Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund manager of Kase Capital Management who often called Trump as "Con Man Don", has sent out three or more emails per day to his list of 3,000 connections to cover the president-elect's outrages. On Wednesday, however, Tilson has unloaded his shares into the market rally.
Tilson said in an interview with New York, "I was at 60 percent cash coming into today, and I'm selling stocks today. It was the third time in 18 years that I made bearish portfolio decisions on a macroecononic view, the other two being the dot-com and housing bubbles."
In the middle of the heat of the campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Tilson assumed that he did not mind losing friends over the election for the issues were just too significant. However, on Wendnesday morning, the hedge fund manager had sent a congratulatory note Anthony Scaramucci who is one the many hedge-fund financiers who were trapped by Trump.
Tilson said, "Hi Mooch. Congrats-what you did here will go down as one of the boldest moves in Wall Street history."
"I fear the worst," Tilson furthered. "But I will also be praying for the best-namely that you are right and I am wrong: that [he's] the man you think he is, and that you and other advisers will be able to influence him positively."
Tilson said he had done everything he could, including going door-to-door in the swing stage of Pennsylvania, and donating about $40,000 to Clinton and other Democratic candidates, just to bring Clinton in to the White House.
"I am now going to do everything in my power to make the best of a bad situation. There is a possibility Trump could govern from the center and cut deals with Democrats on certain issues and really be a transformative president in a positive way," Tilson said.
But, he quickly added, "I don't think that's likely. Putting on my hat as a hedge-fund manager, I think uncertainty is going to reign for the next four years, and markets hate uncertainty" - on his decision to sell stocks. "There's a meaningful possibility that global trade could be very negatively affected and tip the world into a recession."
Whitney Tilson is an American investor, author, and philanthropist. Tilson manages the hedge fund Kase Capital (formerly T2 Partners LLC). Tilson co-authored the books, The Art of Value Investing: How the World's Best Investors Beat the Market (published in May 2013) and More Mortgage Meltdown: 6 Ways to Profit in These Bad Times (published in May 2009), has written for Forbes, the Financial Times, Kiplinger's, The Motley Fool and TheStreet.com, and was one of the authors of Poor Charlie's Almanack (ISBN 1578645018).
Tilson co-founded the Value Investing Congress, a biannual investment conference in New York City and Las Vegas, and Value Investor Insight, an investment newsletter.
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