Why tycoon Arturo Moreno is buying Amazon, AT&T and JP Morgan

By John Hyatt

Baseball magnate Arturo Moreno first bought shares in Alphabet and Amazon six years ago after his daughter “convinced” him to invest in the two tech giants. With share prices falling in recent weeks, Moreno saw a buying opportunity. So, in May, he bought an additional 3,000 shares of Alphabet, increasing his stake to 13,000 shares – currently valued at about $31 million. Moreno also increased his stake in Amazon, with his stake now worth $9 million.

“I love that we use these companies’ products every day,” Moreno told Forbes, explaining the rationale behind his investment moves. “Does a day go by that we don’t use Google? And almost every day, a gift from Amazon arrives at our door.”

Moreno, a conservative price-to-earnings investor, says he has about $780 million in cash or cash equivalents, while his holdings are worth just over $300 million in stocks. Beyond Alphabet and Amazon, Moreno has long shown a preference for value stocks that pay quarterly dividends. “My moves were towards cheaper prices and good dividends,” he explains.

Moreno recently increased his largest holding, JP Morgan, by buying 25,000 shares in March and another 25,000 in May. He now owns 375,000 shares of the bank, worth about $43 million. He also has Morgan Stanley shares worth about $12 million and stakes in oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron. Moreno says his investment portfolio yields $11-12 million a year in dividends.

“With inflation galloping and people looking for safe havens over the next 12-18 months, you’ll see more and more people turning to more stable, better-yielding stocks,” he reckons.

Good dividends were what prompted Moreno to buy an additional 100,000 AT&T shares in May. His share is now worth about $26 million. Moreno isn’t missing Verizon either. The reasoning behind the confidence he showed in the two largest wireless networks in the US is the same as in the cases of Alphabet and Amazon: “Everybody has a cell phone” – simple logic.

Moreno, 77, first made his fortune from a billboard management company. In 1999, he sold Outdoor Systems to Infinity Broadcasting for $8.7 billion, with himself earning $1.4 billion from the deal. Today, a large part of Moreno’s fortune is the Los Angeles Angels, which he bought for about $184 million in 2003. The Major League Baseball team is now worth about $2 billion, including debt, Forbes estimates, with its valuation has increased by 9% in a year, while Moreno has increased his fortune 11-fold in less than two decades.

“The team’s shares have soared,” Moreno notes, attributing the fact to Americans looking for more entertainment outside after too long of staying at home due to the pandemic. “For us in the baseball industry, it’s all about bringing people to the ballpark.”

Real estate is another favorite asset of Moreno’s. He owns about $500 million worth of land, shopping centers and apartment buildings throughout Phoenix, a fast-growing US city, and in southern California. “We’ve been getting crazy offers on our properties,” Moreno says, noting the increased demand for real estate investments. “I think a bubble has been created.”

However, he believes the real estate market still has room to move. He is still looking for opportunities. “I think for the next 36-48 months, I’m going to focus on real estate,” he says. “I think there will be buying opportunities.”

Moreno began investing in land and real estate after selling his billboard management company in 1999. It’s an asset class he’s long been bullish on, but is now becoming even more bullish as the Federal Reserve tightens monetary policy her. “For young people, I always suggest that they buy something that belongs to them – at least partially,” he explains. “Buy a piece of rock,” I tell them.

Moreno’s most “famous” real estate deal – to purchase Angel Stadium from the city of Anaheim in 2019 and an adjacent 150-acre parcel of land – collapsed in June as former Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu became the focus of an investigation of the FBI on corruption related to the stadium deal. The Anaheim City Council voted unanimously to cancel the transaction. The “wreck” was a “strictly political decision,” insists Moreno, who declined to elaborate. Moreno is a longtime donor to the Republican Party and supported both of Donald Trump’s presidential bids.

Despite the collapse of the stadium deal, Moreno is happy to have gotten back the $50 million he had put down as a guarantee, which has added to his cash. He now waits to see if the Federal Reserve will be able to tame inflation: “I think in the next 24 to 36 months, we will find opportunities to invest in stocks again. Maybe even sooner, in 12 to 18 months,” he says. .

His timelines seem a bit vague, since Moreno doesn’t claim to be a market expert. “It’s almost impossible to hit the bottom and it’s almost impossible to hit the top,” says the billboard billionaire turned baseball mogul, summarizing his investment philosophy in this sentence: “You just have to ask yourself: am I willing to hold a stock long term;”