We are pleased to share an exclusive interview with Mr. Justin Barton, the Chief Investment Officer of the UCLA Investment Company, which manages the Los Angeles-based university's $2.5B endowment. In this conversation, Barton shares candid advice for emerging managers on how to stand out in a gr...
The SumZero team sits down with Bruce Lipnick of Alchemy Capital Group to discuss the firm's unique first-loss structure and emerging managers seeding program.
Bison Interests, LLC has landed a new $9M investment from a top 25 university endowment on Cap Intro, marking their fourth investment via the platform since 2016. Congratulations to Josh Young and the Bison Interests team for their success thus far. Please find the full transaction report enclosed.
SumZero CEO Divya Narendra was recently featured on The Meb Faber Show to discuss SumZero's evolution from an idea to a fledgling community of industry peers and finally, to its current form - over 16,000 individuals sharing ideas, posting job opportunities, and raising institutional capital. In ...
Published: January 29, 2018
Interview with Mr. Bill Louis of the New York City and Zurich-based research foundation the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. Through the LICR Fund, Bill helps oversee nearly $1.5B in assets designed to capitalize a major scientific research organization and fuel its future endeavors.
Published: December 07, 2018
We are pleased to share an exclusive interview with Mr. Anders Hall, the Chief Investment Officer of Vanderbilt University’s Office of Investments and the associated $5.6B Long-Term Investment fund responsible for overseeing the future growth and financial well-being of the Nashville-based univer...
Published: September 20, 2018
Our investment philosophy focuses on purchasing the very best businesses in the world. We are very selective and only consider companies that pass our rigorous Selective Process. In order to be considered a Selective Company a business must possess all six of our Selective Pillars. This means ...
Published: September 18, 2018
Bastiat Capital has recently published several pieces of research on Goldman Sachs share-based compensation culture. We compiled this research and forwarded it to the board of Goldman Sachs, to which we received a comprehensive response from R. Martin Chavez, Goldman Sachs’ outgoing Chief Finan...
Published: September 13, 2018
I think a lot of folks bifurcate the world into value and growth, but this doesn’t make sense to me. I define value investing as buying an asset at a discount to intrinsic value. Just because a business is growing quickly doesn’t mean you can’t buy it at a discount to intrinsic value. Assessments...
Published: September 05, 2018
Optex is highly dependent on military spending for the company’s revenues and profits. The U.S. budget sequester in 2013 was a hard time for the company. Although this risk cannot be diversified away, we take some comfort in the planned increase in military spending by the current administratio...
Published: September 01, 2018
With plans announced for a third inter-Korean summit this fall, the prospect of reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula looms. Chan H. Lee, co-founder and PM of Petra Capital Management, sat down with SumZero to share his insights on Korean market opportunities and speculation on North Korea’s pat...
Published: August 23, 2018
While I have been investing in Indian markets (both personally & professionally) for over 10 years now, my investing experience globally is solely over the last 2 years. I headed the research team at a sell-side firm focused on Indian small & mid-caps that grew rapidly initially and then collapse...
Published: August 23, 2018
All investments are based on a fundamental assessment of absolute, intrinsic value. This likely reflects the influence the Applied Value Investing program. I’m looking for securities that are cheap, not securities where I think I can predict a change in the price. When it’s called for we will do...
Published: August 17, 2018
The Job Vault is a job listing platform that complements our research database. There are no middlemen/headhunters, no smoke and mirrors, and importantly, no fee. When a candidate applies to a position, an application package containing their SumZero profile, most recent research report, and resu...
Published: August 16, 2018
One of Rhizome’s core strategies is to look for broken or misunderstood companies that traditionally cater to yield-driven investors. This could mean a master limited partner (MLP) that suspended its distribution or a real estate holding company that does not pay a dividend. During my career, I ...
Published: August 14, 2018
Over time my approach became more Fisher/Munger/Buffett than Graham, which I suppose is a common development. Greenblatt and Pabrai have also influenced my approach to investing for the better, as have my current employers.
Published: August 08, 2018
The Job Vault is a job listing platform that complements our research database. There are no middlemen/headhunters, no smoke and mirrors, and importantly, no fee. When a candidate applies to a position, an application package containing their SumZero profile, most recent research report, and resu...
