This Just In: Hedge Fund Billionaire Now Advertising in “I’m Desperate” Magazine

That's a curious way to start your column Jeff.

Do you really think Ackerman is a genius? The better tautology may be 'successful'; better, 'super successful'. Given that your evidence of his genius is his success.

No doubt he is intelligent, yet I doubt very much his intelligence has any relationship at all to his success. There are likely millions of people who are both poorer than him, and more intelligent. No doubt there are a few wealthier and dumber as well.

He is certainly good at making money – unfortunately I suspect that making money is actually something of a dull pursuit that bores most geniuses.

It would be interesting to find some geniuses somewhere and inquire why it is they have so much less money than Bill. Being smart and all, they should know.

Fair enough, if his successes, such as GGP, evidence genius; what then do his JCP exploits evidence?

The most notable thing that jumps out with GGP is that he was buying at a time when others were selling, dramatically. It is well understood that doing the opposite of crowds can breed great investing success. It is less certain if the willingness or ability to be different than the crowd is due to brilliance or stupidity, or for some other quality.

This doesn't interest me as a semantic detail, and it is not the focus of your post, so it perhaps is more worthwhile to take up at a different time and place.

To me the interest is motivated by the central motivation from watching a master in any field; to learn. If Ackerman's success is due to genius, it is difficult to see what there is to learn. Much as there is little to learn for a man of average height from Tim Duncan if his basketball prowess is due merely to his height.

The link I notice between both GGP and JCP is that both required a serious set of stones. From whence comes confidence? To know and not to act is not to know. Can a person with less than Mensa might learn to act?

No, I am not saying Ackman is simply a high-roller. I don’t know Ackman, and I don’t know anything about his investing besides the headlines regarding HLF, JCP, GGP, and the weird leveraged fund he had to own Target. What caught my eye was the notion of genius regarding stock picking. I think it is fairly common to view the central problem with stock picking as needing to recommend/buy stocks that will go up in the future while not knowing what will happen in the future. Being really really smart, a genius, merely smarter than everyone else in the room, or out hustling all the other smart people has zero bearing on this central problem; it is generally accepted that even smart people don’t know the future. This is why the first objective in investing is not to seek return, but to manage risk (ie. managing risk is the currently accepted answer to the question, how do you make decision in the face of uncertainty). Or in the words of at least one famous investor, job one, two and three is; don’t lose money.
Indeed this is the genius of Buffet for the whole point of value investing is to manage risk, to have a margin of safety. Clearly value investing is not the only tool various risk managing investors use.
How does Ackman put the Hedge in Hedge Fund? I haven’t a clue, clearly the risk at hand is portfolio risk not position risk, and I don’t know at any point what his portfolio is. In any case, I am not taking shots at Ackman, he’s coming up smelling like a rose, regardless of where he stepped before.