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This site has a lot of good educational information.

https://moneyfortherestofus.com/

I listened to the podcast on IEP. The podcast was from February, and IEP's stock price plunged in May. The decision on investing in IEP centers on 2 questions: do activist shareholders add value, and are the dividends sustainable. The author would not invest in IEP, because he prefers to do asset class investing, and is not particularly good at picking individual stocks. Determining if the dividend is sustainable is difficult.

The book's 10 questions are reasonable, and the podcast on Berkshire was interesting. (There is now a succession plan at Berkshire.)

There's also a book: "Money for the Rest of Us: 10 Questions to Master Successful Investing" by J. David Stein

Money for the Rest of Us Book Review, December 13, 2022
Chapter 1: What Is It?
Chapter 2: Is It Investing, Speculating, or Gambling?
Chapter 3: What Is the Upside?
Chapter 4: What Is the Down Side?
Chapter 5: Who Is on the Other Side of the Trade?
Chapter 6: What Is the Investment Vehicle?
Chapter 7: What Does It Take to Be Successful?
Chapter 8: Who Is Getting a Cut?
Chapter 9: How Does It Impact Your Portfolio?
Chapter 10: Should You Invest?
https://thecollegeinvestor.com/33171/money-for-the...

422: This Stock Has a 15% Dividend Yield and Has Outperformed Warren Buffett. Should You Invest? February 22, 2023
"Should you invest in Icahn Enterprises L.P., a conglomerate with a 15% dividend yield and a stake in Carl Icahn's hedge fund?.. We used the process that I used at my old firm to analyze money managers'we looked at the people, we looked at their investment process, and we looked at their performance."
https://moneyfortherestofus.com/422-carl-icahn/

242: Should You Let Warren Buffett Manage Your Money?, February 27, 2019
author wouldn't invest. red flags: lack of succession plan, too much AUM.
https://moneyfortherestofus.com/242-buffett/

"In May 2023 short seller Hindenburg Research released an analysis of Icahn's public company Icahn Enterprises that claims the company is over-valued due to paying large dividends using investments from new investors. In addition, the analysis claims that Icahn took out loans against a majority of his holdings and that these have the potential to be called should the stock price move downward. On the day of the release of this analysis the share price of Icahn Enterprises dropped by 20%"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Icahn

When Warren Buffett eventually is no longer Berkshire Hathaway CEO, Greg Abel will succeed him, May 3 2021
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/when-warren-buffet...

Avoiding IEP should have been easy. In the last 9 years on average, Shareholder Equity declined 4% per year and Shares Outstanding increased 12% per year. The good news is that because of the complicated corporate structure (LP Depositary Units Repr Units of LP Interests), IEP was not in most mutual funds. This was another red flag. (Maybe another question should be who else is investing.)

It is a bit concerning that moneyfortherestofus.com missed this. IEP was also picked by some SIP screens in 2022 ({Up_5%},{Up5X3},{Silver_Parachute}), but was not picked the week before the big drop on May 2nd. This might have just been luck.

          IEP        IEP     Berkshire   Berkshire
year  Equity[$B]  shares[M]  Equity[$B]  shares[M]
2013     13.3        112         224       1.64
2014     12.4        120         243       1.64
2015     10.0        127         259       1.64
2016      8.0        138         286       1.64
2017     11.4        161         352       1.64
2018     12.9        180         353       1.65
2019     10.9        200         429       1.64
2020      9.3        221         451       1.62
2021      9.3        260         515       1.53
2022      9.6        316         481       1.47
 
CAGR      -4%        12%         9%         -1%

           Ownership of BRK.A               % Total    % Total
                  Name                    Shares Held  Assets
          Fidelity® Contrafund®               1.29       9.38
  Fidelity Contrafund Commingled Pl 3         0.45       8.90
        Fidelity® Contrafund® K6              0.27       8.86
    Fidelity Advisor® New Insights I          0.11       5.01
   Vanguard Instl Ttl Stck Mkt Idx Tr         0.07       0.04
 
 
            Ownership of IEP                % Total    % Total
                  Name                    Shares Held  Assets
     Global X SuperDividend' US ETF           0.07       0.97
        Kinetics Paradigm No Load             0.06       1.33
    Fidelity® NASDAQ Composite Index®         0.05       0.09
Kinetics Small Cap Opportunities No Load      0.03       1.78
   Multi-Asset Diversified Income ETF         0.03       0.66

https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xnas/iep/owners...
https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xnys/brk.a/owne...

SI Pro Rankings 2023-04-28
https://discussion.fool.com/t/si-pro-rankings-2023...