Published: August 09, 2018
Active Owners Fund manager, Ben Terk published a long call on Jamba Juice to SumZero in April with a target price of $13/share (~45% upside from $9.44).
Published: August 03, 2018
We are proud to announce a material update to SumZero Buyside's posting terms. Approved research ideas now earn 6 months of renewed database access versus the prior standard of 4 months.
Published: August 02, 2018
We are value investors but we don’t look for cheap stocks. We look for businesses with inherently stable values that can compound their values steadily over time. We get to know them very well before we buy them because they are overvalued, by our math, most of the time. On the rare occasions whe...
Published: July 30, 2018
The Job Vault is a job listing platform that complements our research database. There are no middlemen/headhunters, no smoke and mirrors, and importantly, no fee. When a candidate applies to a position, an application package containing their SumZero profile, most recent research report, and resu...
Published: July 27, 2018
Over the last year, SumZero has published profiles of several of our more prominent members. For the the first time, we are publishing an anthology of these investor profiles. This PDF contains interviews from legends in the investment management industry, including Aswath Damodaran, Mohnish Pab...
Published: July 27, 2018
JD continues to exceed our projections for active customers, revenue growth, and category expansion, while operating profit is below our expectations. The latter is a result of JD reinvesting profits from mature product categories into newer ones - fast-moving consumer goods, otherwise known as F...
Published: July 13, 2018
The most egregious valuation mistake that I see investment professionals make is mistaking pricing for valuation. Most investment professionals don’t do valuation, they do pricing. What I mean by that is that you price a number to a stock based on what other people are paying for similar stocks. ...
Published: July 12, 2018
My initial interest was perked due to my work in the Wafer Fabrication Equipment (WFE) sector. I've become a strong believer in a) the long-term secular growth dynamics gripping the WFE sector b) that there is a sizable valuation disconnect between top companies and their underlying fundamentals,...
Each month SumZero publishes rankings of our top users based on the performance of their ideas. Rankings are calculated to highlight users with the highest risk adjusted returns relative to the market. There are four key points to the ranking methodology we use:
Published: June 27, 2018
"And though it was a surprise to hear Charlie Munger appreciate that, it was as close to me as I could get to being patted by the back by God, and I appreciated it."
Published: June 22, 2018
SumZero’s Job Vault is now hosting over 100 investment professional roles of all seniority levels from 50+ major buyside funds.
The Job Vault is a job listing platform that complements our research database. There are no middlemen/headhunters, no fees, and no smoke and mirrors. When a can...
Published: June 21, 2018
As a value investor, I love buying businesses that (1) are run by a great manager with a keen eye for capital allocation, (2) possess secular growth and sustainable free cash flows, i.e. they are good businesses and (3) are trading at low cash earnings per share multiples.
Published: June 14, 2018
Through my experiences running the Main Fund I learned first hand that generating very good returns is not enough to attract capital. I also recognized that this created an exploitable inefficiency. Simply stated, there are investment managers out there that are incredibly talented, but they have...
Published: June 14, 2018
I think the inadequacies of GAAP accounting create opportunities. For example, we own a tiny software company, SharpSpring. For every dollar they spend on marketing, they generate seven dollars of lifetime value. As long as the marketing spend is that productive, they should be spending every d...
Published: June 14, 2018
We bought Goldman stock for our clients in the summer of 2013. We invested in Bank of America a year earlier. The financial sector was still trading at attractive multiples after the 2009 fiasco. It made sense to look for opportunities in this sector. Goldman was trading at 90% of book value at t...
Published: June 08, 2018
Each month SumZero publishes rankings of our top users based on the performance of their ideas. Rankings are calculated to highlight users with the highest risk adjusted returns relative to the market. There are four key points to the ranking methodology we use:
Published: June 07, 2018
Alliance Data Systems Corporation ($ADS) is a large publicly traded provider of marketing services and loyalty card programs. ADS has three distinct and eclectic business lines, a private label store credit card business, a data driven marketing company, and a Canadian coalition loyalty program.
Published: June 05, 2018
As Chief Investment Officers, we are managing opportunity across three axes: all the different types of securities on one axis; all the different countries where these securities are issued on another axis, and the third axis is whether we can capture the returns via indexing or active. Successf...
