This article comes from: Tencent News Prism Deep Web author: temperature Shi Jun, edit: Zhang Qingning, cover from: IC photo
At the beginning of the Spring Festival in 2020, the epidemic of black swans is circling, the historical collective meltdown of multinational stock markets, oil prices, gold prices and even digital currencies are scrambling to dive.
The 89-year-old Buffett said in an exclusive interview with Yahoo Finance, “If you persist long enough, you can see anything in the market. For me, it may have taken 89 years. Experience. “
“Live for a long time”, the summary of Chinese netizens is concise.
For people on the wealth pyramids, such as Buffett, they are not only concerned about wealth fluctuations, but unite wealth with their own will, and let this unity force cross the turbulent economic cycle. .
The British Economist magazine mentioned in its cover story “The Rise of the Family Office” that every investment wave stems from social development. After the Second World War, after a 20-year rise of the middle class, the fund industry in the 1970s Great development; after the financial crisis of 2008, the exposure of risks and the uncertainty of opportunities also made wealthy customers begin to choose family offices.
At the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders’ Meeting, when asked “if there is a family office”. “We already have a family office,” Munger said. “It’s here. (Berkshire Hathaway) .
Forbes data for January 2020 show that nearly half of the global billionaire’s $ 9 trillion in assets are managed by family offices.
What exactly is thisWhat kind of existence and how to travel through the economic cycles?
An example of Soros’s family office
In 2011, Soros, who successfully predicted the 2008 economic crisis, and still made money in the crisis, announced his retirement.
At this time he was 81 years old. As for the way to retire, you have to convert your Soros Fund (Soros Fund Management, LLC) from a hedge fund to a family office, which is only responsible for management And investing in the wealth of family members.
According to Bloomberg News in 2017, the Soros family office managed more than $ 26 billion.
For family offices, the core of smoothing risks across cycles is time. Family offices can make longer-term, focused investments than other institutions.
A set of data from CIBC Bank of Canada shows that as of December 31, 2018, if the S & P 500 Index is fully invested with US $ 10,000, it will eventually grow to US $ 20,398.
But if you change the investment target in the process, the results will be very different.
CIBC data also shows that if the US $ 10,000 investment in the S & P 500 Index misses the best 10 days in the market in these 20 years, it will only grow to US $ 10188; if you miss the best 30 days in the market, US $ 10,000 or Would fall to just $ 4257.
Another way is to diversify your investment.
Everyone will say that investing in the right assets at the right time, but this goal is difficult to achieve.
For example, in this global stock disaster, individual family offices were also damaged. According to GuruFocus data from the US investment information platform, the Soros family office’s stock portfolio disclosed in December 2019 was $ 2.49 billion. This portfolio contains 140 stocks. The top three weightings are communications, finance and real estate, accounting for 34%, 17.94% and 9.35% respectively.
Among them, the most purchased target in the fourth quarter of 2019 is Blizzard.It is normal operation.
Bezos Expeditions, the family office of Amazon founder Bezos, is very active. (Bezos Expeditions) Its official website shows that investment projects include not only star projects such as Twitter, Washington Post, Juneau Medical, Workday, but also early venture capital such as freight version Uber Convoy, cloud computing Domo, and robot Rethink Robotics.
Of course, it has also invested in some extremely willful projects-
For example, the “F1 Engine Recovery Plan”-the goal is to rebuild the F-1 engine that burns 2.7 tons of rocket kerosene and liquid oxygen per second; Apollo 11;
Blue Origin project with space tourism and moon settlement as its core business;
Even invested in a day and night thermal cycle, 152 meters high, installed in a cave 600 meters above the ground, running a 10,000 year clock.
Bezos Expedition Investment Project Wannianzhong Source: dogonews.com
Omidyar Network (Omidyar Network) , Weber Investment Network (Webb Investment Network) are the family offices of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and eBay Chief Operating Officer Maynard Webb.
Prism looked at the respective official websites of the two institutions and glimpsed their investment interests.
The projects invested by Omidyar Network are very diversified, many of which are not-for-profit projects: for example, African Digital Rights Center, Wikipedia, Amazon Protection Action, Khan Academy.
Weber Investment Network is more concerned about the Internet and fintech. Projects that have exited include Appurify (acquired by Google) , CardSpring (acquired by Twitter) , WePay (acquired by JP Morgan Chase) and so on.
Some “New Money” family offices have even become important levers for leveraging your business.
According to the information released by Dell’s official website, in October 2013, Michael Dell completed a $ 24.9 billion Dell privatization transaction. In October 2015, EMC was consolidated for $ 67 billion. The two transactions that shocked the industry were completed by the family office MSD (abbreviation of Michael S. Dell) in conjunction with Silver Lake Capital.
Dell founded MSD in 1998 at the age of 33.
Today, MSD has branches in New York, Los Angeles, and West Palm Beach, Florida, which the wealthy people love. Investments are scattered in different industries such as real estate, internet, energy, catering, communications, finance, construction, and automobiles.
Family offices have some unique advantages when investing. In 2017, the 50-year-old American-based plastic container maker Ring Container was sold to MSD by the son of the founder, citing that the family office is a long-term investor, not just a financial investor who earns the difference.
SFO to MFO: Rockefeller evolution
Whether it’s just focusing on investment or the family “big housekeeper”-as long as it serves a family, it is called a single-family office. (SFO, The single-family office) .
Single family offices date back to the mid-19th century.
The modern industrialization of large-scale production and division of labor has separated capital and enterprises, and also separated personal wealth and individual business. The steel and dense fog of the industrial era created the world’s first top rich.
In 1882, John Rockefeller, 43, set up a family office to hire professionals, take care of assets and charity.
For more than a hundred years, the Rockefeller Family Office has maintained the family’s wealth and united the heirs. According to Forbes data, as of June 2016, the number of members of the Rockefeller family has reached 174.
1882 Rockefeller Standard Oil Company stock: de.wikipedia.org
In 1979, the Rockefeller Family Office began serving other wealthy families and transformed into a multi-family office. (MFO, The multi-family office) .
The transformation of Bessie Trust has been more successful.
1907 by Henry Phipps (Carnegie childhood playmate, Carnegie Steel’s second largest shareholder) founded Bessie Silent trust.
The name Bessmer Trust is a tribute to Henry Bessmer, a British metallurgist and inventor of the acid bottom-blow converter steelmaking method.
