Does Autozone’s (AZO) earnings report today is sending shares up 15% today (up 9% for the past year). Does Sears Holdings (SHLD) Chairman’s Eddie Lampert’s near 40% stake in the company now mean he is a genius again? I can’t help but notice CNBC has not mentioned ONE TIME TODAY his stake in the company. Mistake? I think not.
Does anyone else find it odd that post after post has hit the blogsphere and the mainstream media bashing Lampert’s investments almost hourly for the past three weeks, today’s news has been met with a deafening silence?
Where are all the pundits today? Are we done piling on? If a bad 9 months means Lampert has offically “lost it” then a 16% gain in one day by the same infantile logic must mean he is an uber-investor once again, no?
This is the problem with short term thinking. I makes you stupid. Nobody is “what they did today”, there are what they have done up until this point. Investors like Bill Miller, Berkshire Hathaway’s (BRK.A) Warren Buffett and Lampert, who have produce decades of market beating return just do not lose it. Investing is not like baseball where a power pitcher turns a certain age and the skills just go. If anything, age and the knowledge that come with it help investors.
CNBC is really disappointing me today. It is one thing to bash an investor and even another to use “questionable” comparisons to make your point, but it is ethically vapid to then not be “fair and balanced” (wrong network?) when events turn.
It just comes down to a credibility issue, they are losing it.
One reply on “Autozone Easily Beats Estimates: Is Lampert a Genius Again?”
big difference between investing in a Autozone, a $6B company operating in a highly fragmented market, and running a $53B retailer in a consolidated, but shrinking market. That’s the main issue the press is having, here. Eddie invested in AZO almost 8 years ago, but never took an operational role – simply a board seat analyzing numbers. Last year, he gave up his board seat because of time commitments running SHLD. It’s one thing to analyze spreadsheet and recommend change; it’s another to think you can operate a business on a day-to-day basis. Retail is a hard, tough business and Eddie is finding that out (btw so is Julian Day, his old partner in crime). I wonder what would happen if Eddie kept his investment position in SHLD, but stepped away from the day-to-day business and instead injected professional management into the equation. My guess is that you would get similar performance to AZO…