Oh Boy Does Julian Robertson Wish Apple, Facebook Had Been Around When He Was A Middle-Aged Man

You kids today don’t know what kind of a bargain you’re getting.

Author:: Jon Shazar
Publish date:: Sep 13, 2017
Updated on: Jan 14, 2019

This year marks the 60th anniversary of Julian Robertson’s arrival on Wall Street as a kid stockbroker at Kidder Peabody. In those six decades, the Tiger Management founder’s seen a lot of things happen over and over again. Like rallies creating bubbles that lead to crashes. And guess what?

"The market as a whole is quite high on a historical basis," he said. "I think that's due to the fact that interest rates are slow low. But there's no real competition for the money other than art and real estate…."
"I think we need interest rates to appreciate, to go up, because I think we are creating a bubble," he added.

Now, you might expect an octogenarian who spends much of his time ensuring that his New York City tax payments are as low as possible to locate the source of this bubble-blowing in these newfangled FANG stocks that the kids love so much, your Faceflix and Netbook and Goog-a-watchamacallit and what have you that no one really understand but whose share prices are seemingly divorced from both reality and gravity. But no: His little cubbies have told him all about them, and he just wishes that a younger him had the opportunity to buy them at these prices long before the existed.

“Right now the Apples, the Facebooks and the Googles are priced cheaper than they would have ever been in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s,” Robertson, 85, said Tuesday at the CNBC Institutional Investor Delivering Alpha conference in New York.
While he’s a long-term investor in Facebook Inc., he finds Apple Inc. and Netflix Inc. enticing. “Netflix is tempting to me because it’s run by really good people and I love it too,” said Robertson, who founded New York-based Tiger Management in 1980 and turned it into one of the industry’s largest hedge funds. “Not liking Netflix is like saying you hate Santa Claus.”