Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:00:00 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: I know firsthand how complex the tax stack is for asset managers, and seemingly every new tool and data source makes the problem even worse, adding more complexity, more headcount, and more risk. Ridgeline offers a better way forward, one unified platform that automates away all that complexity across portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, compliance, and more. All at scale. Ridgeline is revolutionizing investment management, helping ambitious firms scale faster, operate smarter, and stay ahead of the curve. See what Ridgeline can unlock for your firm. Schedule a demo at ridgelineapps.com. Felix by Rogo is a personal finance agent that turns a single prompt into finished client ready work using your firm's own templates, context, and standards. Send Felix an email like, take these comments and turn them for me, or update my tracker with the context of these emails, Or run the ability to pay math on this buyer and Felix sends back finished PowerPoint decks, Excel models, and sourced research. Felix works the way your team already does, delivering work quickly and accurately around the clock. Learn more at rogo.ai/felix. OpenAI, Cursor, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Vercel all have something in common. They all use WorkOS. And here's why. To achieve enterprise adoption at scale, you have to deliver on core capabilities like SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and audit logs. That's where WorkOS comes in. Instead of spending months building these mission critical capabilities yourself, you can just use WorkOS APIs to gain all of them on day zero. That's why so many of the top AI teams you hear about already run on WorkOS. WorkOS is the fastest way to become enterprise ready and stay focused on what matters most, your product. Visit workos.com to get started. Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like The This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and wanna go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at colossus.com.
00:02:00 · S1
[00:02:00] S1: Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
00:02:27 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:02:27] S0: My guest today is Dan Loeb, the founder and CEO of Third Point. Dan started Third Point in 1995 with a few million dollars, and today the firm manages 24,000,000,000 across equities, corporate and structured credit, venture, and insurance. He is best known for his activist work at companies like Sotheby's, Sony's, Yahoo, and for the public letters he has written to boards over the years. What I find most interesting about Dan is how much his approach has evolved across those thirty years. He came up as a credit and event driven investor at Warburg Pincus and Jefferies, built Third Point, then layered in quality investing, thematic technology investing, and now a very large credit business that sits alongside the hedge fund. We cover how he thinks about the AI stack and the companies inside it he believes matter most, The difference between good and bad governance, the Sony and Sotheby stories, the power of writing. Please enjoy my conversation with Dan Lope. Dan, we've only been trying to do this for six years. Welcome. I've been excited to finally chat with you about all things markets. It's such a crazy time. And I was walking in here, I'm like, am I actually the most curious about as it relates to how Dan runs his life? And one of the questions is the simplest, which is, in this time where there's more information than you could ever read, literally, what does your day look like to stay up to speed on all the investments that you've made the investments that you could make? How do you stay on top of the fire hose?
00:03:45 · Dan Loeb, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:03:45] S2: I wish I could say I have a Claude code that is organized all the information in one place, and I go through it all. But you know, I check the news and see what's relevant for the economy, and what's relevant for our positions. I try not to get too obsessed with the minute to minute stuff, because that will drive you crazy. Try to be a little more tactical than strategic. People ask me about macro, what's important, and I think when people think about macro, think about all the typical stuff that the government reports, growth, unemployment, inflation, rates, currencies, where's gold, where's crypto? And I think that all that stuff is trumped right now by two things. Where's oil? And that's going to be dictated by what happens in the war, geopolitics, and what's happening with AI both on the spending front, infrastructure, and what's the impact of that going to be on society and on the economy. So those are the main things I'm focused on really trying to deeply understand. [00:04:42] S0: What is your model of both of those things? Do you feel like you need to have just a clear view or a differentiated view? Like how do you process things as big as this where probably no one person can understand the whole thing?
00:04:53 · Dan Loeb
[00:04:53] S2: I'm not natively a tech person, but I think given where the world is today, there was a time when you could say I'm just gonna punt on tech and focus on industrials and consumer and health care. I think you have to be a tech person today. It's a big and growing and compounding part of the economy. It affects everything else. So I think best as I can, I try to talk to smart people regularly? Jensen is laid out well and everybody talks about the AI stack, starting with power and energy at the bottom and chips and infrastructure and moving up through the LMs and software and applications and how that plays through. I think that's a good mental model to just think about all of it. We've played different elements of that through industrials and infrastructure and hyperscalers and things like that. But right now, the stocks is up 40%. I don't think I have ever seen an event like that. In fact, you just go back a few years, semiconductors were kind of left for dead. They were like roadkill in the market. People were not about them at all. And I think that all changed when NVIDIA reported its March results three years ago. And I think you either were there or it's okay if you weren't, you could quickly play catch up. That was the big event. And now, of course, it's sort of thinking about the NVIDIA, the Tranium, and the TPU ecosystems and how those play out and relative strength and how that plays through the different hyperscalers. And then, of course, the foundational models. I try to think in terms of that stack, but I also think about what's going on in the three most consequential companies today, NVIDIA, Anthropic, and Elon World, all of his companies collectively. There's a lot of ways to look through the prism, but for me, that's been an effective way to kind of think about how things flow through.
00:06:48 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:06:48] S0: How would you describe yourself as an investor? You have an early reputation for this incredibly precise ability to go through things with sort of a forensic lens as an activist early in your career. But now Third Point is a much bigger, broader, more diversified collection of 25,000,000,000 or so of assets. How do you think of yourself as stylistically as an investor?