The Man Who Abandoned Value

Ten years ago, Arne Alsin quit trying to be, as he puts it, “normal.”

投资公司威尔首都的创始人Alsin拥有丰富的经典阿斯伯格的症状。他对光和声音很敏感，对人们成为一名教师来说是如此担心。当他的狗吠叫时，Alsin说：“我的大脑会觉得它会爆炸。”

他试图改变。“当你在频谱上时，你往往像火山一样反应，只是向下工作。我通过逻辑和重新编程和脱敏，我可以逐渐成为“正常”。它不起作用。总失败。“

当时alsin正在试图“重新编程”自己，他还试图挽救从TheStreet.com的编辑中获得了“周转艺术家”的绰号的股票组合，他撰写了一列相同的专栏名字三年。

It wasn’t going well. Classic value plays had won Alsin notice after the tech bubble burst in 2000, thanks in large part to his column. But by 2008 his stock picks were struggling — and even when markets bounced back after the financial crisis, his value stocks weren’t turning around.

Eventually, he says, “I just totally gave up and said, ‘I’m going to do the exact opposite.’”

Alsin, now 63, threw away almost every investment principle he had once held. A forensic accountant by training who had formerly worked for Peat Marwick (just before it became part of KPMG), Alsin switched from being a classic Warren Buffett–style value investor who scoured balance sheets to being one who obsessively embraced the disruptive promises of Silicon Valley and the new economy.

他分别在亚马逊和特斯拉分别在2012年和2016年举行了大量的，早期赌注。与此同时，ALSIN短途汽车公司喜欢通用汽车和栏杆反对凭借SEARS和美国航空公司的危险公司，他也短暂。

At last, in 2020, Alsin’s insights bore exceptional fruit: The small hedge fund with the quirky name, which launched in 2017, and the long-only fund, which got off the ground in 2012, turned in what appear to be the best performances in the industry for the year, according to亚博赞助欧冠计算。

To be sure, a few famous hedge fund managers made a fortune in 2020. But in terms of percentage gains, Worm Capital outdid them all: Its long/short equity fund gained an astounding 274 percent, thanks in large part to a 700 percent surge in the price of Tesla’s stock, which accounted for 37 percent of Worm’s publicly traded equities portfolio at the end of the third quarter. The long-only fund was up 205 percent. And by year-end, Worm Capital had amassed some $374 million in capital.

Last year’s numbers signaled a huge shift from the days when Tesla short-sellers — much more powerful hedge fund managers like Kynikos Associates founder Jim Chanos and Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn — had so thoroughly captured the narrative that Alsin didn’t even attempt to woo institutional investors.

But now, with his firm standing atop a 274 percent year, the question is whether these institutional investors will finally embrace Worm Capital’s founder as a savvy investor worthy of their blessing — or dismiss his astounding 2020 as nothing more than luck.

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When亚博赞助欧冠met Alsin in January — in the first of three lengthy Zoom interviews — he was working out of what he calls an “apartment” in his house in Woodinville, Washington, an appropriately named suburb of Seattle. He shares the home with two German shepherds, a Great Dane, and two of his five sons — one of whom was isolating in another area as he recovered from Covid.

2018年，阿尔辛搬到了圣地亚哥的地区。“我住在水面上，但我无法忍受这种眩光。这是可怕的，“他说，他仔细阅读了阳光灿烂的加利福尼亚州，在那里他在教师的孩子的工作室社区中长大。

资本技术还是总部设在蠕虫the ritzy La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, but its handful of employees have scattered and now work remotely — in Boulder, Austin, Raleigh, and Portland, Oregon. The waterlogged Pacific Northwest climate suits Alsin fine. “It’s nice and gray and quiet,” he notes.

In Alsin’s apartment sparkly Christmas lights are strung around the window and along sharp corners so that he won’t bump into them when he’s pacing the floor, mapping out ideas on the whiteboards that line the room.

当Alsin正在运作时，他经常穿着连帽衫，他可以在他需要进一步闭嘴的情况下提拔他。“只需所有这种可视刺激，您就使用大约30％的大脑能力。如果你可以安静下来，你可以在你试图弄清楚的材料周围保持良好的东西，“他解释道。

To better focus, Alsin also gave up playing golf and watching football. “This is for the last ten years, basically. I mean, I optimized everything from the food, my sleep patterns, everything to try to be the best decision maker I can be,” he says.

