Speaker 1a lot of being successful as an investor is finding an investment's philosophy that fits your own emotional makeup such that you can be rational when you are wrong. I'm wrong a lot. This is a humbling business. When I am wrong and it's because of something I hadn't considered or a risk I was unaware of, that made it hard for me to be rational. But when the stock went down and it was a risk I had considered, stocks always go down more than you expect. It was much easier for me to be rational and make high quality decisions when I'm wrong, which I think is a lot of what being an investor comes down to. That's very important. As an investor, you have to either panic early or double down late. And you have to be one of the two. It's hard to be both. For me, I'm a double down late person. I'm always buying stocks on the 52-week low list. It makes me uncomfortable when a name is in the consensus. Sometimes consensus is right, but it's important to me to be contrarian. I'm Ted Seides, and
Speaker 2this is Capital Allocators. An AI may be second to none, but our conversation barely touches that space. We begin with Gavin's upbringing, intellectual curiosity, and path into investing, before turning to the beliefs that shape his approach. We explore his view that investing is a search for truth, best pursued through debate, intellectual honesty, and a willingness to be wrong, and why people, culture, execution, and risk management matter more than investment process in driving long-term performance. We then turn to the application of those beliefs at Atreides, where Gavin emphasizes the importance of deep fundamental understanding, hypothesis-driven research, and culture that rewards constructive disagreement. We discuss how crossover investing can create informational and behavioral advantages, particularly in AI, and how portfolio construction in both hedge funds and venture capital can narrow the gap between insight and performance. Before we get going, Capital Allocators seems to reach a sufficiently large audience to create all kinds of serendipity. Here's my 16-year-old son, Eric, to share an example.
Speaker 3I was hanging out with my friend, and his dad was super mad at us for being so loud. He told us we should quiet down and learn something. He then asked me, do you listen to any podcasts? And I said no, but I probably should, given who my dad is. He then goes, here's one. The guy asked a lot of really cool, important questions. The podcast he was holding was called The Capital Allocators, and it was a really cool, important question. I was holding on his phone, none other than Capital Allocators. I sighed in annoyance because this has happened before, and I asked for his phone and started playing the Ben Hunt episode from June 2024. If you don't remember, that's the last time I did the spread the word. The sound of my voice made his jaw fall completely to the floor. Even after showing off to my friend's dad, I'm still not going to listen to this podcast, but you definitely should. Apparently, all the rich, smart dads are doing it. If you want to be rich, you should too. If you already are rich, don't worry. Tell your poor friends about this podcast. They're going to get a lot out of it. Thank you so much for spreading the word. Capital Allocators is
Speaker 2brought to you by AlphaSense. Here's something for you. Most AI tools today are very good at sounding right. But can you actually trace it back to a filing, transcript, or specific passage that drove the answer? Or are you just trusting the confidence of the output? For allocators, that's not a minor concern. A missed filing, incorrect source, or context that gets lost somewhere in a retrieval chain aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. AlphaSense is the AI platform built specifically for this. They own the content, over 500 million curated documents from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls. And they own the retrieval layer on top of it. That means every answer can link back to an exact verifiable source. Because the answer is only as good as what's underneath it. And with AlphaSense, you know exactly what that is. See it for yourself. Try a free trial at alpha-sense.com slash capital. That's alpha-sense.com with a hyphen in the middle slash capital. Capital Allocators is also brought to you by Morningstar. In a sea of data, you need to know what you can trust. Morningstar's data, analytics, and research helps bring clarity across public and private markets, connecting independent research and data into the tools and AI platforms you use every day. So insights are easier to spot and act on. Morningstar. Nothing in your way. Visit morningstar.com slash game on to learn more. Morningstar.com slash game on to learn more. Morningstar.com So you can unlock operational alpha. That's why thousands of GPs trust Juniper Square. Learn more at junipersquare.com slash capital allocators. As a disclaimer, I'm both an LP and an advisor to Atreides. So I'm a little biased in my suspicion that you will really enjoy this conversation with Gavin Baker. Gavin, so excited to do this with you. Yeah, I'm likewise excited, Ted. I'm dying to know.
Speaker 1What were you like as a kid? I was very competitive, but I was terrible at sports. Pick last for every team. Always. I was very into Dungeons and Dragons. Like I remember a signature honor was being appointed the dungeon master by the outgoing dungeon master. He was going to his freshman year of high school and I was in fifth grade. I was just so proud to be the youngest dungeon master. I was always into history, the news, current events, I loved military history, love playing chess, love playing this game, Stratego. I remember how bad I felt the first time I beat my dad at both Stratego and chess. I wasn't particularly social until I got to high school. Then I became very social. That served me well. When I got to college, people were going crazy because it was the first time they'd gone to a big party. And I was like, wow, I was doing this stuff when I was a freshman in high school. Maybe I'll go crack open a book at a library. I had a pretty, pretty good time. I was doing this stuff when I was a freshman in free range childhood. I was able to do what I wanted in the summers. I was very lucky. I grew up relatively privileged. My parents gave me an unlimited book budget. As a family, we'd go to bookstores every two weeks and we'd spend hours there and I'd stack books up. Also, there wasn't a lot of structure to my summers. I spent most of the summers at my grandparents' house in the Texas Hill Country, which was an incredible experience growing up with all my cousins. If I was there for seven or eight weeks, maybe my parents were there for in total 20 of those days. Some of the weekends, it was a six hour drive from where I lived. So I grew up with all my cousins sleeping in a screened-in porch, going fishing, searching for arrowheads, running around. Tennis was very important to me. There happened to be a public swim club sports complex. And I went there and there was a racket and a ball and I just started hitting it against the wall. That was my first experience with tennis. I was an athletician because I could practice my way into being good. I realized junior year of high school that there was no hope of me playing even division three college tennis and I gave it up. But I think that was the first time other than something like chess or Stratego that my competitiveness had an outlet. The unlimited book budget.
Speaker 2Curious how you learned to learn.
