From Barrons:"Could you talk about a mistake you made and what you learned from it?
At the dawn of the digital age, when we shorted AOL[AOL] back in 1996, it basically went up eightfold on us. Although it didn't put us out of business, it certainly caught our attention. We learned about timing. Interestingly, as Time Warner[TWX] found
out later, the accounting issues were actually very real. Their churn was actually much higher than they were letting on. But we also had a healthy regard for the ability of corporations to be gullible and to fall for the same hot trends as everyone else. You can never get the timing exactly right, even if you are right on the fundamentals, ultimately. But on the other hand, you can be very, very right and still lose lots of money, so you have to construct your portfolio accordingly and never let one position ever be too large. That was a good lesson, and it probably saved us a lot of money."
At the dawn of the digital age, when we shorted AOL[AOL] back in 1996, it basically went up eightfold on us. Although it didn't put us out of business, it certainly caught our attention. We learned about timing. Interestingly, as Time Warner[TWX] found
out later, the accounting issues were actually very real. Their churn was actually much higher than they were letting on. But we also had a healthy regard for the ability of corporations to be gullible and to fall for the same hot trends as everyone else. You can never get the timing exactly right, even if you are right on the fundamentals, ultimately. But on the other hand, you can be very, very right and still lose lots of money, so you have to construct your portfolio accordingly and never let one position ever be too large. That was a good lesson, and it probably saved us a lot of money."
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