Carl Icahn

Buffett never bought Goldman on the open market — the big boys don't speculate

Codie argues public-market speculation is dumb: no one on the Forbes 100 made their money just buying stocks. Even Buffett's 2009 Goldman deal was a backroom deal with warrants and options for asymmetric upside, not buying shares on the street. Without an unfair advantage, don't speculate.

“Morden didn't go out to the street and buy a bunch of stock. He had a ton of warrants and options on top of it. It was a total backroom deal. And that's the only reason that he did it because he basically had this huge asymmetric risk where he had a bunch more upside than he had downside. And that's the same thing with Icahn, who tries to affect the outcome. So my point with people, especially these days with like GameStop and all the madness and stock investing is like, If you don't have an unfair advantage, if you can't write down why specifically you're going to win instead of somebody else, you should be really careful speculating on stocks because the big boys don't really do it.”

Great investors make large concentrated bets, the opposite of business school

Druckenmiller says every great investor he's studied (Buffett, Icahn, Soros) shares one trait that contradicts MBA teaching: they make large, concentrated bets with high conviction rather than diversifying across 35-40 names. Concentration paradoxically lowers risk because a huge position commands your full attention.

“It's they make large concentrated bets where they have a lot of conviction. They're not buying 35 or 40 names and diversifying. I don't know whether you remember, uh, Icahn a few years ago put $5 billion into Apple, and I don't think he was worth more than $10 billion when he did that, right?”

Steal thisConcentrate into a few high-conviction positions and watch them closely instead of diversifying into names you'll stop paying attention to.