Speaker 1Strangely enough, I got very into military technology. There's those black composer, books, they're this big, they're black and white and they have papers. And I probably filled 50 of those. I was into the thrust to weight ratio of various planes and I redesigned the F-15 with a canard, a different radar, and then these Rolls-Royce engines instead of Pratt & Whitney. Strange I didn't end up becoming an engineer given all of that. I read a tremendous amount about history. I read a vast amount of fantasy and science fiction, which I think shapes a lot of who I am today and I still continue to do that. The conversations around the dinner table with my family were always about ideas, books, things that people had read. We'd go on family vacations and we'd go skiing. You have a dinner and then the last three hours of the night, we would sit in the living room as a family and read. The first time I went on vacation with someone else's family, I was like, wow, people talk a lot and they're talking about different things that I was used to. Arguments were a really big thing. And my family, my parents would both lawyers. Arguing with them was always encouraged.
Speaker 2That blend of competitive vibe often in childhood education gets filtered into grades. A lot of what you talked about in learning has nothing to do with what you learned at school. I was curious your perspective on that.
Speaker 1I don't think I got very good grades in high school. The classes weren't meaningful to me. I found what I was doing my own pursuits much more interesting. I was lucky enough to be a good standardized test taker. That helped me get into college despite my grades. A big thing that changed my life, I went to Dartmouth College. I had no business going to Dartmouth given the grades I had. I'd been the captain of the tennis team and the president of debate club or whatever. There was a kid at my high school in my junior year. He was a little different. He was 6'7", 6'8", a big guy. He got relentlessly teased and bullied. I think this shaped a lot of my life because for sure I think I would have had a different path. Had I not gone to Dartmouth, one day there was a pickup area where you waited to be picked up. I was a junior, so I was driving myself to and from high school. I saw this group of freshmen teasing this huge kid. I didn't think anything of it. I was just like, hey, don't do that. That's not cool. Never do that again. The next day, one of my best friends in high school was the captain of the basketball team, captain of the football team. I invited this kid to come sit with us. Every month, come sit with us. Never thought anything about it. Senior fall, I get an alumni interview for Dartmouth, which I think was a little surprising to the guidance counselor. A really big man sits down across from me, and I'm not thinking anything. He's like, Gavin, do you know who I am? I'm like, sir, I don't. I'm so sorry. They didn't give me your name beforehand. He's like, well, I'm the guy who's going to change your life because you changed my son's life. It was the parent of that kid. He's like, I'm the president. I'm the president of the Greater Texas Dartmouth Alumni Association. I've never asked for anything, and you're going to Dartmouth.
Speaker 2I was like, okay. As you went through school, what led you into finance?
Speaker 1It was complete coincidence. In college, the most important thing to me by far was rock climbing. I became more serious about my grades, but rock climbing dominated my life. My plan was, I'm going to go climb. The best seasons to climb are fall and spring, because the rock's not too hot. If it's too cold, you can't grip it. If it's too hot, it's slippery. Spring and fall are when you really want to climb. I was going to climb full-time spring and the fall. I was going to be a ski bum in the winter. I ski bummed at the Goldminer's Daughter at Alta. I was such a screw-up. I went there with a bunch of kids from Dartmouth. Everybody else got rapidly promoted. I stayed at the most junior level of housekeeper the whole time. I was the guy who had to clean the toilets because I'm a little absent-minded. I was going to be a ski bum in the winter, work on a river in the summer, climb, live out of the back of a pickup truck, try and write a novel, maybe write something about history, be a wildlife photographer. I was into photography at one point. You could save enough money working as a ski bum on a river to support yourself in those shoulder seasons. A lot of people do it. My parents were like, this is an amazing plan. We've never asked you for anything, but just do one professional internship. The only internship I could get was in finance here in Boston, working for Donaldson, Lufkin, and Jean Rhett. I worked for. The head broker, the number two producer in the office. Every day, a bunch of research would be produced, and we'd get these big stacks of nicely bound paper research reports. My job was to look at which clients owned them, and then put them in an envelope and mail them to the client. As part of that, I'd started reading every report, and I got so into it. It was everything I loved. It was competitiveness. It was history. It was current events. It was understanding risks. Risk is a big part of rock climbing, accurately calculating it. I have to think about things I learned about risk a lot in the context of investing. I started reading these. I loved it. I'll never forget, I had to write a 20-page thing at the end, and I wrote up Cisco in 1996. I presented it to everybody, and everybody was like, yeah, but it's already been such a good stock. How could it go up any further? It's got 20X in the next four years. Being the arms dealer to the internet, I was fascinated with me, and I knew how important the internet was, because Dartmouth had email. They called it Blitzmail. I was very familiar with all of that. I came back to Dartmouth. I changed my major from history and English to history and economics, started the hedge fund, the traded options, never looked back. Started reading the Wall Street Journal every day. That fall that I spent at DLJ, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the basement of a woman's house in Cambridge. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the basement of a woman's house in Cambridge. Every day, I'd take the red line home, get off at Harvard Square. There's the people who you can play chess for money. I'd love to beat one of them. No chance. I'd play one of them, and then I'd go home, cook myself Kraft mac and cheese, and read about investing. I read Buffett's letters to his shareholders. I read both Peter Lynch books. I found this great book that we still use here that helped me understand accounting. Taught myself how to build a model, and that was how it worked. I remember I printed out the Motley Fool message boards. There was this guy, Dale Wettlaufer. He talked a lot about return on invested capital and incremental returns on incremental invested capital. That was so powerful for me. I never looked back, then had a series of finance internships. I was interviewing with Soros and Tiger. I'd interviewed at Goldman Sachs for investment banking. They said, hey, we see your SAT score. You're not dumb. They're like, we see you've gotten bad grade, and I forget what, maybe geology. I don't know what it was. I'm like, listen, if I'm not interested in something, I struggle to apply myself. They're like, well, when investment banking, a lot of it is doing really boring, detailed work that has to be done well. I'm like, well, it doesn't sound like it's for me. I'd gotten a job in Goldman Equity Research. I was thinking about all these things. I didn't always go to class, so I relied on Fred's notes before an economics test. They're like, hey, man, we just heard this Fidelity pitch, and it sounds incredible for you. I interviewed them the next day, and this was the first time I learned about the buy side. I said, well, I have these exploding offers from Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. They explode in two days. The Fidelity guy was like, don't worry about them. