It was more than twenty-five years ago when I first met Doug Kass. He had recently left Putnam Investments in Boston where he managed a fund. Doug moved to NYC and began trading his own account. I was with Rothschild Inc. at the time and was doing institutional equity marketing. We didn’t have much product so I would call some of the hot companies of the day and introduce myself. I’d start with the CFO and tried to interest him in a higher level of institutional (as opposed to retail) stock ownership. One company that was really receptive was Home Shopping Network, now known as HSN. They were in St Petersburgh. At the time this was a real schlock operation. Questionable merchandise with haphazard delivery. But the stock was hotter than a pistol. Management loved that someone from the house of Rothschild showed interest in them.
It turned out that Kass owned 6% of the stock. Eventually, I believe he went up to 8% or 9%. He crashed and burned with it. But not before we established a relationship. Since then Doug has become a significant talking head on the financial networks and the blogs. A couple of weeks ago he made a gutsy call suggesting that the low of S&P 666 was a generational low. Most scoffed at his bullish forecast. Remember, we thought at the time that Armageddon was at hand. Not Doug. And today he reiterated his call. Today’s post spells out his thinking and is very worthwhile reading. Here is the link: http://tinyurl.com/czcj8h
