I was targeting good real estate assets overburdened by excessive debt. Well, I began seeing similar scenarios unfold in the corporate world and real… - Sam Zell

There’s a line from an old movie, Wheeler Dealers: “You don’t go wheeling and dealing for the money, you do it for fun. Money’s just a way of keeping score.” And that’s how I see it. I’ve always been much more drawn to the experience.

Around the same time, Congress passed the Economic Recovery Tax Act. Among other things, it extended the life of net operating loss carry-forwards (NOLs) from seven to fifteen years. NOLs allow companies to offset their current year’s taxable income with past losses, thereby reducing current tax liability. The goal of the act was to help struggling companies recover and to enable their shareholders to benefit from the prior losses. We took a look at all of the public companies with large NOLs and found something surprising. These companies had virtually no change in share price as a result of the new legislation. The market was overlooking the significant value added through the extended life of NOLs. That presented us with an enormous opportunity to gain control of those NOLs and create holding companies for businesses whose profits would be shielded. If a company was trading at $3 a share for a total enterprise value of $45 million and it had $350 million in NOLs, we knew we could create profits that were sheltered and convert those NOLs (which were valued at $0) to roughly $100 million of cash, or 25 cents on the dollar over time. And that’s just what we did.

Sentimentality about an asset leads to a lack of discipline.