Title: Bill Ackman Just Bought 6 New Stocks Show: The Joseph Carlson Show (YouTube) Guest: Joseph Carlson (solo) Date: 2026-08-13 URL: https://youtu.be/v00MJumOVRk Length: 23:38 Note: YouTube auto-transcript pasted by Stephen; (mm:ss) cues real; wording verbatim (light stutter collapse only).
00:00 Welcome back everyone. We just had breaking news that Bill Ackman is once again a Netflix shareholder. That's right. After his brief stint of owning it for about 3 months in 2022, he finally decided to buy back in. So what changed? Why is Bill Ackman now buying Netflix when he used to own the company and he at one point called it too unpredictable? It seems like he's changed his mind on Netflix as well as a number of other companies.
00:25 In fact, he didn't just buy Netflix as a new position, he bought six new holdings. That's a lot of buying. Bill Ackman has been on a buying spree. But the interesting part about this is I already own three of these six new companies. Three of them were Netflix, MasterCard, and S&P Global. These are all big positions in my portfolio.
00:44 So obviously I have a lot of thoughts about his analysis on these companies. And with his analysis on them, he released an entire in-depth update. This is the Pershing Square Q2 report. It's very in-depth. He goes through his entire strategy, what he's trying to accomplish. He goes through every holding and the performance of it.
01:01 He also goes through the valuation and the implied growth rates, how much he thinks all of these companies will grow in their earnings per share over the next 5 years. So I compared all of his estimates against the market consensus to see which companies he believes will grow the most today compared to what investors think.
01:20 So this is going to be a very full episode. We have a lot to get into. Let's go ahead and get started. Now the first thing I want to address is many of the holdings that I have now are in overlap with Bill Ackman's portfolio. But I just want to point out that in my defense, the majority of them I have bought before Bill Ackman.
01:35 I've already been in a lot of these companies. I bought Meta before it was revealed that Bill Ackman bought Meta. I had Google before he bought Google. I had Microsoft before he had Microsoft in his portfolio. I had Amazon before he bought Amazon. I had Netflix twice before he bought Netflix. And the same goes for now MasterCard and S&P Global.
01:52 Now there are some companies that I followed Bill Ackman into. One of them was Chipotle, which was a successful investment. And the other one is Uber, which is a new position that I really like. But the reason I point this out is because between the two of us there is a big overlap in holdings, but I'm not just copying his trades. The majority of these companies I've actually owned prior to Bill Ackman buying into them.
02:12 Now, out of the new companies that he just bought, the one that I first want to outline is Netflix. I find this particularly interesting because Bill Ackman had previously owned Netflix, and I've owned the company long ago. I owned it before Bill Ackman both times. So, he's owned it twice now. This is his second time.
02:30 I've owned it just once the entire time through. My position is a $102,000 position, $30,000 in the green. If we look through Netflix's stock price history, I'll give a short outline of Bill Ackman's dealings with this company a couple years ago. In early 2022 or late 2021, he bought the company after it suffered a major fall.
02:49 So, right there, Netflix dropped like 25% in a single day because things were slowing down. We had a major slowdown in subscribers, and management would they warned about it. They said it's a problem. We have a slowdown in subscribers. With Bill Ackman having looked at the company and studied it, he thought that this might be just a minor dip, and he can buy the company today, and it will sail back up in the future.
03:11 Well, what he didn't know is that Netflix would stay flat for the next 3 months, and then things would get much, much worse. Netflix management said that not only are they not going to grow subscribers, but they're going to lose 2 million subscribers. So, millions of customers being lost. Their churn has picked up.
03:30 They're no longer a growth company, and literally everything flipped on top of its head. Netflix now was being viewed by Wall Street as a has-been, a company that was totally saturated. It couldn't grow at all. It had no pricing power, and it had competitors crowding it out. The news was so insanely bad.
03:47 I've never seen anything like it. YouTubers were making videos of rise and fall of Netflix with big arrows and explosions showing it just crumbling. People are almost rejoicing in the fact that this big company came tumbling down. From the peak to the bottom, Netflix dropped by about 75% and again sentiment could have not been worse.
