Jamie Dimon spoke and we kind of listened. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Tyler Crowe and today I'm joined by long time full contributors, Lou Whiteman and Jason Hall who's pulling in for spot duty because you know what, it's that time of the season with spring breaks and family stuff that Matt Frankel needed a little bit of time off. So we brought in Jason off the bench for a little discussion here today. What we are going to get into is we have some a big deal kind of in the in the wings with Bill Ackman looking to acquire Universal Music Group and we're also going to dip into the mail bag. But before we get started, we are going to look at Jamie Dimon's most recent investing letter. Before we do, the list of people who can write a letter and move markets is pretty small, perhaps even smaller today now that Warren Buffett is no longer writing the Berkshire letter. On that short list is Jamie Dimon who recently penned the annual shareholder letter for JPMorgan Chase's annual report. Now before we really dive into what it said or anything like that, I do want to kind of couch it a little bit, maybe a little bit disclosure. Jason, are you a shareholder of JPMorgan? I am not. Now my family does through EZFs, but not directly to. And what about you, Lou? Yeah, me neither. We have three people who don't have direct investments in JPMorgan, but clearly have a lot of things to get into with this. And there was a lot in this letter. It is considerably longer than what you would say a Warren Buffett letter was. He threw some shade at emerging FinTech companies while simultaneously acknowledging JPMorgan has the catching up to do in that area. He opined on bank regulations and how to fix them as the CEO of the largest bank in the US that would benefit from less regulation. And there was quite a few words dedicated to the risk and the horizon with quite a bit of time on private credit. And we'll get into all that. Now we all read the letter. It was kind of our homework assignment before we do this. So for each of you, I want to ask two things and kind of a pull out from these letters. What made you say, heck yeah, and I'm really behind what he was saying? And we're the other one, like, are you sure about that, Jamie? So I want to start with what you guys liked in the letter and any investing takeaways from it. Lou, let's start with you. So first things first, Jamie really, really likes this role and he likes looking contrarian. So I think you have to filter it with that. If this guy is falling, he's going to talk about the sunshine. When things are sunny, he's going to talk about the clouds. That's just the way he does this. That said, Jamie is not a big fan of private credit and I sort of found interesting or liked what he had to say or I thought it was useful. But part of it with private credit is it is the competition. But also he has some points. He writes, quote, it has always been true that not everyone providing credit is necessarily good at it. I think that that simple advice should be kept in mind for anyone pursuing some of these stocks that are private credit companies. Blue Owl has been taking on the chain. We'll see about them. But at least something to keep in the back of the mind just because they're doing it doesn't mean they have all the answers either. Relatedly, he has a warning for all of us invested in private equity firms. The average hold time is now seven years. That's nearly double what it used to be. Exits have become a real issue and this isn't a bull market. What Jamie's warning was is that if we do end up in a recession or an extended recession, it could get really ugly in PE land. If they can't sell these things now, how are they going to do them with the bull market turns? I think that that is worth, again, part of the due diligence as you consider these companies. It's worth keeping in mind. I don't think he was just talking about the folks in private credit not necessarily being good at lending. There are plenty of banks that have been proven to not be good at lending and that actually ties a little bit into something that Diamond wrote. It was about competition. He wrote, nonetheless, despite our best efforts, the walls that protect this company are not particularly high. This is an industry with relentless competition. At times, onerous regulation and Diamond has built something pretty incredible. I would think you could argue that because of regulation in some instances, the bank has succeeded. It's really great to be the FDIC's choice to take over failed institutions that actually have really great assets and customers. I will push back a little bit, Lou, on the hat of being optimistic when times are bad and switching to the pessimist when times are good. I think he does love being viewed as that contrarian. I also think that that's how he's wired. When you're running the biggest bank in the world, you not only have all of these assets, but you have massive liabilities because that's the capital that you've lent out. You have to be a little bit paranoid all of the time about the economy. When you combine that with his ruthless ambition, you get the right combined mindset that's made J.P. Morgan such an incredibly dominant business over the past couple of decades. I feel like what I'm saying is almost like a backhanded compliment because there was a lot of words in the particular letter that he gave related to some of the new investing like themes or lending practices that the company wants to have. They started up this defense-focused fun. I believe that Ted Weschler is going to be part of the team running that. That was announced a little while ago. There was also this invest in Main Street thing. I'll give Diamond a lot of credit. It was very much like taking the pulse of America almost and being in the zeitgeist of what people are wanting to talk about, whether it be conflicts overseas, war in Iran, or a little war between Ukraine and Russia. Well, at the same time, talking about affordability and entrepreneurship in the United States. It was also just like, yeah, but this is just lending. You're kind of being a bank and telling us that you're just going to lend to people, which is kind of very interesting. A good way of really putting up the marketing for it. Tyler, 95% of FinTech is just packaging. That is true. That could be said for banks as well. In that regard, as I throw a little bit of shade at this already, even though I was trying to give them a compliment, as you looked at the letter, because it was pretty extensive, what was some of the things where you're like, are you really sure about that? We always have some sort of line where we're like, I don't know if I believe that. Yeah, this segment kind of reminds me of the Saturday Night Live skit they did about Amazon Alexa giving answers and everybody's response was, I don't know about that. The thing that stood out to me was when a diamond-wrote that JP Morgan Chase isn't a conglomerate. In the world of banking, it's absolutely a conglomerate. It does basically everything. But where it's different than a lot of conglomerates is it actually does almost everything pretty well. It's also built huge franchises in some of the most profitable parts of banking, things like credit cards, for instance. It's done it. Again, the timing has been incredibly fortunate, extremely low defaults because there's been really steady economic growth over most of that period, the tailwinds of low taxes, low interest rates. I mentioned it before being Uncle Sam's favorite banker. At some point, I'm afraid that those tailwinds could change and the result could be some of JP Morgan Chase's strengths that have been built in that conglomerate. Yes, Jamie Diamond, I'm calling your bank a conglomerate. Some of the strengths might end up being weaknesses when the tides turn. I'm going to get into the weeds here. Diamond was one of the leaders in killing what was called Basel 3, which was this global framework that was thought up by regulators after 2008 to try to avoid repeating what happened in 2008. They won. They killed it. He spiked the football in this letter. I get why he hated it. Fewer capital reserves means more money to lend, more money to make money on. Arguably, Jason, like you said, some banks are better than others. Arguably, this might be too onerous for JP Morgan if it's well run, but not everybody is as well run, as you say. We promised we learned our lessons and we'll be good this time, and so you don't have to punish us. Argument tends not to age well, so Jamie, enjoy your moment now. We'll see, and I hope you're right. These regulations aren't necessarily built for a JP Morgan because the way that it's constructed, it's probably one of the more fiscally conservative, financially solvent. As you said, Diamond always tends to be slightly contrarian when everyone's risk on. He's like, I don't know about that. Spiking the football, as you said, with Basel almost feels like a, yeah, it's good for you, but is it good for banking? Because I don't necessarily know if those rules were put up specifically for JP Morgan, even though it does affect them. It's more for what we could call the bad actors in the system. Spot on. You kind of want to regulate for the weakest link, not for the strongest link. Coming up after the break, we're going to get into Bill Ackman's recent attempt to buy Universal Music Group. Hey, Fidelity. What's it cost to invest with the Fidelity app? Start with as little as $1 with no account fees or trade commissions on US stocks and ETFs. Hmm. That's music to my ears. I can only talk. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Zero account fees apply to retail brokerage accounts only. Sell or assessment fee not included. A limited number of ETFs are subject to a transaction-based service fee of $100. See full list at Fidelity.com slash commissions. Fidelity brokerage services LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Speaking of investors who are often on the front page, Bill Ackman certainly fits that description. Pershing Square is his investment vehicle, the hedge fund. He's been trying to basically buy Universal Music Group numerous times over, but this specific time it was a deal announced today with a new deal that would basically value Universal Music Group at about $60 billion. Now, this isn't the first time that Ackman tried to do it. There was a SPAC, I believe back in 2021, that he was using to try to acquire a portion of Universal Music Group that would have made them like a controlling stakeholder. Much like that previous one, this new deal is also a bit on the convoluted side. Knowing the three of us, there's probably a temptation to do like a Statler and Waldorf impersonation from the Muppets and just kind of heckle him from the background. To avoid that fate, I want to get started here. What does Ackman specifically see in Universal Music Group that it's been like his white whale for the past several years? This is a cash cow business. To a large degree, it owns irreplaceable assets between artists that it has signed and music rights that it just down outright owns. It's the world's largest label. It's a business that shouldn't really require a ton of operating expenses, but whose assets should just generate steady royalties from streamers and radio stations. He's always been interested