For shaving, Alsin began using two hands (and two shavers) at a time and calculates he saves 14 hours a year as a result. “You’ve got two hands. Two cheeks. For the cost of an extra shaver, you get the job done in half the time. Good for hand-eye coordination too,” he wrote in a 2013 Seeking Alpha post, “Confessions of a Crazy Stock Picker.” (Alsin now sports a trim salt-and-pepper beard, further reducing the time needed for grooming.)

“I just threw everything out, just literally turned over the table and just, ‘I don’t want to ever see any of this again,’” he says with a sweeping motion of his arms. He ditched the stacks of Wall Street research and decided, “I’m going to do it myself — I don’t care how long it takes — from scratch.”

A voracious reader, Alsin found his new playbook in Harvard professor Clayton Christensen’s best-selling tomeThe Innovator’s Dilemma.

Christensen, says Alsin, “talked about the challenger that comes from below.” The philosophy explains why Alsin’s value stocks weren’t coming back — and perhaps never would.

“我记得写的fice Depot, another classic one where their numbers are down,” Alsin says. “You can buy them cheap, and when they rebound you make a good return. But the problem is, what if they never rebound?”

他继续，“它只是像一吨砖一样打我：哦，我的上帝，转变是最糟糕的地方。当我们用在线商店替换物理商店时，这将是可怕的。这将是一百周转。没有人会回来，因为世界的变化，能源和运输和上和上和上面将是真实的。“

当Alsin于2012年开始他的新公司时，亚马逊成为首次举行。今天，在线Juggernaut是世界上最常规和最受欢迎的对冲基金股票，但是当Alsin首先投入它时，聪明的金钱持怀疑态度。毕竟，公司并不盈利。

But Amazon was already upending the world of retail and had embarked on a new venture that caught Alsin’s imagination: cloud computing. Although he has no background in technology or science, Alsin says “I just dove into it, 100-hour weeks, I think, five weeks in a row.”

He explains: “You can figure everything out if you just spend enough time and break it down into its simplest component parts. Everything is just an on-and-off switch. Everything is just a pixel of information. Just keep digging, keep taking notes and figuring things out, and see how things work like an engineer. And that’s kind of the way I went at cloud computing.”

然而，Alsin最大的胜利可能更好地描述为来自所有那些来自打高尔夫球的末离那些昙花一现。

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清洁能量革命was already on his mind when Alsin started studying Tesla with the same type of intellectual rigor he had brought to Amazon. And he kept repeating a simple mantra: Focus on the customer.

That’s where a golf anecdote proves useful. Thirty years earlier, before Alsin had given up on sports, country clubs switched from golf carts powered by gasoline to electric ones. “We’d have a golf tournament at the club. And they’d have a hundred golf carts out there — 50 electric, 50 gas. Nobody wanted the gas carts.”

Everyone, he figured, would prefer an electric car if one were available.

Alsin购买了他的第一个特斯拉 - 一个红宝石红色模型S - 同时他在2016年8月购买了该股票的同时，当汽车在加利福尼亚州已经受欢迎。他说，在圣地亚哥的街道上驾驶他的特斯拉，“你可以看到人们看着你。凉爽因子肯定存在。“

Alsin, his family, and his firm now own ten Teslas, including both Tesla S models, four Model 3s, and a Tesla X. He has reservations for six cybertrucks — which he plans to use for research and testing as well as his family’s use. And one of his sons has reserved a Tesla Roadster, the brand’s luxury sports car.

当时，特斯拉不是战场库存，后来不是。但该公司的沉重债务负担和缺乏现金已经吸引了一些短卖家，包括惠特尼·蒂尔逊。前对冲基金经理和价值投资者在2017年关闭了他的Kase Capital基金，在2013年和2014年缩短了Tesla，并表示这是他职业生涯中最糟糕的。

一年前，蒂尔森（Tilson）在大约20年前与Alsin汇集为艾滋病的同伴投资者，收到了2019年威尔首都第四季度报告的副本 - 当Tesla赌注最终开始偿还。那一年，威尔威尔的长/短基金获得了13.04％，而且唯一的基金上涨了29.15％。

Now the CEO of Empire Financial Research, Tilson says he was impressed to see Alsin “absolutely crushing it” in the tech space.