SI Rankings 2022-08-26
http://www.datahelper.com/mi/search.phtml?nofool=y...

I listened to that episode also. I don't think he was bullish on the stock. I took him as being neutral to slightly bearish because the structure of the company was hard to understand and Carl Icahn is getting old.

Right, but he totally missed that IEP sold a significant number of new shares while paying a high dividend. These cancel each other out. There were plenty of red flags. 5-year average earnings yield is -3.85%. 5-year average free cash flow is negative. Revenues are down from $19B in 2013 to $14B in 2022. I think "maybe buy a little for the dividend" was bad advice ("Should you invest? I don't know... Perhaps you take a small position in Icahn Enterprises to collect the 15% dividend yield." at time 16:00 in the podcast).

Looking at S&P1500 equal weight screens since 1991, the best CAGR was with both lower Total Shareholder Equity and lower Shares Outstanding compared to 9 years earlier. The worst CAGR was lower Equity and higher Shares. Increased Equity (1229 out of 1393) and increased Shares (998 out of 1229) was the most common.

         Screen           CAGR  GSD  MDD  Sharpe  Depth
EquityDownSharesDown2023  13.5  22   -65   0.63    103
     SharesDown2023       12.3  20   -59   0.61    397
     EquityDown2023       12.0  24   -69   0.53    166
 EquityUpSharesDown2023   11.7  19   -58   0.59    294
    SP1500EqualWeight     11.5  22   -60   0.54   1393
      EquityUp2023        11.3  21   -59   0.54   1229
  EquityUpSharesUp2023    11.0  22   -60   0.51    935
      SharesUp2023        10.9  23   -61   0.51    998
 EquityDownSharesUp2023   8.1   30   -75   0.34     63

From 19910524 To 20230310
https://gtr1.net/2013/?~SP1500EqualWeight:h63f0.4:...
https://gtr1.net/2013/?~EquityUpSharesUp2023:h63f0...
https://gtr1.net/2013/?~EquityUpSharesDown2023:h63...
https://gtr1.net/2013/?~EquityDownSharesDown2023:h...
https://gtr1.net/2013/?~EquityDownSharesUp2023:h63...
https://gtr1.net/2013/?~SharesUp2023:h63f0.4::pref...
https://gtr1.net/2013/?~EquityDown2023:h63f0.4::pr...
https://gtr1.net/2013/?~SharesDown2023:h63f0.4::pr...
https://gtr1.net/2013/?~EquityUp2023:h63f0.4::pref...

"Though total shareholder yield might be something that does in fact work, it makes no economic sense. Buybacks don't increase the value of a stock... By seeking high numbers for the sum of divdends, buybacks, and [optionally] debt reduction, I suspect what the screen is really doing is finding firms that are generating more cash than they can profitably invest in growing the business. The only sensible things one can do in that situation is to pay out the surplus cash as dividends, pay down debt, or buy back shares. Since you're picking firms with "too much cash", it would not be a shocker that the screen beats a random selection of companies."
http://www.datahelper.com/mi/search.phtml?nofool=y...

Now that you gave more information, I agree with you. He did miss the red flags. He is so focused on analyzing asset classes, that he may have forgot how to analyze individual stocks. I think he is good at for example, saying that Japanese stocks are undervalued now.

More links on IEP make an interesting story. Reminds me of some of the shenanigans of the early 2000's, but on a smaller scale.

"Icahn Enterprises (IEP) is an ~$18 billion market cap holding company... Our research has found that IEP units are inflated by 75%... Most closed-end holding companies trade around or at a discount to their NAVs... As a result of the company's elevated unit price, its annual dividend rate equates to an absurd 50.5% of last reported indicative net asset value... The dividend is entirely unsupported by IEP's cash flow and investment performance, which has been negative for years. IEP's investment portfolio has lost ~53% since 2014. The company's free cash flow figures show IEP has cumulatively burned ~$4.9 billion over the same period... Given that the investment and operating performance of IEP has burned billions in capital, the company has been forced to support its dividend using regular open market sales of IEP units through at-the-market (ATM) offerings, totaling $1.7 billion since 2019."
https://hindenburgresearch.com/icahn/

"After the short report was released, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York inquired about the company's corporate governance, capitalization, securities offerings, dividends, valuation, marketing materials, due diligence, and other materials."
https://www.marketbeat.com/originals/is-this-the-c...

"We incurred $5,849,121 and $5,582,246 in audit fees and expenses from Grant Thornton LLP for 2022 and 2021, respectively."
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/81...

"Grant Thornton LLP is the sixth largest U.S. accounting and advisory organization."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Thornton_LLP

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