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, I'm going to tell you they're not going to explode. I'm like, no, they've told me they're going to explode. He's like, listen, if at noon tomorrow, you still believe they're going to explode, you give me a call, but we went to Boston two weeks, and these offers aren't going to explode. The guy's name was Steve Calahood. He's a great guy. The next day, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers called me. They say, you have as much time as you want. Your offers are no longer exploding. I was like, oh. I think had I gone to work anywhere other than Fidelity, I would not have had a successful career in finance. I profoundly believe that. What was it about Fidelity that led you to believe that? At Fidelity, you joined out of college. You don't work for anyone. They give you a group of 30 stocks. They give you the phone number of the IR, the email address of the IR, how much Fidelity owns, and percentage and dollar terms of each name. They give you three monitors, and they say, go. That's very different than anywhere else where you work for someone. I don't think I would have done that great working directly for someone. I can't tell you how incredible it is. There's a one-month training program, and it's really good, but then you just get this list of stocks. The only thing you're judged on is results. Sometimes people there believe it's political, but it is ultimately very meritocratic. Sometimes it takes three, five years for meritocracy to assert itself, but it was incredible. Your job is your buys need to outperform yourselves. Ideally, your buys outperform the market, and the measured spread, value added on each side relative to the market, then they measured your impact, how you changed Fidelity's holdings. You can go do the job however you want. If you want to be one of these people who's always on the phone to other people on the buy side, okay, as long as it works. If you want to be the world's best modeler, live in a world of 10 Ks and 10 Qs, great. If you want to constantly be on the road, if you want to go to every relevant convention, and there was an unlimited travel budget in those days, which is wild, you can do that. If you want to do continuous channel checks, if you're the retail analyst and your process is you just want to drive around, go to every Best Buy you can, great. All you have to do is generate results. You have this incredible freedom and independence, and then it's combined with, because Fidelity, they run money in every discipline, value, growth, core, income, small cap, mid cap, large cap. They have sector funds for each thing. And as an analyst, you have to service all of those PMs. You have to learn what will resonate with each PM, and you begin to find the philosophy that resonates with you. I'll never forget Joel Tillinghast, great value investor. I went in and I covered the whole thing. I said, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. These capacitor companies that were wildly over-earning, Joel owned one. And I was like, listen, the earnings are about to crater. You don't want to own these names at a cyclical peak when they're really cheap, because tech cyclicals are different than normal cyclicals. Normal cyclicals, you get peak multiples, trough fundamentals. Tech, it's not quite the same. Makes for a lot more vol. But even so, everybody understood that capacitors were obviously wildly over-earning. And Kemet, K-E-M-E-T, I think it was a four times earnings. I went into job Joel, and is like, man, you need to sell this. Their earnings are going to go down 80%. And he's like, well, let's do something. Let's look at their assets. Let's look at their equity. Let's look over the last 10 years, 15 and 20 years, what their average ROA and ROE is. And then we'll generate their normalized earnings. And I'm four months out of college. And he's like, I'm on those normalized earnings. I think it's pretty cheap. And you're probably right. The stock is going to go down, but I've owned it for a really long time. I have a low cost basis and I'm going to live with this wall. You have experience after experience like that with different fund managers, which I think is really healthy because a lot of people come into investing, they're steeped in Buffett and they're super convinced that that's the only way to do it. By the way, everything is downstream of Buffett. In the English language, 99% of good quotes are from Shakespeare. 1% are from Winston Churchill. And there's essentially nothing else. Overstatement. I'm investing Buffett is 95%. And then there's Peter Landshu's 4%. Then a bunch of other people for the 1%. It's important to be exposed to all these things because you come in steeped in value and steeped in Buffett and steeped in Benjamin Graham. Everybody's read The Intelligent Investor. Everybody knows chapters 8 and 20 are the most important chapters. That's not the right philosophy for a lot of people. A lot of being successful as an investor is finding an investments philosophy that fits your own investment. And that's what I'm doing. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. emotional makeup such that you can be rational when you are wrong.
Speaker 2As you were exposed to all this, what became the investment philosophy that matches your own disposition?
Speaker 1A few things. Steve Weimer, Steve's approach was to always do the work himself, to not rely on the analyst. Rather than expect the analyst to deliver ideas in alpha for you, to go understand the company really well, to go to every analyst day, to go to every relevant trade show, to do your own legwork, to read every relevant transcript. That was most formative for me because what helps me be rational when I am wrong is feeling like I have a high knowledge level on the company. I'm wrong a lot. And as a result of that, I didn't care whether the analysts at Fidelity got their stocks right or wrong. It was utterly immaterial to how I evaluated analysts. There's an analyst, he consistently had some of the worst stock picking metrics in the department. But I made a vast amount of money with that guy because he always laid out all of the facts, even importantly, the ones that suggested his rating might be wrong. And he would always lay out very clearly the bull and the bear arguments. Here are the three bullish lenses through which people view the stock. Here are the three bearish lenses. He would happen to pretty consistently pick the wrong one. It was incredible. And I think that was the way I was able to do it. That was the way a lot of my colleagues on the growth team who imbued Steve's philosophy of doing your own work. That was what was important to us. Be on top of the facts. Show us the second. There is a new fact that's important because investing is a Bayesian endeavor. You have a Bayesian probability space of expected outcomes. The data points should fit within that. And then if there's a data point outside that, that's what you have to super focus. If a data point's inside the probability space, it's less urgent than if it's outside. The second thing, there's a woman named Jennifer Urich, who's one of my closest friends, just like Steve. Her big thing, and it's so true, as an investor, you have to either panic early or double down late. And then the third one is Will Danoff. A lot of people feel biased to be consistent. If you've been buying a stock every day for 100 days and the facts change, it's hard to turn around and type into the order management system, S-A, sell all. And Will was a true master of being totally dispassionate. He didn't care what he did yesterday. When the facts change, I change my mind. I change my mind. I change my mind. I change my mind. That's John Maynard Keynes, but not many people can do it. Going back to that Bayesian probability space, when there's something that lands outside of that, it changes the thesis. You have to react.
