Crispin Odey Quotes

104 Crispin Odey Quotes (Odey Asset Management, Nichola Pease)

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To be a successful long term investor you must think like an owner - know when to take risk and when to preserve capital.
Crispin Odey

[In August 1994.] You've got to look at assumptions behind markets long before you look at markets.
Crispin Odey

[In February 2002.] What we do is work very hard not to lose money. We don't live with hope in the portfolio; we live with fear. Our view of the market now is: Take care of the downside, and let the upside take care of itself.
Crispin Odey

[In June 2006.] There will be no such thing as 50 times leverage on a securitised loan portfolio in two years' time.
Crispin Odey

[In October 2010.] Too many so-called professional investors embrace mediocrity by seeking consensus views that starve private clients of performance while lining the managers' pockets with high and often hidden charges.
Crispin Odey

[In April 2011.] You need three bear markets to know what to do. The first nearly wipes you out, the second you learn how to survive and the third you take by the scruff of the neck and enjoy it.
Crispin Odey

[In April 2012 on what it takes to be a great investor. A] History degree is far more useful than a CFA [Chartered Financial Analyst].
Crispin Odey

I launched Odey Asset Management in 1991 with this 'owners' approach and have worked hard to build an investment team and a client base who share these beliefs. Today we manage c.$12.2bn for many of the world's leading investors and have an exceptional performance record across our conventional and hedge fund portfolios.
Crispin Odey

[In August 1994 on breaking away from Barings to found his own business at time when some felt that the private client side was playing second fiddle to the institutional business.] Anyone with creativity had to operate outside the system. Clients felt they weren't really being looked after.
Crispin Odey

[In August 1994.] The lucky thing for me is there was a real need for eyes and ears in Europe.
Crispin Odey



[In 1995 on having a short position in British Airways.] You're paying three times book value when you should be paying 1.5 times. A good deal of its profit has come from cost-cutting, and we think there are no more costs to cut. Oil prices are rising, as you know. And slots at their home port, Heathrow, controlled by British Airports Authority (BAA), must now earn cost plus 8%. BAA will have to raise its charges to remain profitable and to keep pace with inflation.
Crispin Odey

[In July 1995.] My guess is that we have about nine more months of fun ahead of us, and then it will turn nasty. Consumers will start to borrow just to blow money. Leveraging will get out of hand. Investors are going to get it wrong again.
Crispin Odey

[In 2002.] We’d love the retail money. But the hassle is too much.
Crispin Odey

[In February 2002.] I seemed to have the knack of finding companies that would do well despite the recession.
Crispin Odey

[In February 2002 despite knowing next to nothing about Hedge Funds.] People like
George Soros and Gilbert de Botton [the founder of Global Asset Management] were very bearish at the time. They were keen to back European managers, but they didn't want money run on a long-only basis. Well, like an idiot, I said, 'If you want me to run it as a hedge fund, I will.'
Crispin Odey

[In February 2002.] I'm building this business because I want it to be bigger than any individual. I like being surrounded by intelligent people.
Crispin Odey

[In February 2002.] Contrary to popular belief, being a hedge fund manager is not about being a master of the universe. We believe the market is the master. [On the market.] A capricious king. If the king wants prawn cocktails, there is no point in offering chocolate gateau.
Crispin Odey

[In February 2002.] Fund-of-funds managers like to pigeonhole managers, and I suppose I refuse to be pigeonholed, not least because my money and that of my friends is at stake in the fund.
Crispin Odey

[In March 2003.] These markets are very hard to read. But bonds are giving a clear buy signal, and you have to grasp what little certainty you can.
Crispin Odey

[In June 2006.] The ending of Bretton Woods in 1971 coincided with a massive monetary expansion, which brought on a world boom resulting in the oil price hike. The US was engaged in an expensive war in Vietnam. This time it is Iraq and the Japanese monetisation.



[In June 2006.] The new question is how do you protect your portfolio against rising interest rates? We have protected our investments against falling rates over the past six years, but rising interest rates are much harder to deal with.
Crispin Odey

[In June 2006.] Bond markets are too sanguine about inflation. Globally, 10-year interest rates should be at 150 basis points.
Crispin Odey

[In July 2006.] We are definitely into a bear market - a continuation of one that began in 2001.
Crispin Odey

[In August 2008.] People want to find a scapegoat. We were 0.28% short on Bradford & Bingley stock. That was a €1m position. It is not our fault that Bradford and Bingley was in trouble.
Crispin Odey

[In March 2009 on becoming bearish on credit in September 2005 but losing about 25% a year shorting the equity of subprime lenders up to March 2007 but since then making 470% through his short equity book.] It's difficult to know the difference between being early and being wrong.
Crispin Odey

[In March 2009.] High yield corporate debt looks attractive when it yields 15%, but in a way that means you have to be even more picky. If there's deflation you're going to get some pretty nasty defaults and that 15% carry stops looking so interesting. Or if there's inflation, that 15% is not looking so good either. Inflation and deflation are closer brothers than you might think. They damage the value of things.
Crispin Odey

[In March 2009.] Banking's been a pretty good system since the 1720s. It only got bad when people forgot about redemption yields , and that was only from 2004/5 onwards when they decided to lend without any concept of the person having to repay their loan.
Crispin Odey

[In March 2009.] We need to get inflation through the system…
Crispin Odey

[In April 2009.] Opinion is divided over whether this is a bear market rally or the beginning of a new bull market. I think it has the chance to be a new bull market.
Crispin Odey

[In April 2009 on long positions in banks like Barclays PLC.] Since on my numbers these banks are trading on between two and three times future earnings, two years out, I am not afraid of the volatility in the share price.
Crispin Odey



[In May 2009.] This is the start of a long bull market.
Crispin Odey

[In June 2009.] You cannot say lending to a company is a good thing, but lending to a hedge fund is a bad thing.
Crispin Odey

[In June 2009.] Visceral legislation is a dangerous thing to do.
Crispin Odey

[In June 2009.] Anyone who has got an understanding of history which extends beyond three days does understand that actually at some point, like Northern Rock, the government is actually going to be tested. It means you need to attract foreigners to buy 8 per cent of your bonds every year and you are offering them a tepid drink.
Crispin Odey

[In June 2009.] Foreigners have been busy selling gilts and the Bank of England busy buying them. The answer is that if you carry on, that is called Zimbabwean and that is monetisation. Probably we are going to have a visit to the IMF.
Crispin Odey

[In June 2009.] We managed to lose 80 per cent shorting shares between 1995-2000.
Crispin Odey

[In September 2009.] In a world of debt and deflation, inflation is our friend.
Crispin Odey

[In September 2009.] A bubble involves a rapid and unfounded rise in prices. Buying assets in such circumstances requires investors to rely on the ‘greater fool’ argument, to believe, mistakenly, that they will make money on the up and get out before the burst. Irrational exuberance is not evident today. It is rational to have revalued companies upwards by 50 per cent from those frozen post-Lehman days as the world recognised that they were not going out of business, and it is rational to expect further uprating of equity valuations. We are living a rational bubble.
Crispin Odey

[In September 2009.] We are not in a sustainable recovery. Too much debt brought about the crash, not just bankers and their pay packets. And debt levels have not fallen. Much of the debt has merely been transferred to or has been underwritten by governments. We are no more secure than before. A world economy in which rational consumers take to paying down their debts, as they are doing, will not allow a return to the inflated demand we knew. There is more money around, but it is not being spent.
Crispin Odey

[In September 2009.] The rational investor drives up real assets; the rational consumer pays down debt.
Crispin Odey



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