04:06 Everybody was mocking anybody that owned the company. It was a terrible time to be a Netflix shareholder. And Bill Ackman, after two days after that report and the stock dropping, he decided to move on. He called CNBC and he said that the stock has become too unpredictable and he wanted to move to a more predictable company. >> As he told me, the reason why he exited his position after only 3 months at a $400 million loss was, quote, "I'm 100% ready to admit when I'm wrong and 100% ready to admit when I'm wrong quickly.
04:36 " So, that sort of gives you an idea of where his thinking was. >> So, he sold out of Netflix roughly at the bottom. Now, this isn't to criticize Bill Ackman. We all have to make judgment calls. He had a different analysis on this company than I did at the time. And I would say that my analysis of Netflix at the time was uniquely bullish on the company.
04:57 I realize it was a bit of an outlier at the time. I had studied Netflix so much. I felt so confident in it. Maybe to some naivety. Maybe I was being overconfident, but I just could not fathom that Netflix was done growing. It was just such a global company. They had so much content. They, in my opinion, they owned the world and I thought that the market got it wrong.
05:17 So, while this is going on, I continued to add to my stake in Netflix. I bought more and more of the company. I continued to buy it and I talked about it incessantly. In fact, I even published and I wrote things in-depth about Netflix. This was December 1st, 2022. The stock price at the time of writing that was $30.
05:38 So, I wrote this December 1st, 2022, Netflix is trading at a price-adjusted $30 per share. And I go through and I highlight a lot of different things that are going on with Netflix at the time. Netflix reported subscriber losses for two consecutive quarters. Netflix subscriber loss resulted in destroying investors confidence causing the stock to drop by over 70%.
05:58 Netflix had changed their mind on having no ads and has introduced a new $7 month ad tier. Netflix has decided to monetize password sharing accounts. Netflix admitted they faced real competition in streaming. Netflix made a pivot into gaming. Netflix has done layoffs and budget cuts. So when you're looking at the situation here, this is illustrative of what goes on during a time period where a stock is in crisis, where it's just dropped 75%.
06:22 Everything is interpreted negatively. All of these actions that Netflix took looked desperate on the surface. Oh, they changed their mind and they're adding ads. They're going into video games. They're monetizing password crackdowns. All of these looked like desperation when in reality they were well-calculated moves by management.
06:41 I continued on saying the damage to Netflix's story over the past year is real. Investors confidence has been shaken. Even Bill Ackman purchased into Netflix to buy the dip and quickly sold out 3 months later when Netflix had another disappointing quarter. He's now stated that the stock is {quote} too unpredictable for his concentrated portfolio.
07:02 This is where I continue to strongly disagree with the market and with Bill Ackman. I don't think things are so bad for Netflix. I don't think the company is unpredictable. In fact, I think Netflix is one of the most predictable companies in the market. I go on talking about how Netflix is making breakout shows. You had the Glass Onion. You had Dahmer. We had Wednesday.
07:20 We had all these shows that they're making that are actually quite good. When I consider the facts surrounding Netflix, I don't see a distressed or struggling company. I see a company that is still dominant and thriving. Netflix is the only streaming company at scale generating positive free cash flow with their streaming business.
07:36 Netflix is still profitable and growing despite all their competitors spending tens of billions of dollars on streaming to chase Netflix. Now since then, over the following years, Netflix's stock price quickly sailed upwards, going up around 600% from the lows. And while many other streamers like Paramount and Disney were throwing tens of billions of dollars at streaming, most of them gave up the fight.
07:58 They pulled back on their budgets and conceded the battle to Netflix. And with Netflix soundly winning that streaming war, fighting that battle, and completely dominating, the stock went up to around $135 per share. Huge highs for Netflix, all-time highs. But then, as you can see, over the past 1 year, Netflix is down substantially.
08:18 The stock has actually continued to go downward this year, almost around 40%. So, it's given up a lot of the gains from its all-time highs. And why is that happening? Well, the reason that's happening is because there's now a new fear baked into Netflix's stock price. They first tried to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which a lot of investors didn't like.
08:36 They thought it signaled that Netflix is weak. Netflix looked at it as a content acquisition, but many investors thought it means that engagement's going down and they need to do acquisitions. This narrative of an engagement problem has dropped the stock enough to become once again attractive to Bill Ackman, and he's recently entered a new position at around $74 per share, so right around where it trades today.