Speaker 2So in those three examples, there are threads of growth investing versus value. Joel Tillinghast is the value guy you're pitching, getting out of a value stock. There's threads of value wanting to double down late. Where did you see yourself on the stylistic spectrum in addition to wanting to know the companies really well? At the end of the day, everything
Speaker 1is downstream of value. It's not this great value versus growth debate. This is something that's often misunderstood. When a growth investor owns something at 60 times earnings, it's not like they believe in the greater fool theory. Instead, what you think is that in three years or maybe five years, it's a high quality business. And on your numbers out that far, it's at eight times earnings. And it should probably be valued 25. So it's a triple. Growth investors tend to have more out of consensus estimates. Warren Buffett's famous statement is the price you pay determines your return. I would modify that and say the price you pay determines your return for a given business outcome. That's a very important modification. If you're paying 40 times earnings and the company is actually going to compound their earnings at a high rate over time, which is possible with a lot of these great growth stocks where they have low margins because they've been investing. And then you go into a period where the revenue growth maybe slows a little, but the operating margins explode. But I don't know a single growth investor with good numbers who isn't extremely sensitive to valuation. John Hempton's a famous value guy, short seller. He wrote this thing about an investment memo. It should be eight to 10 pages. Valuation should be two sentences at the end. It's that complicated. If you've been doing this long enough, you can do a DCF in your head really quick. If you've been doing this more than five years and you can't instantly do a DCF in your head, this is the wrong business for you. People are not confused about valuation. And I do think this is why a lot of fundamentally based value strategies have struggled for a long time. Because the alpha in those strategies was being willing to own these stocks that other people were embarrassed to own because they were so out of favor. And you didn't have that different of an opinion on the future business outcome. You just were willing to tolerate six to nine months of pain, owning something really out of favor, and then it would mean revert. The problem is when algorithms and quantitative investors came in, they took all that alpha because they don't feel embarrassment. They don't feel shame. They don't feel emotion. And that's why a lot of human-driven fundamental value strategies really struggled, have struggled for a long time. And the alpha in the market as a Earnings estimates or free cash flow estimates or whatever metric you choose that are materially different from consensus and being right.
Speaker 2The three people you talked about effectively had their whole career at Fidelity. You were on that path. At what point in time did you decide you wanted to do your own thing?
Speaker 1I did my first venture deal in 2001. I was on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show and I met this company. They could do something called RF on CMOS. At that time, most Wi-Fi chips were made with very specialized, more expensive materials. They could do it on the standard silicon. This is going to be amazing. And I said, man, when are you going to go public? I can't wait to invest. Because I was at Fidelity. The CEO had heard that this Fidelity guy was at the booth asking about how to invest. And a sales guy eventually comes out of whatever, you know, at CES. People are in these rooms. And he's like, well, you can invest right now. We're looking to raise a round. And I'm like. But you're private. He's like, well, you can still invest. So I call up Weimer. And I'm like, man, I think this is really exciting. And he's like, oh, yeah, RF on CMOS, Wi-Fi. That's going to be amazing. It's going to change the world. You have a lot of unusual experiences as a young person at Fidelity. Because sometimes you own 15% of a company. You're the most important shareholder. And you're 22 or 23. And you're sitting down with the CEO. So anyway, as I go to this room in New York. And it was at a law firm's office. And I was by myself. And there's this giant team. It's the management team. They've hired a banker. It's their lawyer. And we're there to negotiate the terms. They say, hey, we think this is the price we want. And I'm like, no, that's not the price. This is a fair price. I'm not going to pay an unfair price. And they're like, OK. And I was like, I have to go meet with a big public company where we own $800 million worth of it. We need to wrap this up quick. I wasn't even negotiating. That was just the truth. We were only going to put $30 million into this company or $50. And I was going to be late to see the CEO of a company where he owned $1 billion worth of stock. I was like, guys, I don't have a lot of time. Let's either do this or not. And then they're like, well, what kind of terms do you want? And I'm like, the standard ones. And they're like, well, what kind of preferences do you want? What kind of liquidation preferences? I had no idea what they were. And I was like, I just want the standard ones. And then they sent over a term sheet. The Fidelity attorney got involved the next day and explained it all to me. And then I reengaged with Venture right around the time Allen and company started bringing growth stage equity opportunities to big mutual fund managers, which is so important to own Facebook privately in 2010. From that point on, I became very involved in Fidelity's Venture efforts. I was getting more into this and it was more exciting. It was becoming clear to me that doing public and private investing together was a big advantage. So, for instance, there is this company, Roku, no VCs would fund it because every venture capitalist was worried about competition from Amazon, Google and Apple. I was like, well, I'm really familiar with those companies competing with Roku. It is not on their top 50 list of priorities. It's not like the A-team is being staffed on. And I think there's a room for a connected TV box. They had a great UI. The founder, Anthony Wood, was great. We led three rounds in a row at Roku. Made plenty of mistakes as well. I did invest in WeWork. They pushed the price and I did cut my order in half. Never did anymore. The best of my memory. But it's not like it was all roses or successes. But I really liked it. A venture fund, a hedge fund. I got excited about them. They felt like my calling. I had become passionate about the products. So I told my boss, it makes sense for me to leave.
Speaker 2So you go to launch Atreides. How did you think about bringing the best of what you saw, both from yourself and Fidelity, to a firm?
Speaker 1When we started, I had a couple of ideas. I do think being at Fidelity for 18 years was an advantage because I saw a lot of different regimes for how you compensate analysts and PMs. Probably most big asset management firm changes the way they pay people. Every three to five years. And it's really hard. You got to find a balance between accountability and incentivizing risk-taking. I had participated in the hiring decisions for hundreds of people. And I'd seen how those people had worked out as analysts. Like anything, repetition and seeing a lot of film helps.
Speaker 2What were some of the things that you learned about how to interview analysts well to get at good outcomes?
Speaker 1Point number one, when I started, I thought there was way too big of a bias for people. Point number two, I thought there was way too big of a bias for people. Point number three, I thought there was way too big of a bias for people. Point number four, I thought there was way too big of a bias for people. Point number five, I thought there was way too big of a bias for people. Point number six, I thought there was way too big of a bias for people. I played college sports or been a fighter pilot in the Navy. And I was like, hey, we need to have room for a violinist. In today's world, actually having played sports is an advantage or done anything where there's objective outcomes. For a lot of children, they've lived in a world of participation trophies and great inflation. They haven't been confronted with losing, with an empirical reality where they're wrong. Having participated in a competitive endeavor is now more important to me than it was. Having a tremendous amount of passion. And curiosity is important. And again, I think investing is interesting enough that you can take somebody who has a demonstrated history of competitive success, hard work, passion, curiosity, and a lot of those people will succeed in investing because it is so inherently interesting. I was a little less sensitive to experience. But then a lot of it is I would always ask people, tell me about sometimes when you were really wrong and how you made a decision. And then I would ask everyone. Tell me what your favorite class was and the three most interesting things you learned in it. And if you didn't have a good answer to that, you probably weren't that passionate. And even though I was an indifferent student, there were some classes that I was passionate about. I loved my class on the Iliad and the Odyssey. I loved my class on romantic poetry. I loved my class on behavioral finance. I loved my class on macro. You don't have to be interested in everything, but you have to be really interested in something. And then you have to be really curious. Tell me 10 things you've learned in the last. Three months, because if you're a curious person, you should always be learning. So I look for curiosity, passion, and try to tease out this ability to be rational when wrong. That's, I think, the hardest thing to do.