“我知道他不仅仅是一些二维牛市的天才，”蒂尔森说。他向他的订户列表转发给他的订户列表，其中5,000人对特斯拉感兴趣，并指出它包括“Tesla的最佳看涨分析”他曾读过。

在其中，Alsin详细介绍了特斯拉的强大品牌，以及软件和电池技术的进步，将来会导致未来的结构上更高的利润。

There’s no doubt that, at least thus far, Alsin has been right about the stock, as Tesla shares surged more than 700 percent in 2020 and split fivefold. He isn’t predicting how high Tesla can go now, but says, “I have not seen any price target out there for which we are uncomfortable.”

然而，直到现在，Alsin对特斯拉的大胆看法使蠕虫资本与潜在的对冲基金投资者销售。

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A smattering金钱经理 - 最突出的是ARK投资管理的大教堂 - 已成为声乐特斯拉公牛。但在对冲基金经理中，Alsin在近年来唯一只有那个姿态。与此同时，像艾因霍恩一样着名的短卖家 - 另一个价值投资者 - 和Chanos在另一边。

Alsin winces at the mention of these names. “All my favorite stocks David Einhorn was shorting and panning in the media and criticizing all the time, and I had no voice,” he says. It started with Amazon, which Einhorn publicly dismissed in 2014, “and it went all the way through Tesla. I mean that’s my entire portfolio, and here’s this big hedge fund manager with $8 billion at the time. And I had, I don’t know, $15 million or something,” he recalls.

Getting people to listen to a small firm with a weird name like Worm Capital that was at odds with the smartest guys in the room, as well as their legion of followers, was a “waste of time,” says Zak Lash, Worm’s chief operating officer.

“当你看着我们集中的投资组合时，以及像特斯拉这样的非常分裂的名字 - 当然在2019年开始时它会被打败 - 你真的无法与某些投资者的进展，”他解释道。“他们会读取CNBC标题，说另一个将特斯拉加速到墙上。这是否定的完美风暴。“

Potential investors — or, more often, consultants who are the gatekeepers to institutional allocators — would come back with “‘Jim Chanos is saying this. What do you think about that?’ And so, yeah, I think probably everyone knows who Jim Chanos is. A lot of people respect what he has to say,” adds Lash.

然后有社交媒体评论。2018年，Alsin写了一块题为“Tesla 1,000美元的股票？”他谈到了第3型是“新的iPhone”，并且所述电动卡车是“Ace Up Tesla的袖子”，其可持续电池是“为地球创造可再生能源”。这块产生了数百个评论，大多数是负面的。一个评论员称为它“有史以来最愚蠢的文章之一”。

The drumbeat of criticism grew stronger when in 2019 Tesla shares fell to $150 (before the 5-for-1 split) and the shorts appeared to be winning their pitched battle with Tesla’s controversial founder, Elon Musk. Alsin, however, wasn’t tempted to give up.

“I wasn’t lowering my numbers because Tesla was going down,” he says. “I kept coming up with higher numbers. Our value is going higher, and by a lot, month after month. And so my targets kept going like this, and the price kept going down.” He points to the ceiling and then the floor.

Today, Tesla bears insist that the stock — now trading at what would be a presplit price of more than $3,900 — is simply overvalued. But when presented with some of the short-seller arguments, Alsin becomes agitated.

“他们被绊倒了，因为他们正在寻找后视镜，”他说。“他们永远不会发现在后视镜中看着特斯拉。”

如果在特斯拉现在的崇高价格上有休息怎么办？

“世事皆可能。我的意思是，任何时候都会发生回调，“Alsin承认。但他仍然是一个真正的信徒。“我可以看到几年，无需缺乏需求，而且成本将继续下降。一辆电池车基本上是一种更简单的结构，一旦您获得流程，更容易制造，并更便宜地生产，保持更便宜，保留其比汽油车更好的价值。“

The coming decade, he asserts, is when the transition is going to happen. “The 2020s will be a historically unique period in which industrial wealth is created and destroyed at an accelerating rate,” he wrote in his year-end 2020 letter to investors.

Mark Campanale, a former fund manager and investment analyst, is the founder and executive chairman of the CarbonTracker Initiative, a London think tank that analyzes the impact of the energy transformation on capital markets. He says markets typically misread the rate of technological change, pointing to a famous McKinsey study of the mobile phone market that miscalculated its potential by a magnitude of a thousand.

“这是迅速发生,” he says, referring to changes in the energy and other markets owing to new technologies. And though the election of President Joe Biden, with his commitment to rejoin the Paris Agreement and battle climate change, has put auto companies like GM on notice, Alsin and Campanale say these shifts will be driven not by politics, but by economics.

