“I’m surprised how fast the market bounced [Monday],” Tepper told Absolute Return today. “Shows you there’s a lot of money looking for any dip on the sidelines. Which is good, but I have to be a little more cautious than last week because I didn’t know how much this stuff could flair up. I’m still generally constructive but just a tiny bit more cautious than I was before because of this [Egypt] stuff.” As for the Super Bowl? The Appaloosa manager, who is a minority owner of the Steelers and pictured at left ready for the big game, is confident Ben Roethlisberger will pull one out. Read more »
Appaloosa Management
7:59 The last time the Appaloosa founder was on CNBC he sparked the “Tepper-Rally” in the stock market and Joe Kernen came thisclose to fellating him on live TV. What are we in store for today? Stay tuned.
8:03: Kernen describes Tepper’s appearance this morning as being as hotly anticipated as the LeBron James decision.
8:05: JK, a television anchor: “I know you hate TV, so we thank you so much for coming on. I hate TV too!” (Samesies!)
8:10 Tepper has started a campaign to raise $15 million to feed the needy in New Jersey. Bank of America, JPMorgan and other NJ hedge funds have committed almost $9 million to the charity. It’s a good cause! Read more about it here.
8:15 Kernen wants to get back to how hot Tepper looks. A picture of Brass Balls that ran in the Post is shown; JK tells him, “You’ve never looked better.”
8:17: Tepper says “QE2 worked.” Read more »
The lock-up period’s not over yet but that’s just the kind of guy he is. There’ll be a small fee associated with the exit, of course, and the knowledge that you’ll never find a manager with a pair like Big Tepp. Read more »
David Tepper ‘Always Put Everything In His Mouth’ [Daily Intel]
It might seem all fun and games but there is a downside to being a billionaire. Namely, the task of coming up with what to do with your shit-tons of money. It’s not that, at 53 years old, David Tepper hasn’t had plenty of time to think about how he might put his stacks of coin to use. In fact, according to his sister, as a little boy he predicted he’d be a millionaire “before turning 30.” So, we’re talking decades here. But back in a suburb of Pittsburgh, when the Appaloosa founder was looking at a railing on the front porch and asking his brother, “If I put my head in there, would it get suck,” hadn’t dreamed he’d have the amount of money he does today. And those extra zeros really kind of expand your options to be limitless, making the task all the more difficult. Along the way, ideas, of course, have presented themselves. He could, for instance:
* Pay for a whole bunch of kids to go to college. But Tepps isn’t too keen on that one. “I’m gonna have somebody put together a form letter for that,” he says. “It’ll say something like, I’m going to give you a great gift. What I got: Nothing.”
* Have a mold of his balls made (but a former employee already gave him just those, in all their “cartoonishly huge and grotesquely veiny” glory) or a pair of tits for everyone in the office (ditto on that base already being covered: “We had this client, they make breast implants,” says a former employee. “He loved to keep them on the desk, he’d love to throw them around.”)
* Get back at the girlfriend of five years, Cindy Perl, who dumped him, citing a question in her mind as to whether or not he’d be able to “support the lifestyle” she was hoping for, by, I don’t know, hiring one of those skywriting planes to leave the message “How do you like me now, bitch?” every morning over her house? But the poor girl has probably suffered enough, having married a dentist.
* Buy a private jet? No: “I have NetJets.”
* A piece of the Steelers? Already owns a minority stake.
* A hot piece of just barely legal ass? “I could get myself a 22-year-old!” he says, but then there is the matter of the wife of thirty years, Marlene.
Okay, well WHAT THEN? Think, god damn it, THINK. Read more »
Tepper: “You can’t take a chance on not being a little longer now, you gotta buy. That doesn’t mean I’m going balls to the walls– can you say that?”
Joe Kernan: “You can say that. Balls to the walls. I’ll say it a couple times. Balls to the walls.”
Tepper: “Balls to the walls. It’s that easy right now.”
“The hedge fund run by David Tepper, the best-paid fund manager in the hedging business last year, has agreed to pay more than $1.3 million in penalties stemming from stock trades that regulators said “willfully violated” federal rules.” [Crain's]
Related: David Tepper’s Lucky Brass Balls
In our last installment of The Secrets To David Tepper’s Success we learned that the Appaloosa founder rubs a pair of brass balls at various points throughout the trading day for good luck and also to keep his team in good spirits. Today it’s the bit with the twenty:
David Tepper often throws a $20 bill on the floor when he’s weighing a big investment with analysts at Appaloosa Management LP. “Would you pick that up?” Tepper, founder and president of Appaloosa, asks them. His point: The best trades can be like found money.
Obviously this has worked out pretty well for D.Tepp, as evidenced by his fund gaining about 120%, after fees, through early December but really? He does this quasi-amusing trick “often,” without it getting old after the first time? And his employees are still always like “ah-ha, we see what you’re getting at, Big D” the 100th time around? The thing with the sack we get. Watching someone have his way with a replica of testicles he keeps on his desk is never not uproarious. But this? Meh. In fairness, maybe it’s just that we read the first couple lines and got overly excited that this was going to go down the way it does up in Stamford, where the trick has been perfected and goes something more like, “Would you bend over and pick that up? Yeah, really put your back into it, just like that. That’s a good girl. Oh, I see you’re wearing the crotchless panties today, very nice. [sing-songy voice] Someone’s gonna get to execute his trade todayyyy. Okay now take that $20 and stick it in your mouth. Yeah, just like that. Don’t think I’m not doing this to make a point here, I am, and it will reveal itself right after you put this ball gag on.”
But whatever! The team seems to like it (or put up with it) and has only great things to say about the big man, like that a certain investor/aberrant sex fetishist doesn’t hold a candle to the guy.
“When he sees a fat pitch, he just keeps swinging and swinging,” says Alan Fournier, a former Appaloosa partner and founder of Pennant Capital Management LLC. “I don’t think Warren Buffett holds a candle to him,” Fournier says.
A pair of panties and 5 inch stilettos. A carton of Pall Malls. The ticket to his first Cher concert. These are just a few of the good luck charms some of the industry’s best known managers (Jiang, Simons, Griffin) turn to when they need that extra inch. They’ve done their research. Their homework has been turned it. But they still aren’t sure which way this thing’s gonna go. So they look to the rabbit’s foot or whatever their version of the rabbit’s foot may be. In David Tepper’s case, it’s a pair of testicles.
Performance for David Tepper’s Appaloosa Management (excuse the watermark. The dear friend who sent it had to remove the original one so as not to incriminate himself and replaced it with something else):
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