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Speaker 1place where I do think investing is the search for truth and truth alpha generation is. Truth comes out through discourse and discussion. You become friends with people you work with and you don't want to make an analyst look bad in front of you. it's the way we draft players. It's the way we evaluate players and trade for them. It's the training facilities we have. It's the offense we have. Tex Winter's triangle offense. It's a system. We have an organizational edge. Well, after Michael Jordan left, they never won another championship. That is a truth that a lot of allocators struggle with because it feels safe and good to say, oh, wow, there's a process and it's repeatable. By the way, you have to have a process and you have to have the process that works for you. But any process that's repeatable that generates significant alpha, it's a very competitive world. It's going to quickly be armed away. In fundamental investing, any process-driven advantage just isn't going to last. So where does the repeatable performance come from? I would just submit that any investment organization, no matter how big, they're somewhere between two and 10 people. And if you took those people out and the organization had the exact same process, the results would be very different. I always think of idea generation as a very funny concept because particularly as a crossover investor, there should be no new ideas if I'm doing my job well. You should have a defined universe where we have a very high knowledge level and you should be aware of the fundamentals. And then the fundamentals drive the valuation, the places where you have the biggest gaps to consensus. And ideally, the stock's cheap on both consensus numbers and dramatically cheaper on your numbers. That's where you hunt and vice versa for shorts. I think of the most important edge as recruiting, training, and retaining a great team and then going, back to that pilot co-pilot, having an internal process such that we get the most out of our combined insights. For me, execution is the gap between our performance and the performance we could have had based on the quality of our insights. I make an effort to measure that every year and every year get better. That's incumbent on me. As a portfolio manager, and it's incumbent on the analyst. We're a team on each stock, and it's our job to deliver the best outcome on that stock, given what we know. And then the rest of the team is there to be additive to that discussion and debate. Kaizen is a word that we often use here. And my goal is to get a little bit better at execution every year.
Speaker 2If you bring all of those insights, the ideas, the team together, ultimately comes into construction of a portfolio. Let's talk about the liquid side for now. How did you think about building a portfolio at Atreides that had shorts that you weren't involved with at Fidelity and a bunch of different levers that go into driving returns?
Speaker 1The only thing everybody who ran a hedge fund said to me, and these are hedge fund luminaries, is, "Listen, Gavin, you are going to hear from every allocator that shorting stocks is very different from a long only, and you should be cautious and learn to short." He said, "It is super important that you ignore them. There's no difference except for the risk, but the same principles apply. If you're good at buying stocks, you're going to be good at shorting stocks. Now, you have to understand the risk differently." That was the second thing. I've had such a lucky career. I was so lucky to be assigned small and mid-cap semis in the year 2000. Another really lucky thing that happened to me, I took over my first fund, I think I was 25 years old. I went down 700 basis points relative in my first month. It's a lot. I'm like, "Oh, my God, I clearly have no idea what I am doing." Fidelity had just hired a team of quantitative researchers. There was a lot of skepticism back then about the quants. They asked to schedule a meeting with me, and these are like people with PhDs, and they say all this stuff to me about how to think about risk and constructor portfolio and size decisions and selection for sizing. I was like, "Oh, my God, this is awesome." I was like, "Well, when is the next time I can meet with you guys?" They're like, "Well, to be honest, not many people want to meet with us, so we're excited to meet with you as much as you want." I met with this team of quants for one or two hours a day, every day, for more than a year. I read the Bayer book on factor risks. I got used to thinking in terms of vol adjusting position sizes, but after a rough start, that background and thinking about that, I was like, "Oh, my God, this is awesome." I was like, "Oh, my God, this is awesome." I was like, "Oh, my God, this is awesome." I was like, "Oh, my God, this is awesome." I was like, "Oh, my God, this is awesome." I was like, "Oh, my God, this is awesome." I was like, "Oh, my God, this is awesome." I was like, "Oh, my God, this is awesome." I was like, "Oh, risk and portfolio construction from a quantitative lens helped me make this transition. Because it's not the dynamics of shorting that are different in terms of what makes stocks go up or down. It's the risk. Because they can go up infinitely. You have to manage short squeezes, crowding. One of our clients had this great phrase, there's three risks for a hedge fund, LLC, liquidity, leverage, concentration. I now say LLCC, liquidity, leverage, concentration, crowding. Understanding all of those was maybe a little easier for me because of that incredible education I got from those quants who I'm so grateful to. Where did that land
Speaker 2you in terms of the gross net exposures that you like running?
Speaker 1If you're going to run a high gross, the most essential thing that you have to manage is basis risk. Basis risk is when your longs and your shorts are not correlated. So quantitatively, if you're a hedge fund, you're going to have to manage your longs and your shorts. If you're a hedge fund, you're going to have to manage your longs and your shorts. And you run a levered long book and a net exposure over zero, the most important factor for your returns is long short spread. You can generate an immense amount of long short spread by being long names that are uncorrelated. You can't be long a stock like GM and be short Tesla. From a quantitative perspective, that makes no sense. If you're long growth and short value, that's equally painful. If you're long value and short growth, that means you're just levered value. If you're long growth and short value, you're just levered growth. So if we're going to run with a high gross, it was important to me to try and generate long short spread in stocks that were quantitatively and fundamentally similar. If you do that, you can lever that up. And then that's how you get a sharp ratio that's ahead of the index. That's a hedge fund.
Speaker 2Typically, a long short fund makes people spend more time on the shorts than the longs as a result. I'm curious, what drives the hypothesis? Is it a long idea and then you're looking at the shorts to balance it? Is it a short idea that then you have to find longs to balance?