Alsin isn’t investing in every company that has jumped on the clean-energy bandwagon, however. For example, he passed on electric-truck maker Nikola, which was briefly one of the hottest new SPACs of 2020.

Even before short-seller Hindenburg Research accused Nikola of being a fraud, Alsin was skeptical of the vehicle maker’s claims. “We began digging into the company, its founder, and the supposed technological breakthroughs,” Alsin wrote to investors in October. “What we found was bizarre: Despite a charismatic CEO who claimed major advancements in cell chemistry that would improve vehicle range and efficiency, we couldn’t independently verify the company’s claims.”

But Worm Capital didn’t short Nikola, as Alsin tends to avoid shorting momentum stocks. Nikola’s thin float, high short interest, and costly borrowing rates were also deterrents.

Last year, Worm’s shorts were names in the oil and gas industry, including ExxonMobil, along with airlines, auto companies, and some brick-and-mortar retailers — all companies that were hurt by the pandemic.

By fall, Alsin says, the fund began closing out some short positions when borrow rates and short interest jumped — allowing it to avoid the carnage experienced in January during the short squeeze of video game retailer GameStop and other heavily shorted names.

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然而制度亚博赞助欧冠投资者remain elusive. Worm Capital employees blame this at least in part on innate institutional conservativism, as well as on the fact that despite the firm’s massive gains, Alsin doesn’t tick many classic institutional investors’ boxes.

一方面，他没有在凸起的金融公司开始开始;相反，他获得了注册会计师，并为Peat Marwick工作。

These credentials are one reason Alsin decided to start writing — first at TheStreet.com, then at theFinancial Times, and more recently atForbes.

“我有愿望，我有梦想，但我到底是如何成为沃伦巴菲特？这永远不会发生，特别是当你害怕出门时。这太荒谬了，“alsin解释说，疯狂地姿态。“所以我刚刚决定，好的，我可以写文章。写作不容易，但我可以做到。这对我来说只需要更多的时间。所以这真的是我休息的地方，我可以得到一些客户，实际上开始一个小企业。“（他从2003年到2008年开始了一个小型共同基金，周转基金。）

Ideas are fine. But institutional investors tend to ask more questions about the fund’s Sharpe ratios than about Alsin’s thought process, notes Worm Capital research director Eric Markowitz. And now that the firm has had such a big 2020, some prospective investors fear they’ve missed out and are waiting for a pullback to get in.

“It’s definitely been an uphill battle,” agrees COO Lash.

Still, Markowitz says Worm Capital is getting so much more inbound interest from institutions, endowments, and big investors that it limited access to Alsin’s writings on its website. The firm also recently hired a director of investor relations.

And though Tesla put the firm on the map last year, Worm stresses that its track record was already respectable. Since Alsin launched his long-only fund in 2012, it’s turned in six double-digit years — in addition to last year’s triple-digit one — annualizing at 38 percent, compared with a 14.7 percent total return for the S&P 500. The long/short fund, which got out of the gate in 2017, annualizes at 59 percent, compared with the S&P 500’s 14.4 percent.

This year’s market dislocations haven’t hurt either. In January, when other funds were reeling and the broader market fell 1 percent, Worm’s long/short fund was in the black — up 8 percent. (Alsin says he was shorting “boring” stocks like Clorox.)

对于蠕虫之都，还有奇怪的名称来解释。

Alsin thought his former firm’s name — Alsin Capital — was “so boring nobody could remember it.” Worms, he says, may have both bad and good connotations, but they’re critical to life on the planet. “Worms do their work first, in the soil; the worms have to carve out the tunnels, and the architecture inside the soil, and the organic material gets spread around and then you have growth.”

而其他着名的资金选择在希腊神（阿波罗）或哲学家（Aurelius）之后为他们的公司命名他们的公司，而且没有这样的秀老势能为Alsin做。

“There’s a lot of pretty names and pretty people and pretty office towers,” he says. “I had this vision of being at the top of the charts, and I wanted something that would just shock people.”

当然，始终有可能在特斯拉的大衰退将把蠕虫送回图表 - 而且alsin回到他的白板上，争先恐后地争夺另一个大想法。

That may be why the manager warns against making too much of Worm Capital’s big year, noting in his recent investor letter that it’s “foolish” to focus on short-term performance.

“今年可能看起来像是一个家庭跑步，”他写道，“但我们的心态很简单：每一天都是蝙蝠的一个新的。没有胜利圈。“