Hi friends,
Here are 3 ideas, 2 quotes, and 1 question from the life of Henry Singleton.
I.
Warren Buffett said Henry Singleton had the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. Charlie Munger said his results were a mile higher than anyone else's.
A dollar invested with him in 1963 was worth $180.94 by 1990 — 20.4% compounded, for twenty-seven years.
Outside professional investing, almost nobody knows the name. That was deliberate.
II.
Earnings per share has two parts: the earnings, and the shares. Every chief executive works the numerator — revenue, margin, acquisitions. Singleton worked the denominator.
Between 1972 and 1984 he took Teledyne's share count from 88 million to roughly 12 million. Operating earnings tripled across the same period. Earnings per share didn't triple — they rose about tenfold, from $1.64 to over $16, because he was shrinking the base faster than the business was growing.
In an era when executives measured themselves by revenue, headcount and number of divisions, he worked out that the most creative act available to him was making the company smaller.
This is Principle 2 of 12 in the full Henry Singleton playbook →
III.
Being right for twenty-seven years does not mean being bearable for twenty-seven years.
Teledyne's stock fell 75% from its late-1960s high. An investor who bought in 1966 was sitting on a 40% net loss by 1974. Singleton, who almost never spoke to Wall Street, did not go out and explain himself.
The record Buffett admired was only legible at the end. Everyone who lived through the middle of it had to decide, repeatedly, whether to keep backing a man who wouldn't talk to them.
"If everyone's doing them, there must be something wrong with them."
— Henry Singleton, 1997, to Leon Cooperman
"His results are a mile higher than anyone else… utterly ridiculous."
— Charlie Munger
One question: Are you growing the numerator because it's right, or because it's the number other people can see?
Cheers,
Alex
P.S. Every issue distills one playbook from the Research Library — 810 of history's greatest people and companies, sourced.