Speaker 1Both. Yeah. An alpha short without a funding long is hazardous to any hedge funds. The allocators always ask about alpha shorts, particularly as a contrarian. There's nothing more emotionally satisfying than being short a name that's a consensus long. And being right, alpha shorts are great. You just have to have a funding long against them. If you're going to run with an unlevered long book, maybe it's a little bit different. This is another thing about hedge funds that are underappreciated. If you're going to run with an unlevered long book under 100, then short alpha is irrelevant. All that matters is your shorts must make money. Full stop. How do you think about position sizing? I think of position sizing as being conviction-adjusted risk-reward. What I mean by that is the best risk-reward that we have in the book might be on a name where I don't feel like we have enveloped all of the outcomes in a high-fidelity way. You can't envelope them. So that will be a lower conviction name. That's the conviction-adjusted risk-reward. Beautiful thing about a hedge fund relative to a long-only fund is a long-only fund is actually very hard to manage risk. And a long-only fund, you can manage it with a blunt instrument. In a way, we're Citadel or a pod shop, but I do try to be pretty factor aware. I took the discipline I had from Fidelity in terms of long-only portfolio construction. There's three tranches of position size, just high, medium, and low, and just conviction-adjusted risk-reward. The one thing that is important to me is if you have a 35% position in one stock, and then your second position is 3% or 5%, you're not a fund, you're a stock. Maybe some people like that. If I'm in the 12%, 15% range, a necessary condition for having that one position is feeling like there's at least two, three, four other names that I have a similar conviction-adjusted, risk-adjusted IRR in. Therefore, you have a diversified top of the book. Even if your biggest position is 15, the number two is one and a half percent, you're still a stock, not a fund. I'm always trying to balance risk-reward between those three tranches of bet size within that. The link that people have between turnover and time horizon is one of the strangest concepts I've ever encountered. Turnover should be a function of how often you change your mind, and part of that in any discipline valuation-based process should be about how the stocks move. For me, turnover is mostly a function of volatility. What do I mean by this? You can have a one-month time horizon, never change your mind, and own the same three stocks for 10 years. You can have a 10-year time horizon, and change your mind every month, and you'll have 1,100% turnover. We underwrite stocks, we look out three to five years, we come up with a framework for risk and reward. If you're evaluation-sensitive, and a stock goes up 100% in three months, Either the expected IRR that you underwrote to just got cut in half, or you took your numbers up 100%. You probably shouldn't be revising numbers up three to five years out 100% all that often in a high-integrity research process. For me, turnover is a function of volatility, not time horizon. The concept that
Speaker 2there are a few real stars that are driving the performance of a fund seems to fly in the face of the success of the pod shops. I would love your perspective on that hypothesis and whether it applies to what's become a very significant part of the hedge fund landscape.
Speaker 1At a lot of these multi-managers, there are a couple of pods, and maybe I am out of date, who are running a disproportionate amount of money with really good returns. The reason they have a disproportionate amount of money is because they have a long history of generating excellent results. At some places, there's an investment team of 50, and if you take the top 25 away, it's really different. It's not to say it's just two or three people, but any competitive endeavor, it comes down to individuals.
Speaker 2Let's turn over to the private side. You talked initially about the synergies across public and private investing. Where have you found that to be particularly relevant? It's always been relevant,
Speaker 1but I think it's paramount in AI. One of the benefits of being a crossover investor is, theoretically, if any company is good enough to go public, you should have had a decent amount of exposure to it as a private investor. You should have a familiarity with the business. You've probably met with a company a few times. You've probably done a lot of due diligence on them, maybe if you're conflicted out because you're in a competitor. When a company goes public, instead of starting from scratch with the S1 or the testing the waters meeting, you might have three to five years of history already. It's funny that some investors, have an idea that you can do 90 days of work on a business and really understand it. I don't think it's possible. For me, to really understand a business, I need years of history, in some case, decades, to see how the business and the management team have responded to challenges, how they have overcome adversity, how they've adapted to changes. It's really hard to do 90 days of intensive work. And have a deep, thoughtful opinion on a business that gives you at least the knowledge level, the conviction I need to have one of those big conviction-adjusted, attractive risk rewards.
Speaker 2So what are some of the other reasons you think it's important?
Speaker 1I have never seen a new technological trend where at every level of the stack, the competitors are both public and private. In other words, in the early days of the, the smartphone, it's not like Apple had loads of private competitors. There was this company, I think it was called Danger, became the basis of Android. The competition was mostly taking place with public, with Apple, and for a period of time, Nokia. In lots of other new technological revolutions, it's taken place in public. Even with SaaS, Amazon was public. Salesforce was public. AI is different in that at every level of the stack, whether it's the frontier models, you have open-end companies, you have open-end companies, open AI, Anthropic, XAI competing with Google, whether it's semiconductors, at every level of semiconductors, the key competitors are both public and private. From an application perspective, there's all these verticalized AI companies that are running fast at different things and doing things in a very different way than SaaS companies are doing them. To invest in AI, whether privately or publicly, it's a big advantage to have both lenses. I don't know how it would underwrite a private semiconductor company without a really detailed understanding of the public companies, and I don't know how it would underwrite the public companies, vice versa. For AI, having both a public and a venture investment practice, it's important, at least for me and Atreides. How have you thought about competing for deals in the private markets? A lot of this comes from my friend Antonio Gracias. You want to be a repeat player in life, with people, with institutions, with everything. In public equities, relationships are important. I come very close to a lot of my peers. But in privates, people really remember how you behave when the chips are down. If you approach venture with the goal of, I want to be a repeat player with everyone I encounter. Every partner at a venture firm, they're like a client. We need to take care of them. We want to have a repeated relationship with them over time. With founders, I want to generate references. So there's founders who we've passed multiple times on them. But I still talk to them every six to nine months. Viewing venture has a business where relationships are very important. Being a repeat player is important. Doing what you say you're going to do is important. All of this sounds easy, but I don't know how many people actually do it. And it's a big advantage. If the people around the table trust each other, you can get a deal done really quickly and fairly. And those references are so important. Having CEOs who are willing to drop everything to give you a reference for a new founder, that's essential. A lot
Speaker 2of venture firms are more resourced to try to create operational value add. In a world where you're not trying to compete on depth of resources applied to the businesses you're backing, what is it that's causing these CEOs to want to give you those recommendations to others? Giving them good, honest
Speaker 1feedback and having that good, honest feedback. Be proven correct. That's one aspect. Being a crossover firm is powerful. Being able to say to a founder, I never have to sell your stock to get paid. That's so powerful. If you execute, I can hold you forever. And then being really honest with the founders. If you execute, I'm going to try and be very helpful to you for future capital formation. And if you don't execute, I'm going to be there to catch you. That's probably a different deal, but it's a fair deal. When you're in that position, you can do a lot of things. People really remember if you do those things. That just goes to being a repeat player and not optimizing for a single interaction or a single transaction. If you recap someone and you do it in a fair way, also you do it in a fair way to the existing shareholders who maybe can't participate. People remember that and appreciate that. The golden rule is powerful. Treat others the way you want to be treated. For whatever reason, not a lot of people live that, but
Speaker 2particularly in venture. How do you position that? Position yourself against or alongside venture firms that are very well resourced and are trying to contribute operational value to the companies they miss?
