Is there another tech bubble on the verge of bursting?
David Einhorn, a pretty big name among activist investors, made headlines yesterday with his “bubble basket” and for saying that there’s now a consensus that there’s a tech bubble.
Activists investors buy a large chunk of stock in a company with the goal of pressuring management to make changes. At the Active-Passive Investor Summit in New York, Einhorn said his “bubble basket” is a group of stocks he’s shorting, or betting that the price will go down. While he didn’t name companies, we can assume there are tech stocks in that basket. Einhorn is betting that some stocks might fall by as much as 90 percent.
Activists investors also raised bigger issues. Jeff Ubben, a notable west coast hedge fund investor, called into question executive compensation at the tech companies. He singled out Google’s Eric Schmidt and his $100 million pay package in 2011, which Ubben thought was outsized. Ubben noted that same year, JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon was “hauled over the coals” for getting paid $20 million.
The tech companies haven’t responded to the criticism but upshot from the summit was that tech companies need to be put under more scrutiny.
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