in those cash cow businesses. Like I said, the deal is kind of convoluted. In part, not just because Bill Ackman's pension for using convoluted structures to make acquisitions, but also the ownership structure of Universal Music Group is a little convoluted in its own way because it has a whole bunch of, I wouldn't call them majority owners, but owners with enough of a stake that if they say no, the deal wouldn't go through. Because of that, it makes it a little bit harder to convince them to get rid of it, to sell their stake. This isn't the first time he's tried to do deals and done it in some convoluted way. Frankly, we've all had questions about the viability of doing it or evaluation or whatever. Now, I don't want to speak to either of you, but Ackman's track record isn't necessarily spotless, don't you agree? Yeah. What exactly are we trying to accomplish here, Bill? What's the big picture? It feels like he's just throwing his spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. That's the strategy right now. He wants to do the Universal Deal under his Pershing Square holding company. He's also been trying to take Pershing Square and various entities public in various forms for the last few years with little success, but he's trying that again now. He's not doing this under Howard Hughes Holdings, a separate public company that he also controls and which he claims he's going to turn into the New Berkshire Hathaway. The New Berkshire Hathaway could really use that cash cow, Jason mentioned, to make it happen. So, Bill, choose a child here. I'm not going to slam the plan. I think it makes sense to try and go after these assets, but I would at least appreciate if he picked a vehicle and went with it. If you're a Howard Hughes shareholder, you're saying, what about us? You're buying some insurance thing and hoping for the best? Multitasking never works well for almost all of us. It's probably going to work out well for Ackman if any one of these succeed, but as investors, I really like the one I'm involved with to succeed or for them all to succeed. I think it's important to remember too that even the best investors screw up at times. I think something that happened about 12 or 13 years ago with Ackman that stands out to me was when he shorted Herbalife. I don't know if you remember that. That was one of the first times we saw an investor really do a big public presentation. He streamed it. It was like two or three hours long. This was 2012 when that wasn't normal. It was this long presentation basically saying that Herbalife was a pyramid scheme. Well, his short blew up in his face, lost like a billion dollars. It gets even more juicy irony here. A couple of years later, invested like $3 billion in valiant pharmaceuticals and lost like 90% of that because you guessed it, management was doing fraud. I feel like buried deep somewhere in YouTube. There's the video of Bill Ackman was actually presenting the Herbalife short. I think it was on CNBC and Carl Icon called in as like a guest and they started going back and forth about it because- That's right. I forgot about that. He was like a major shareholder at the time. It was probably the most eventful thing that happened in CNBC in like five years. I want to broaden out the lens a little bit here because we're talking about famous investors following what they do, making opinions on it. I think a lot of investors use famous individuals, notable individuals. There's been an entire like cottage industry of following Warren Buffett style investing or even mirroring the moves that he does. For a decent enough proportion of people, I'm sure that they look at Bill Ackman in the same way. I want to broaden out the idea of using individuals and trying to mirror their moves. As an investing strategy, how do you as an investor incorporate famous investors' stock picking decisions into your actual own investing process? You got to play your own game. You can almost find someone who is always, find someone who's bullish, someone who's bearish on almost anything you're looking at. You can find the confirmation bias if you want it. It probably makes sense to read all of this. They are smart people with opinions, but acting because someone who is famous-acted, assuming that assumes you have the same portfolio as them, the same goals as them, the same timeline as them, and let's face it, you don't. So to do what they do doesn't make sense. There's also just such a big information difference asymmetry that I think is really important with this kind of thing because the Ackmans of the world are pretty rare in the investing community where they're talking about their deals in this near kind of real-time thing that they're doing. The realities we generally like if we're relying on 13F filings, I mean it can be weeks to months before it becomes public. So you're acting so far after the fact. It's possible that the other party that you're following is already maybe moved on when you're buying because of the nature of that asymmetry of information and when they're acting. So for those reasons and everything that Lou said, I generally don't really pay much attention to what the big names are doing. If there's one thing that's important to remember is that we spend some time beating up Ackman, but one of the features of stock investing, and it feels like a bug sometimes, but it's a feature, is it's less about precision and more about asymmetric returns. It's the massive winners that cover up for those bad investments plus a lot more. And if we're just chasing somebody else's portfolio, we will sell out of our winners too quickly often, and it hinders our ability to reach our financial