Published: June 01, 2018
SumZero is the world's largest community of buyside investment professionals, with over 14,000 members. As part of their user profiles, SumZero members can optionally indicate who their investment heros are and what their favorite books are.
Published: June 05, 2018
A year ago, Barron's and SumZero partnered to launch a new column titled 'View from the Buyside'. We have since published 35 actionable ideas sourced from SumZero's Buyside community, many of which have outperformed the market.
Published: June 01, 2018
"I am a big proponent of the Joel Greenblatt school of thought that investigating complex situations is one of the best ways to uncover mispriced assets. In the case of HPE, two large spin-merge transactions (the Enterprise Services business in April 2017 followed by the Software business in Sept...
Published: May 25, 2018
As the world's largest network of buyside investment professionals, SumZero has a breadth of data on the hedge fund industry. One of the optional pieces of information that SumZero members can include on their membership profiles is their favorite investment book. We decided to compile our data ...
Published: May 23, 2018
Jeff Meyers founded Cobia Capital, a value oriented long/short equity fund in 2008. In the decade since, Meyers has carved out a niche and reputation for himself unmatched within the small cap technology space. He has consistently been one of the top ranked analysts on SumZero, where he has gen...
Published: May 18, 2018
SumZero quantitatively explored the names of 5,000+ hedge funds listed on our platform. To do so, our data team implemented natural language processing techniques to cluster trends in naming convention. In addition to some very prominent topical themes, there are numerous granular sub-categorie...
Published: May 10, 2018
Van Biema Value Partners, a family office and investment adviser specializing in identifying, vetting, and investing in small, value-oriented hedge funds, and legendary value investor Chuck Royce are pleased to announce the (5) Finalists in the recently completed van Biema Value Partners Ex-US Sm...
Published: April 26, 2018
Saberhagen: Lots of people want to compare “value” against “growth” but we would make a different distinction, between “investing” and “speculating.” Investing is about valuing businesses. You can value a business if it is public or private. So investing doesn’t depend on the stock market at all....
Published: April 14, 2018
In recent months, President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that Amazon exhibits monopolistic tendencies. The jury is out as to whether this is the case, but Amazon certainly monopolizes ecommerce news.
Published: March 22, 2018
FB is one of the most widely watched stocks in the world, which is no surprise given its ~$525BN market cap. But as is often the case, investors neglect large opportunities that present themselves in plain sight. As someone who has owned FB shares since 2008, you might wonder why I'd post a long ...
Published: March 21, 2018
Charles Royce is currently president and co-chief investment officer of Royce & Associates LLC. Royce is well known as one of the pioneers of small-cap investing, and his eponymous Royce Funds now manage in excess of $32 billion. Prior to founding Royce & Associates in 1972, Royce serve...
In conjunction with the recent culmination of the 1stvan Biema Small Cap Challengeand subsequent allocation to the Winner Massif Capital, we are pleased to announce the immediate scheduling of the 2nd such initiative: the van Biema Ex-US Small-Cap Challenge
Published: March 06, 2018
We first became aware of BOMN when we noticed it was trading at a 52 week high. We thought it was an interesting company but felt the stock was overvalued trading at well over 2x book value, especially since much of its book value was made up of cash. We thought about shorting it at that point ...
Published: February 14, 2018
The Faroe Islands are a windswept archipelago between Denmark and the United Kingdom. Their biggest employer is Bakkafrost, a farmed salmon producer. Bakkafrost is registered on the Oslo Stock exchange, and is one of the more prominent salmon producers in the Nordic region. Robert Leitz of io...
Published: February 12, 2018
Michael Mauboussin is currently the Director of Research at BlueMountain Capital Management. Prior to his role at BlueMountain, Michael was Head of Global Financial Strategies at Credit Suisse and Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management. He has also authored three books, an...
Published: February 01, 2018
In Korea, a separate class of shares with blended characteristics of stocks and bonds trade over the counter. These shares are called 'Preference' or 'Preferred' shares, and contrary to what their name implies, carry less rights than common stock. They were conceived to keep majority family co...
Published: January 22, 2018
SumZero’s Job Vault is now hosting over 100 investment professional roles of all seniority levels from 50+ major buyside funds.