Speaker 1I don't know how much operational value those venture firms are really contributing. I think a few of them do. So we're very close partners with Valor Equity Partners. If you were to read the Walter Isaacson biography on Elon Musk, there's a chapter called Antonio and Tim and all of the hard things they did. But they're doing real work. Tim worked in the tube shop at SpaceX, working on the supply chain, working on distribution. Valor has stood up repair centers for companies. They've sent teams to China to help stand up a supply chain. Going back to how important relationships are, I don't like to invest in a company and make it a big position unless it's either a repeat founder who I've had a long-duration relationship with, or I don't like to invest in a company who or there is a VC who I have a close personal and professional relationship with, who has a really good track record, and they are on the board. I like to invest when I trust that wise advice is not needed because they're already getting it. And I will pick my spots, like cut, burn. But I think that's actually a pretty powerful pitch. Series C and up. If you're a founder, the VCs who do seed A and B, who've built companies, they actually have really valuable wise advice. But by the time you have three of those people on your board, if you're a founder, you're wise advised out. Okay? And so one thing I say is I'm investing because I trust you and these people on your board to make really good decisions. And I trust you that when I have an opinion, which is rarely, you guys will listen. And hey, if we disagree, reasonable minds can disagree, but I'm not going to be another person continuously giving you wise advice. The value add that a firm like Atreides or any crossover firm can have is going public is actually pretty scary to a lot of these companies. There's all sorts of things. This is what you do the first time you get a short seller, write a report about you. Do not respond. I know it feels so personal. I know how personal it is, but just don't respond. Let the numbers do the talking. If you get in a public fight with them, it's just blood in the water. Even if you're right, it's just pattern recognition. For them, it's going to attract more sharks and it's going to be less pleasant. So the best thing to do is say, I'm aware they're short. I'm confident in the numbers. So let's see what the numbers hold. That's what you say. There's a whole set of things we can do to help companies go through the process of going public. You can go on the cover of the S1. You can be there during the lockup and that's often an opportunity to acquire more stock in a company you know really well at a time when there's a lot of low information sellers. The short answer is a lot of the operational value add from a lot of these firms is wildly overstated. The wise advice is super not appreciated. Apart from the truly exceptional VCs, I try to be very high value added per minute I speak to one
Speaker 2of these CEOs. After our discussion on thinking about portfolio and construction and risk in the public markets, I'm curious how you go about thinking about putting a portfolio together in your private market strategies.
Speaker 1It takes time to get to know someone. The way we try to manage risk in the private portfolio is when possible, we start with a small check or have a long duration relationship with someone. And it goes back to, it's really hard to make a high quality decision with 60 to 90 days of diligence. So the way we try to manage risk is by making sure that our larger positions in private companies are ones where we've had a long duration relationship with whether it's the CEO, some of the investors, that approach has served us well. There is more bad behavior in private markets than I think people realize. FTX, it's very public, but these companies, they're not filing always audited financials. They don't have the controls, particularly when something starts to go bad. There's a lot of bad behavior that can be really damaging. And then there's bad behavior when a deal goes south by other investors. That bad behavior costs you a lot of money. And the way to avoid that is to take your time to think about it. And then there's a lot of bad behavior when a deal goes south by other investors. Time getting to know people and only make a really large bet. Once you have a history with a person in a company, do they do what they say they're going to do? Are they honest? Do they behave honorably? Are they as relationship and repeat oriented as I am? My rule is trust but verify. I will bounce the ball to anyone once. Then if I like them, I'll bounce the ball one more time. And if the ball doesn't come back, okay, no more bounces. It is funny. I think there's this community of people, who are like-minded, who bounce the ball to and from each other. And then you end up in that community and doing deals together.
Speaker 2Some of this comes from people knowing you. I'd love to ask you about how you've thought about your brand, your presence on X, things like that.
Speaker 1When I was at Fidelity, X became a very important part of my investment process. Going back to AI, AI happens on X. The Jax team at Google got into a giant fight with the PyTorch team on Meta on X. And the heads of each company's respective AI division had to make a public truce and instruct their troops to stop fighting. You learned a lot following that fight. Anthropic researchers have said a lot of our hiring comes from what people say on X and what they might write in a substack. To a large degree, AI happens on X. But even before that, there's this giant community of investors sharing ideas, critiquing each other's ideas, in some cases dunking on each other. But you learn from all of it. And there's a lot of really smart people. So for the last three, four, five years that I was at Fidelity, X was a very important part of my investment process, but I was not allowed to post. I felt like, wow, I've learned so much from X as a consumer, as a lurker, as they say, that I want to contribute back. And then I found the more I posted, the more I got back. It's very funny, the more I got back, the more I got back, the more I got back, the more I got back, the more I got back. Two things are true of most analysts. One is they're on X, probably under an anonymous account. And two, they think they're smarter than their PM. They may not work at a firm like Atreides, where the PM loves to be told he's wrong. I love it. Sometimes I'll get in these dogfights with 15 analysts. They're clearly smart and they know it. And it's like, great. I'm not here to be right or wrong. I'm not here for ego validation. I'm just here to learn. When you put something out on X, even if people are dunking on you, as long as it's a smart dunk, you're learning, you're pressure testing your ideas. Our friend Patrick O'Shaughnessy has said having a big, high IQ following is actually a superpower. And it really is. So I think for sharpening your ideas, it's incredible. Then there's a whole nother dynamic. It really matters for deal flow. So that's why I got on it to contribute. And then I found the more I contributed, the more I got back. One of my friends said X is an exercise in cultivated equanimity. I try really hard to be nice on X. Sometimes people say that was the dumbest podcast I've ever heard. And he's totally wrong about everything. I may or may not have a lot of draft replies, but I don't send them because I try really hard to be nice. People get a sense of who you are by how you behave in public. Because once you get a big X following, you have this huge community of trolls who are continuously dunking on you and quote tweeting you and replying. If you'd fly above it all or respectful to everyone, never really get down in the mud.
