"I Own The Water:" A Fool's Brush With Donald Trump

Rule Breaker Investing

The Motley Fool

Business, Investing, Invest, Rulebreaker, Stocks, Company, Growth, Stockmarket, Fool, Foolish

4.5 • 928 Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2016

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1997 The Motley Fool publicly shorted Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts (DJT). In 1999, after the stock had dropped significantly, David got a call from the CEO, Nicholas Ribis. He invited a handful of Fools to Trump Tower in New York City to hear a defense of the business, and to meet The Donald in person. Here's what happened.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast with Motley Full Co-founder David Gardner.
0:07.0	And welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing.
0:12.0	Thanks for spending a little bit of your summer with us.
0:16.7	This week, it's going to be a little bit of storytelling.
0:19.5	It's actually probably one of our 10 greatest stories in full history.
0:23.7	Not that there is such a list, but since I've been all the way through the history, now about
0:27.7	23 years and counting.
0:28.9	As I think back on some of our great brushes and funny moments, I have to include our one encounter with
0:36.9	Donald Trump and what I learned from it.
0:40.0	And it's a story that I wrote down at the time.
0:43.1	In fact, we had opened up a short position in 1997.
0:47.2	Shorting Donald Trump's company, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts,
0:51.4	the ticker symbol was DJT. We had opened the short on April 30th of 1997 at about 8.
0:57.0	And by the late summer of 1999, a couple years later, it had dropped to below $5 a share.
1:06.3	It was an excellent short, especially in light of the stock market's performance, which
1:09.9	was raging over those two years.
1:12.1	The market rose more than 60% of at that same time.
1:15.8	So it was a very profitable short.
1:18.4	Now you might be wondering what portfolio am I talking about, just a little bit of history here. The Motley Fool the very first day we launched
1:24.7	online was on America online, August 4th of 1994. And on that very first day we said, here's $50,000 of our own real money and we think
1:36.5	average individual investors like ourselves can beat the market. We want you to be able to watch
1:41.2	what we're doing, transparently follow along.
	...

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