The Job Vault is a job listing platform that complements our research database. There are no middlemen/headhunters, no fees, and no smoke and mirrors. When a can...
Published: January 08, 2018
In 2014, Michael Novogratz, then an executive at Fortress Investment Group, partnered with Ribbit Capital and Benchmark to raise a round of funding for Pantera Capital, a San Francisco based hedge fund. Pantera was run by a former classmate of Novogratz's from Princeton, Dan Morehead. Morehead ...
Published: December 18, 2017
In partnership with the <strong>Sohn Foundation</strong> and <strong>Canalyst</strong>, we are pleased to announce the Finalists in the recently completed <em>Top Stocks for 2018</em> Challenge. The initiative was designed to replicate the success and significant outperformance of the contest pic...
Published: December 13, 2017
In January 2017 SumZero published the winning investment ideas from the Top Stocks for 2017 investing contest. With the New Year approaching, we revisited the performanceWinners and Runners-Up. These 15 highly-rated ideas from SumZero were individually selected to appear in this report through a...
Published: November 30, 2017
Johnny Steindorff launched Focus Investments in 2014, one of a handful of crypto funds in existence at the time. As such an early adopter, Focus faced significant headwinds launching and managing a fund based on an emergent asset class with no institutional backing. This proved extremely presc...
Published: November 28, 2017
The vast majority of investment dollars in the venture capital industry come from “institutional investors.” These are organizations such as pension funds, university and nonprofit endowments, foundations and other financial institutions. They deploy capital as limited partners (LPs) to venture c...
Published: November 17, 2017
John Huber, the Managing Member and Portfolio Manager of Saber Capital Management, is at the forefront of a new generation of value investors compounding their way through the bull market. Huber has been running Saber for just over 5 years, and has amassed investment and a significant following...
This begs the question, is value-investing style active management in decline? In this article, we will demonstrate that, at least in SumZero's case, the death of stock-picking has been greatly exaggerated.
Published: September 09, 2017
Palo Alto Networks Inc. (PANW:US) has had an exciting week, leaping over 10% due to an positive earnings call. This jump would be significant for any stock, but is particularly noteworthy in the notoriously cutthroat sector of enterprise and network security. Given this, we decided to take a de...
PetMed Express (PETS:US), an online pet pharmacy, had a tumultuous past week, dropping as much as 15% intraday Thursday under heavy volume from its peak. This volatility is the result of allegations published in a bombshell report by research firm Aurelius Value. The report contended that PetMe...
Published: August 22, 2017
In the career of all investors there comes a time where you'll get excited about an investment. If you’ve done your homework (if not, check out the 15 favorite books of hedge fund analysts), then you already know the maxim that emotions and investing shouldn't mix. Facts, logic, hard work, and c...
Published: August 21, 2017
SumZero’s Job Vault is now hosting over 100 investment professional roles of all seniority levels from 50+ major buyside funds.
What is SumZero’s Job Vault?
The Job Vault is a job listing platform that complements our research database. There are no middlemen/headhunters, no fees, and n...
Published: August 07, 2017
China began importing US beef for the first time in almost 14 years on July 16. The catch? The beef has to be source verified i.e. traceable to the farm where it was raised. Enter Where Food Comes From (OTCMKTS: WFCF) which specializes in auditing and verifying beef, poultry and other meats for s...
Published: July 21, 2017
Netflix is hot, though admittedly the stock has been one of the most discussed names on the market for almost a decade now. This Monday's earnings report proved hot even for Netflix, as the stock jumped over 10% in after hours trading after the company announced it had beaten user growth by wide ...
Published: July 14, 2017
SumZero’s Job Vault is now hosting over 100 investment professional roles of all seniority levels from 50+ major buyside funds.
What is SumZero’s Job Vault?
The Job Vault is a job listing platform that complements our research database. There are no middlemen/headhunters, no fees, and n...
Published: July 11, 2017
It’s been an interesting week for Liberty Global Latin America (LILAK) with the stock up almost 15% after billionaire CEO John Malone bought $16.3M of the stock in the open market, his first open market purchase in any of his businesses since 2013. LILAK has been a top holding for Nitin Sacheti, ...