09:00 He's now reinvested back into the company. So, that's Bill Ackman's history with Netflix. And while it's easy to take shots from the peanut gallery and say, "Look, Bill Ackman sold the company after just a short time last time." That's true, but he also bought back in. He bought back in during a big dip. And that shows a level of mental flexibility.
09:19 When you're able to have a company that you're a loser on, but you also now want to turn it back into a winner, you're buying back in later, and you're maintaining discipline. So, I actually view it as a strength that he was able to change his mind on Netflix, and once again re-enter the position. And things have materially changed for the better for Netflix.
09:34 But there's still that one problem, which is the engagement issue. This is what he talks about with Netflix. He says with respect to engagement, investors have been intently focused on the watch time metric without appropriately considering the quality of that watch time or the impact of geographic mix shifts. So he outlines two reasons that investors are being confused about Netflix's engagement problem.
09:57 One of them is that engagement is not equal to watch time, the other is geographic mix shifts as he calls it. Now I want to play just a short clip of a video that I did two days ago on Netflix. Here it is. The reason the stock is down 37% over the past year can largely be attributed to this entire narrative that there is an engagement issue with Netflix.
10:17 That their watch time and their engagement per subscriber is going down. But the way that Netflix measures this is that engagement is different than just watch time. Watch time is important, but watch time from a social media app where you're scrolling YouTube shorts or Instagram reels is different than watch time watching a movie.
10:36 One of them can be more impactful to the enjoyment of someone. When you watch a really good TV series that you're really into, that's a higher quality of engagement and enjoyment than simply scrolling Instagram reels while you're on the toilet or enjoying lunch. So right there I outlined the exact same thing earlier this week.
10:53 That engagement is not equal to watch time. And this is exactly what Bill Ackman points out. He says live programming for example represents a small fraction of watch time yet is instrumental in driving sign ups and retention. But we also have the other thing that he points out here, which is what he calls quote geographic mix shifts.
11:11 This is another issue that investors are getting wrong. And of course I also commented on the geographic mix shifts in this video earlier this week. The areas in the world where people watch the most TV are already largely saturated. That is the United States, Canada, and Europe. In other areas that they're growing fast into, those people don't watch as much TV. They don't spend as much time on it.
11:32 So even though they're growing in the number of subscribers, the amount of watch time per subscriber is lower for those new areas. But, that's not a concern intrinsically about the company. So, of course I agree 100% with Ackman here. I've been arguing the same thing for months now, that Netflix doesn't have an engagement problem, and part of what's going on is being skewed by the geographic mix shift.
11:53 Now, he continues on addressing another bear case for Netflix, and that is short-form video. He says, "In our view, time reallocated towards short-form video is far more likely to come from share donors like linear TV and lower quality streaming services than from utility-like services such as Netflix. To that end, the ramp up in short-form video consumption has been most acute over the past 2 years, yet has no discernible impact on the company's results.
12:20 We've had short-form video for a while. It's been growing rapidly, and so has Netflix. Netflix is continuing to grow rapidly. Look at the revenue. Look at the subscribers. Whatever short-form video's doing, it's not really damaging Netflix. We don't see any of that in the numbers itself.
12:35 So, I think that's another good point to highlight. Combined with a robust buyback program, we estimate earnings should compound at close to 20% annually. We believe the company's current valuation represents a substantial discount for a business with such a strong growth profile and dominant market position." So, that's his case with Netflix, and obviously I agree with it.
12:54 I've made many of these same points for months now, and I am glad that Bill Ackman once again has Netflix in the portfolio. Hopefully, he has a better experience with it this time. Now, next up we get to S&P Global. This is another new position to the Ackman portfolio. Now, of course after show that this is also one that I've had in my portfolio for some time.
13:11 I've owned S&P Global for a while. It's currently a $104,000 position. I'm up around 18% $13,000 on it. I own this one in two places. I have another small position, $18,000 in the story fund with another $2,000 in gains. He says, "Our opportunity to invest in S&P Global arose mid concerns of AI disintermediation of the company's data offerings and workflow and analytic tools, including Capital IQ.
13:37 Now, I remember this vividly. It was like it was yesterday. What happened was on Twitter, on X, Claude released a financial analysis plugin. So, they said, "Oh, you can plug it into financial dashboards. It can run through and do analysis on companies and you can do all of this stuff that a lot of it seems very similar to what S&P Global does.
