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Bill Ackman has given his critics something else to gripe about
(REUTERS/Brendan McDermid)
Bill Ackman.
Billionaire activist-investor Bill Ackman has no shortage of critics, and it's not hard to see why.
When he goes after a new target, Ackman can be vicious, with over-the-top presentations and personal attacks. With his most famous short position — Herbalife — he has promised investors a smoking gun more than once, only to come up short.
A guy like that ought to, then, be wary of giving his enemies ammunition.
The latest attack on the Pershing Square manager is self-inflicted and the product of poor disclosure. Some people are making it out to be an effort to mask Ackman's performance in September.
Here's the issue. Last week, Pershing Square Holdings, the publicly traded part of Ackman's hedge fund, made a change to the way it reports its numbers.
Pershing Square used to report weekly returns and net asset values, meaning the value of an entity's assets minus its liabilities, based on calculations as of close of business every Tuesday. You can see historical reports here.
Last week, however, those numbers came in based on close of business on Wednesday, September 30, instead of Tuesday, September 29. They showed a 12.6% year-to-date loss. Then, on October 2, Pershing Square Holdings released a statement officially announcing the changes to its NAV reporting policies.
One of those changes, according to the statement, was that the company would only report results once on a week that included the end of the month — rather than on the Tuesday and again on the last day of the month.
The reason for that tweak, according to the release, is to prevent investors from using the periodic reporting to front-run, or determine portfolio changes in advance of official disclosures.
The statement also noted that weekly and monthly reporting would now be provided on a one-business-day lag instead of two business days.
Valeant losses
Pershing didn't give a reason for waiting to make the announcement until after it had made the changes to its reporting.
But the criticism that has emerged is that the change seems awfully convenient. It saved Pershing from reporting a loss September 29 that was even bigger than the 12.6% loss it reported the next day.
By Australia-based fund manager John Hempton's calculation, Pershing's year-to-date return September 29 would've been closer to -16.6%. Hempton owns shares of Herbalife, the company Ackman has called a pyramid scheme and against which the New York-based manager has a massive short position.
Another blogger and prolific Herbalife bull made similar calculations about Pershing's returns here.
The dramatic difference over a single day is that Pershing's stake in drugmaker Valeant plummeted in September, especially Monday and Tuesday, but rebounded around 12% Wednesday.
(Yahoo! Finance)
Valeant plummeted in September, including on September 28 and 29.
Hempton suggests that Pershing Square made the change to mask the month-end changes to its performance, saying that such a move "opens Bill Ackman up for allegations of deception — allegations that Bill should neutralize immediately by reporting the interim data point as originally planned."
Another way to look at this is that the worst thing that Pershing Square did was fumble the way it explained the changes. It wasn't until after it had already reported September's numbers that the fund explained what it was doing.
This is an error for sure — the fund is publicly traded and that means changes ought to be outlined before they are rolled out. But it's only a problem if Pershing Square repeats this kind of thing over and over.
There are other reasons not to read too much into the change: Pershing Square's portfolio consists of publicly traded companies, so its day-to-day performance can mostly be tracked. This is how we can guess that it recovered a chunk of losses on the last day of the month.
And nobody's claiming that the numbers Pershing Square reported September 30 are inaccurate.
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