Published: June 26, 2017
South Korea is cheap. Despite being one of the wealthiest countries in the world (11th in 2015 GDP, 30th in PPP GDP per capita) and housing some of the world's most successful companies in Samsung, Hyundai, and LG, members of the KOSPI index trade at an average P/E of only 9.7. This compares with...
As the world's largest network of investment professionals, we've got a lot of data about analysts, portfolio managers, principals, and CIOs at hedge funds, mutual funds, and other buyside shops. One optional question that SumZero members can fill out on their membership profiles is what their f...
Published: April 25, 2016
Michael Zapata is no stranger to managing risk. Through his time in the Navy, Michael served as a Navy SEAL officer and deployed multiple times during the Global War on Terrorism. Following his last command at the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, Michael transitioned out of the military t...
Published: March 23, 2017
Poor investor communication can cause prices to stay low even when good things are happening, and this could be the case for Redknee Solutions (TSE:RKN), a Canadian software company that serves many of the world’s major telecom companies.
Redknee has suffered from a series of unsuccessful acqu...
Published: March 14, 2017
Signet Jewelers (NYSE: SIG) is the world’s largest retailer of diamond jewelry, currently operating Jared, Zales, and Kay Jewelers. While many of these stores have seen double digit profit growth in the past few years, they are increasingly promoting in-house financing to drive sales. Currently 7...
Published: January 24, 2017
Bonus season is here, and SumZero has produced a comprehensive analysis of salary trends in the fund industry.
SumZero maintains an internal, user driven compensation database. This database, which launched in 2012, now hosts over 4,500 unique compensation entries. The feature was designed t...
Published: January 12, 2016
China is home to plenty of paradoxes, but some of them are Western misconceptions. For example, notion of "ghost cities" is largely the result of information inefficiencies and misunderstandings related to China’s development model.
Published: December 19, 2016
Jen Ganzi has a knack for spotting key investment opportunities. The recent winner of SumZero’s Corporate Credit/Preferred Stock Challenge, Jen has worked at firms of all sizes and has built an eye-popping resume. We sat down with Ms. Ganzi to talk about her views on credit investing and the curr...
Published: September 06, 2016
Dan Chen has been a professional investor for almost 20 years, and a disciple of Warren Buffett even longer. In his search for permanent value in great companies, nothing catches Chen's eye like Visa (V:US), the world's largest electronic funds transfer company. Though Visa is massive (nearly 200...
Published: August 25, 2016
Time is almost up to enter SumZero’s jobs contest for a chance to win interviews for investment roles at top funds.
In light of this, we sat down with contest judge and investment guru Mohnish Pabrai, managing partner of Pabrai Investment Funds and author of The Dhandho Investor and other boo...
Published: July 28, 2016
Though it’s been seven years since the end of the Great Recession, much of the world still suffers from the crisis’s legacy of languid economic growth. Past efforts to spur national economies have fallen short of expectations, and many central banks have recently turned to speculative measures in...
Published: June 24, 2016
Taylor Mann is not your typical fund manager. The twenty-six year old Texas A&M graduate manages a small fund, Pine Capital, in Larue, Texas (population 160). Also atypical compared with many of the largest funds our there, Mr. Mann makes good trades, previously making a killing shorting the stud...
Published: June 01, 2016
Top ranked SumZero investors recently predicted the crash of Valeant despite prominent hedge fund ownership. This time, award-winning investor and SumZero member Sid Choraria of APS Asset Management in Singapore has taken on hedge fund favorite JD.com, one of China's largest retail websites. Mr. ...
Published: April 25, 2016
Israeli fund manager Ori Eyal has been a SumZero member since the Financial Crisis when he was just starting his Emerging Value Management fund. Since joining, he’s posted 28 ideas with an average return of 87% and is currently ranked #10 in our all-time member rankings. SumZero sat down with Mr....
Last Tuesday SumZero gathered highly ranked members at Bloomberg Headquarters in Midtown, NYC for liquid refreshment and pitches from three top fund managers on liquid special situation opportunities.
Peter Lupoff of Tiburon Holdings, Daniel Lawrence of Elmrox Investment Group, and David T...