13:58 " And investors went crazy with it. Lots of likes, lots of retweets, spread everywhere. Every investor is looking at it going, "Oh, no. Claude has jumped from coding and now they're into finances. S&P Global and Moody's, those companies are no more." And the stocks dropped that day, and they continued to drop.
14:16 And Bill Ackman watched this happen. He said, "In February of this year, the stock declined more than 25% from peak to trough following Anthropic's launch of Claude Co-work." That's the name of the plugin. Now, as a result, the stock's valuation declined from 25 times to 19 times earnings per share, the lowest valuation in the previous 5 years, and a bargain level for a company that is often cited as one of the world's highest quality businesses.
14:41 It is incredible that S&P Global today, which is considered again one of the best companies in the world, is trading at 21 times multiple. And an interesting thing about this that I'll just highlight now is even if Claude was to hypothetically completely disrupt market intelligence, the thing that it actually competes with, if it made that business line of S&P Global go to zero, so it totally eradicated that entire business line, S&P Global's forward P/E ratio would be 26.
15:08 That's what we're talking about here. The concerns of Claude are real, but they are heavily overstated to a dramatic degree. Capital IQ, that's their desktop application, which has drawn a disproportionate amount of investors' attention this year, represents less than 7% of the total revenue and an even smaller percentage of the total profit.
15:28 On the other hand, over 40% of market intelligence revenue is driven via the sale of proprietary and curated data that are typically deeply embedded in customer workflows. The actual part that's subject to being disrupted by Claude is a tiny fragment of the market intel business. He says, "We believe investors have become myopically focused on the potential threats to a single digital portion of the company within market intelligence and have lost sight of the fact of future earnings growth.
15:56 They'll be almost exclusively determined by the company's benchmark business." "These high-growth franchises should enable the company to meet its multi-year target and high single-digit revenue growth." So, in Bill Ackman's mind, investors are focusing on all the wrong things, and I believe they are as well. Investors get easily scared.
16:14 We see it again and again in all different great companies. They jump out of them as soon as Claude or Anthropic release this one feature without even knowing how it's going to affect the company. And they've done the same with S&P Global. When you listen to the calls and you listen to what's going on with the company, they are business as usual.
16:30 They're in fact growing in many areas faster than anticipated. So, this is another buy that I obviously like by Bill Ackman. Now, the next company that Bill Ackman bought that I already own is MasterCard. And this is an exciting one. It's literally one of my biggest positions. I own $188,000 worth.
16:48 It's now up 89% money-weighted returns. That's $40,000 in gains. And I really increased my position in MasterCard this year. He bought both Visa and MasterCard as a collective buy. He says, "Earlier this year, we initiated positions in Visa and MasterCard, two businesses we have long admired, which provide a dominant global network for consumers and commercial payments.
17:09 We believe stablecoins represent an opportunity for card networks rather than a threat. They are in fact most relevant where cards are not the incumbent. Cross-border business-to-business payments, high-cost remittance corridors, and dollar savings in countries with volatile currencies. Adoption in these areas should grow in parallel with, not at the expense of, card volumes.
17:28 So, he's not only not worried about stablecoin, but he believes that's a bullish part of the story here. He also says that in terms of agentic technology, that agentic commerce is more likely to expand the payment ecosystem than erode the network's moat, as agents remove friction, enable more frequent purchases, and accelerate digitally commerce.
17:47 Agents should adopt, not replace, consumers' existing payment preferences. So again, I believe this is a timely buy during a dip, and another fantastic addition to the Pershing Square portfolio, and I continue to hold my position in Mastercard. I'm every bit as bullish on it. So, with Ackman adding Netflix, Mastercard, and S&P Global, our portfolios are looking more similar.
18:06 But then he also added companies that I don't own. So, there's some additions here we'll go over. One of them is the Intercontinental Exchange. Most of ICE's exchange revenue comes from its future and options exchanges. These seem like a new type of business for the Ackman portfolio, but it does remind me of S&P Global. He says that we believe the favorable macro backdrop and powerful secular tailwinds should enable ICE to achieve a low-to-mid-teens growth.
18:29 And then in summary, the business is a classic, simple, predictable, free cash flow generative business that is sold off on concerns that we view as unwarranted. The other company that he bought that's not currently in my portfolio is called Alcon, and this is one that I wasn't familiar with. Alcon is the world's leading ophthalmology company with a dominant in surgical vision, strong positions in vision care and contact lenses.
