud that John discovered.
The email that changed John’s life.
The sorry tale of Bre-X.
Portfolio management is key.
Why John would rather be Warren Buffett than the greatest of the short sellers — and some basic portfolio heuristics.
How many frauds does Bronte short on average and how many could it potentially short?
How does Bronte balance its longs and shorts?
The story of how John landed his first job in finance, at Platinum Asset Management.
How John finds short ideas through dodgy brokers’ notes.
How to get hired in finance.
Learning from books.  
What lessons and anti-lessons did John learn from Kerr Neilson?
John’s early retirement, quick comeback, and the birth of Bronte Capital.
What sort of characters does John look for when searching for frauds?
Bernie Madoff’s golf scores.
John’s tussles with Chinese frauds — and the techniques he...