Published: March 15, 2016
Today SumZero released its new Analyst Rankings feature, which ranks analysts on SumZero according to their past performance. Rankings will be updated monthly for a variety of categories, including Best Short Analyst, Best Analyst of the Last Twelve Months, and of course, <a href=LINK TO MEYE...
Published: March 15, 2016
Who is the best investor on SumZero? With the release of SumZero’s <a href=LINK TO RANKINGS>analyst rankings</a> feature today, we now know. Jeffrey Meyers, founder and portfolio manager at Cobia Capital Management in New York topped SumZero Long-Only and Best All-Time rankings with an average re...
SumZero had the privilege of sponsoring and attending this year’s Harbor Investment Conference. Buyside funds from around the world gathered in New York's Midtown district to hear some of the best minds in investing educate, pitch, and debate.
<strong>The Cancer is Back: Whitney Tilson’s Renew...
Two of SumZero’s most successful and outspoken members, Navi Hehar of Mile 26 Capital in New York and David Trainer of Novo Capital in Nashville, came down on opposite sides of one of the most talked about stocks of the year, Valeant Pharmaceuticals. With highly publicized investigations by the S...
Published: February 26, 2016
Hong Kong based hedge fund analysts Winston Chu, Pep So, and Perry Tan sat down with SumZero for a roundtable on the macroeconomic state of China. This is part two of the SumZero China Macro series which began with Vladimir Yuzhakov’s exclusive SumZero memo The 5 Biggest Misconceptions About Chin...
Published: February 18, 2016
The only thing more uncertain than the stock market these days is the crude market. We asked our buyside members where they think prices will bottom out in the near term.
Oil has been on a volatility streak due to demand concerns from China and supply surpluses from North American shale fracki...
Published: February 16, 2016
A new Bloomberg article highlights the power of the SumZero Cap Intro platform to drive institutional exposure (and ultimately large investments of capital) toward the funds who utilize the feature:
<em>Joshua Young started his hedge fund less than a year ago. Last month, he caught a break whe...
Published: February 12, 2016
The Chinese New Year continues and with it a sense that the nation stands at a crossroads. The Shanghai Stock Exchange Index is down nearly 25% in the past three months, hitting investors with the sobering reality of a heavy correction, but also the distinct possibility that significant buying op...
Published: February 11, 2016
Mattel Inc. (MAT) is one of the leading toy manufactures in the world. The company has fallen on hard times as sales of flagship brands such as Barbie and Fisher-Price have been declining. This is in addition to losing the rights next year to produce movie-themed toys for Disney films Princess an...
Published: January 29, 2016
SumZero polled its membership on the prospects of Bloomberg as president. The results suggest that fund professionals are enthusiastic about more than just their terminals.
Last week Mr. Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City and 44th wealthiest person in the world according to Forbes, instr...
Published: January 29, 2016
Bonus season is here, and SumZero has produced a comprehensive analysis of salary trends in the fund industry.
SumZero maintains an internal, user driven compensation database. This database, which launched in 2012, now hosts over 3,500 unique compensation entries. The feature was designed t...
Published: January 29, 2016
Chipotle Mexican Grill was hit hard in late 2015 by an outbreak of foodborne illness cases traced back to its burrito eateries. Chipotle stock (CMG:US) saw a sudden end to its near decade long upward march since the company was spun off from McDonald's.
SumZero member Nick Mazing, portfolio m...
Published: January 22, 2016
The only thing more volatile than the stock market these days is the crude market. We asked our buyside members where they think prices will bottom out in the near term.
Published: January 15, 2016
Amid a downwardly volatile market, everyone in finance has an opinion on what the future may hold. Is this another short term hiccup or the beginning of a much more serious correction?
SumZero recently asked the 12,000 members of its professional investing community for their sentiments on the...
Published: December 10, 2015
Tesla Motors (NASDAQ: TSLA) is one of the most controversial and heavily-covered names in the market in recent memory. To help investors understand the name at a more advanced level, SumZero has asked two fund professionals that cover the company closely, one long and one short, to opine on some ...
Published: August 15, 2015
Posting your research on SumZero now comes with the chance to win $5K cash, each and every week. We are pleased to announce this new partnership with <strong>Interactive Brokers</strong> designed to recognize top-quality buyside research and the analysts/PMs behind that effort. Starting in Septem...