18:51 So, this is a medical ophthalmology company that is a strong franchise, benefits from a massive global install base, strong brand affinity, unrivaled commercial capabilities. The core of Alcon's business is the dominant surgical vision franchise supported by over 30,000 unit capital equipment install base. This install base anchors a highly attractive stream of high-margin recurring consumable revenue.
19:14 We anticipate Alcon generating meaningful compounded returns from the current levels as it grows its earnings in the mid-teens and its valuation multiple expands to a level more reflective of the underlying business quality. So, there you have the six new companies to the Ackman portfolio. Now, outside of those six new holdings, Ackman also gave small updates on his existing positions and what his ongoing thoughts are.
19:34 For example, with Uber, he notes that the stock continues to trade down because of AVs, but he doesn't share the same AV risk as the market. Broad investor concern regarding the potential long-term impact of AVs continues to negatively weigh on Uber stock. Punctuated this quarter by the evidence of an increasingly fraught relationship with its partner, Waymo.
19:54 But, offsetting these concerns, the company continues to make significant progress with its many other strategic partners. With AV launches planned in multiple new cities later this year. Against this backdrop, Uber continues to demonstrate very strong operating financial performance with earnings on pace to grow approximately 35% this year.
20:15 Valuation is increasingly disconnected from the fundamentals and now trades at just 19 times earnings near its lowest valuation ever. Uber already has the critical demand that you need to have a successful ride-sharing business. And a hybrid model where you have humans and AVs will always be superior to a purely AV model. Uber has many things working for it.
20:36 And while I believe that Waymo will be successful in its own right, that has not detracted from Uber success. The company continues to grow even in the markets that Waymo is successful. I do own Uber. This is one of the positions that I bought after Ackman was in it. I agree with him on the thesis.
20:51 I think this company will do really well. Meta is another company that he talked about in this report. I also have a large holding in Meta. It's currently in the red by around 14% and Meta is a position that I did buy into before it was disclosed that Ackman owned the stock. He continues to view Meta as one of the best stocks in the market today to own.
21:09 He says, quote, we view Meta as one of the clearest beneficiaries of AI, which is driving higher engagement through better content recommendation, greater ad monetization through improved targeting, and meaningful product innovation in consumer and business agents. Though still early days, these benefits are already visible in greater revenue acceleration in Meta's core advertising business.
21:31 Meta's compute investment also affords itself downside protection as capacity not consumed internally can be profitably monetized in a highly supply constrained compute market. Anytime that Meta has gotten down to the teens PE ratio, it's just been a great deal. Like look throughout history and look at anytime it was in a 10 to 20 forward PE ratio, and those are times that you wanted to own the stock.
21:53 And that's exactly where Meta is today. So overall, I like these updates. I think that he's right on Meta and Uber. I like his new buy into Netflix. I like the thesis into Mastercard and Visa, as well as S&P Global. Great additions to the portfolio. Overall, it's very strong. And then finally, I think it's worth highlighting one part of his letter here that I thought was particularly interesting.
22:15 We know that Bill Ackman has invested in all of these companies, the hyperscalers, the capex spenders, these digital network companies, but he doesn't own any Micron or Nvidia, he doesn't own any Sandisk, he's not in these AI companies. And he believes the outperformance of this subset of companies is likely temporary. He says, while the S&P 500 index has increased by approximately 10% through the first 6 months of the year, nearly the entirety of gains has come from two sectors that provide the picks and shovels for AI infrastructure. Just two of the S&P
22:46 500's 24 sectors, semiconductors and tech hardware and equipment, which comprise just 8% of the companies and 22% of the market capitalization of the index, have contributed nearly 85% of the S&P 500's year-to-date gains. As a result, more than 90% of the companies in the S&P 500 have collectively contributed less than 2% of the overall return. That is a staggering statistic.
23:12 90% of companies contributing less than 2% of the total return. We are fortunate that in the current market backdrop, it has created highly attractive environments for Pershing Square as it's allowed us to opportunistically deploy $5 billion worth of cash. So, he's used this as more of an opportunity than a problem.
23:31 He's using these companies that are all being left behind as chances to buy in now. Now, that's going to be it for this episode. Hope you enjoyed. See you in the next one.