Speaker 2I think people get a sense of who you are. I want to ask you one more question before we dive into the closing questions. How in the world do you find time to talk to all the people you do, cover what you do in as much depth as you do, particularly in some of these fast moving sectors?
Speaker 1Personal life and my professional life are very integrated. I have only a few really good friends who aren't in the business because they've been friends with me since college. I have a doctor in California and a writer in Vermont. And apart from that, essentially everyone I spend time with, at least some chunk of the conversation is about investing. It's about technology. It's about venture. That is what it is. There's no real difference. I'm a very competitive person. This is the only thing I've ever been good at. Djokovic said, to be a good tennis player, you have to like hitting the ball. For me, hitting the ball is the first thing I do. I wake up and I'm either looking at emails or X and my X is all about investing. The first eight hours of any day that I'm awake, whether it's a weekend or I'm on vacation, I'm working and it doesn't feel like work. You can't be competitive in this game if you don't, to quote Buffett, tap dance into work. If you don't tap dance into learning about things and investing in technology, you're just not going to be successful because you're competing against people who are equally smart, equally hardworking, but for them, the work is just fun.
Speaker 2Gavin, let's turn to a couple of closing questions. Before we get to the closing questions, I want to tell you about one of our strategic investments. We've made a few and each are working on a product or service we think will be valuable to our community. One is Thema. For all the products and services that we provide to our community, private equity managers out there, Thema uses AI to help map the landscape and source private businesses. It's incredible what a well-designed AI tool can do to accelerate the discovery of businesses in private markets. There's a link in the show notes so you can learn more. And here are those closing questions. What's one thing most people don't know about you that you find interesting?
Speaker 1Geez, well, I've done a lot of these at this point, Ted. I'm pretty open. I'm probably a bigger NFL fan than anyone knows. I'm an extremely competitive fantasy football player. And I should actually say fantasy football is probably the only thing other than investing that I'm good at. I've won my leagues at a statistically improbable rate. And that's because fantasy football and investing, they're fundamentally the exact same thing. You have to have a differential opinion. If you just draft everybody where their ADV is, you're never going to win. You have to understand, wow, the reason this running back wasn't good is the offensive line was better. They're changing to a different system and they've upgraded the left guard. And I actually think he's going to be good. I think I'm probably a much bigger NFL fan and bigger fantasy football, more competitive player than possible. All proceeds go to charity. I've also become a college football fan because of my wife, Becky. It's a big Penn State family. I have not missed a Penn State game in many years. And I do like Penn State. They don't have the names. It's all about the team. I think that's cool. Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life? That I referenced at Fidelity, Jennifer Urich, Steve Weimer, Will Danoff. They've had the biggest impact on me from public and then from a private market investing perspective, for sure, Antonio Gracious at Valor. One of my closest friends. We do a lot together. A large part of the way we approach venture is driven by the way Valor approaches venture. What's the best advice you've ever received? This concept of ikigai was very powerful for me. Ikigai is a Japanese concept, there was a possibility that there's what you're good at, there's what you love, and there's what the world values. Ideally, you want to find something at the center of all of those. That was very helpful to me to decide to go all in on investing. Because early on, I felt like I got off to a good start. Okay, I'm okay at this. Although I think it takes five to seven years to really know. And then I love it. And the world values it. So I think ikigai as a concept was really powerful to me. From a business perspective, your former colleague, Mike Barron, who now is at Goldman Sachs, he gave me very good advice starting at Tradies. You have to get to a billion dollars. Don't worry about how you get to a billion dollars. Once you're at a billion dollars, you have some level of durability and resilience. Hedge funds are fragile. And the smaller they are, the more fragile they are. I do think it's becoming a scale game. And that was very important advice from Mike. So if you have a diversified business, it makes it a lot easier to be rational When you're wrong, if you don't have a diversified business, business, when you add on all the performance pressure that you naturally feel, the pain you feel from being wrong, if you're also worried about business fragility, it's a problem. And so resilience is an advantage for performance.
Speaker 2All right, Gavin, last one. If the next five years are a chapter in your life, what's that chapter about?
Speaker 1I think it's about a few things. Point number one, something I profoundly believe is that 50 through 70 are peak performance years for professional investors. I'm about to turn 50, and I'm really excited about that. Some of my closest friends, like Steve Weimer, who's still investing, he's nearly 15 years older than me, and it's just a big advantage. I am excited to be entering my peak performance years and really looking forward to that. Atreyu is going to celebrate its seventh anniversary of our launch in May of this year. And so I had a 14-year track record of running money, and there were all these allocators who were like, no, we want to see one year of numbers. We want to see three years. And I was like, really? 15 years is different than 14? 17 is different than 14? What are we talking about? But I have come to see the wisdom because it did take a long time to build processes and frameworks internally. It took a long time, in some cases, for me to learn how to work with some of the really talented analysts we have. You can't just make no-look passes day one. What I do think, going back to that execution gap, the gap between your insights, and your performance, I'm optimistic that they will help narrow that. We're, I think, in the very early days of AI. If ChatGPT is to AI, as Netscape Navigator was, we're in year three of what should be a 20, 25, 30-year really exciting cycle or trend. Given that semiconductors are my first love, both as a private investor and a public investor, and semiconductors are so foundational to AI, I think all of that is exciting. All of that will play into it. Building Atreides into a firm that can hopefully endure beyond me, which would be so fulfilling for me. I'm excited for that, but that's a long way away. I'm going to do this for a long time because I love it. Gavin, thanks so much for spending the time. Really enjoyed it. Thank you, Ted. It was awesome. Thank you for being a friend.
Speaker 2I've learned so much from you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at CapitalAllocators.com, where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for premium content. Have a good one, and see you next time. All opinions expressed by me or podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Capital Allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. It should not be construed as investment advice or a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offering of any kind. Clients of Capital Allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast. The statements and opinions of Capital Allocators and their Opinions contained herein may change at any time based on market or other conditions.