goals in the long term. If I were to give my interpretation of it just blindly following whatever they do is never a good idea. But there are, at times, even the most, the Ackmans of the world, Cathie Woods of the world, the Warren Buffets, they're always ideas. And there is a reason that they probably got into the stocks that they got into for one reason or another. And it can be a decent way to do some ideation and at least give you something to like, hey, maybe this is a string I should follow. We've thrown a lot of shaded Ackman in this particular one, but his investment in Uber has been probably one of his better performing stocks in his portfolio and is a great example of kind of taking a contrarian opinion at a time when Uber didn't look great. So there's always examples of like that. And so using famous investors as a way to source ideas is probably the most valuable thing investors can do at any given time. Coming up after the break, we're going to dip into the mailbag. Introducing Fidelity Trader Plus, the next generation of advanced trading from Fidelity. Customize your tools and charts and access them seamlessly across desktop, web and mobile. For faster trades, anywhere you go, try the all new Fidelity Trader Plus. Learn more about our most powerful trading platform yet at Fidelity.com slash Trader Plus. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Quick reminder before we answer our question from one of our listeners here, if you have a question for the mailbag, you can, if you want to ask for Lou, Jason, Matt, John, anybody else that's on the podcast at any given time, you can contact us at podcasts at fool.com. We'd love to answer your questions on air. And just the only question request that we make is if you do ask a question, keep it foolish. That email again is podcasts at fool.com, podcasts at fool.com. And so for this listener question, it came in from Marty Meyer. And here was the question that he had. I love dividends and I like ETFs. And I think that could be said for most of us on this call and probably listening to, there is a relatively new ETF and it's from JP Morgan. It's called JEPQ, which is a covered call strategy on the NASDAQ to generate monthly income for investors. Now, just to broaden out, JP Morgan's covered call strategy is not the only one available on the market. There are lots of other ETFs that are looking to make similar strategies. So we don't want to put, you know, endorse JEPQ over any one or the other, but there is this kind of group of ETFs that are doing something in a very similar way. So to kind of answer Marty's question, guys, looking at this type of investing vehicle, what are your thoughts? Because they are pretty high yield, but they do tend to have things like higher expenses and stuff like that. Yeah. That's the first thing I'd say, you know, not to comment on JEPQ specifically, other than the say, as Marty notes, as you said, you should always look at expense ratios because the only guarantee in life is you will pay those expenses, right? So that is so important to look at. Generally, I'm not a big fan of these covered call ETFs. Yes, you get some cash flow as volatility protection, but you're also capping your upside. And for the most part, I invest in equities because I am seeking those oversized returns and times are good. You don't even get full downside protection if the stock crashes, you still lose money. I would rather use cash instruments to generate cash and for my equities, not limit my upside. Note two, at the end of the day, most of these specialty products on Wall Street were created to be sold, not created because you should buy them. I'm not going to say any one of these, whether or not that's true, but I advise investors to always keep that in mind when you're looking at these especially sort of specialty products. Yeah, I'll speak a more specifically about JEPQ just more just as an illustration and certainly not to ding it specifically or to promote it specifically. The expense ratio, 0.35%. That's expensive. The inception was kind of late mid 2022. Since then, it's barely outperformed the S&P 500. It's actually trailed the NASDAQ 100. One of the things that they tout is that it gives you exposure to the NASDAQ 100. Now, that underperformance may be fine if it is the high yield that you're looking for, but that yield comes with caveats. The dividend that it pays is mostly from options premiums. So it's not a qualified dividend. What does that mean? Qualified dividends, the one that's your low, your long-term capital gains rate for most people, that's 15%. The dividend that it pays you is taxed at your marginal rate. For most of the people listening to this, it's probably 22 or 24%. So immediately, unless you own this in a retirement account, you have a tax headwind in mind. I want to emphasize what Lou said about sure, maybe some volatility protection because of the premiums from those covered calls. This is not a loss-proof strategy. Now, if the tax headwinds and the volatility risks aren't really concerns for an investor, it is kind of an interesting source of higher yield and a sort of diversified, but really far from bulletproof package. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for our guests. So don't buy or sell stocks based on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards, and it's not approved by advertisers. Advertising is your sponsored content provided for informational purposes only. See our full advertising closure. Disclosure, please check out our showbooks. Thanks for being producer Dan Boyd and the rest of the Motley Fool team. For Lou, Jason, myself, thanks for listening, and we'll chat again soon.
