Carl Icahn on Wall Street Week: Worried About the High Yield Market

Anthony Scaramucci's rebooted show Wall Street Week just finished its third episode and this week they had on activist investor Carl Icahn.

He talked about the markets and said "I'm very concerned about the market.  You have a situation where this market keeps going up and up with zero interest rates and that's what's really pushing it.  And yet, a lot of the economic news isn't all that good and also, perhaps more importantly, earnings aren't good."

"We're very hedged."  It sounds like he's using CDS and derivatives to hedge his portfolio.

Icahn said he's even more worried about something else:  "What's even more dangerous than the actual stock market is the high yield market.  I think it's ridiculously high." 

He then went to talk about activism and how he's been involved over the years.

And lastly, he talked about his investment in Apple (AAPL) and how it's almost doubled since he first got involved but he hasn't sold a share (and he's actually bought more on the way up).

Embedded below is the video of Carl Icahn's appearance on Wall Street Week:



For other great episodes of Wall Street Week, check out their interviews with JANA Partners' Barry Rosenstein as well as DoubleLine Capital's Jeff Gundlach.

Barry Rosenstein on Wall Street Week Talking Activist Investing

The classic show Wall Street Week has recently been rebooted by Skybridge Capital's Anthony Scaramucci.  The second episode just aired and featured Barry Rosenstein of activist hedge fund JANA Partners.

In it, Rosenstein talked about activist investing and more.  Rosenstein started JANA in 2001 with $17 million and now manages over $10 billion.  He describes his strategy as: "We try to bring out the full value of the company."

On how he identifies candidates, Rosenstein says: "There are still plenty of companies that should be making changes and aren't.  It's not necessarily that management is bad or the board are bad people... We bring attention and a spotlight.  We're looking for companies that have underperformed... both relative and absolute ... We look at these companies and figure out why."


Embedded below is the video of Rosenstein's appearance on Wall Street Week which starts around the 4 minute mark:



For more on this hedge fund manager, head to our recent post on how JANA has gone activist on Qualcomm.

Jeff Gundlach's Appearance on Wall Street Week

The classic show Wall Street Week has recently been rebooted by Skybridge Capital's Anthony Scaramucci.  The first episode recently aired and featured DoubleLine Capital's Jeff Gundlach.

In it, Gundlach talks about his specialty: fixed income markets.  He pointed out that in 2018-2019, there will be tons of bond maturities.

He's also worried about junk bonds:  "One thing that I think is really important that nobody talks about or has been thinking about is the entire life of the junk bond market has been secularly declining interest rates."

On what will happen to the junk bond market when interest rates go up, Gundlach proclaimed: "I think that's the next bond market crisis."

On interest rates, Gundlach said, "I think the probability of a rate hike in June is very, very low." He also thinks it could be possible that the Fed doesn't raise rates at all in 2015.  He emphasized that the Fed is data dependent and so the data will need to give them a reason to act.

Embedded below is the video of Jeff Gundlach's appearance on Wall Street Week, which starts around the 3:30 minute mark: