Capital Alliance Podcast
The Capital Alliance Podcast is built for fund managers navigating the path from strong returns to lasting firm. Each episode tackles what nobody talks about openly in the industry raising capital beyond your inner circle, building real operational infrastructure, getting in front of allocators who don't already know your name, and making the leap from running a fund to building an institution.
Guests include fund managers, professional investors, and researchers. We dig into what actually gets allocators to write a check, how operators solve the hiring, compliance, and back-office problems that keep small teams stuck, and what separates the funds that scale from the ones that stall. We also go deep on the craft itself, investment philosophy, long-term value creation, portfolio construction, and the ideas shaping how serious capital gets deployed.
Capital Alliance Podcast
He Built the Research Platform for Event-Driven Investing | Asif Suria
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In this episode of the Capital Alliance Podcast, we sit down with Asif Suria, Founder and CEO of Inside Arbitrage, a leading research platform focused on event-driven investing strategies.
Asif brings a rare combination of deep technical expertise and decades of market experience. Starting his career in technology during the dot-com era, he transitioned into investing through some of the most volatile market cycles—from the dot-com crash to the Global Financial Crisis—before building Inside Arbitrage into a trusted platform used by professional investors worldwide.
We dive deep into event-driven investing, including merger arbitrage, spinoffs, insider trading signals, and activist strategies. Asif breaks down how he built proprietary tools to track hundreds of live deals, process SEC filings in real time, and generate high-quality investment ideas through data and pattern recognition.
He also shares how reading You Can Be a Stock Market Genius by Joel Greenblatt shaped his approach, why “seasons” exist within investing strategies, and how overlapping signals—like insider buying + spinoffs + M&A—can create asymmetric opportunities.
We cover:
- How Asif transitioned from tech to investing during the dot-com crash
Building Inside Arbitrage and turning it into a subscription business
- The fundamentals of merger arbitrage and how to track deal spreads
- Why insider buying can be powerful—but also misleading
- The concept of “idea generation” vs. conviction investing
- How macro environments impact strategy performance
- Real-world case studies combining multiple event-driven strategies
- Why timing and urgency matter in event-driven investing
This episode is a masterclass on finding non-obvious edges in public markets.
Follow Asif Suria:
Inside Arbitrage: https://www.insidearbitrage.com
X : https://x.com/AsifSuria
Asif's Book The Event Driven Edge in Investing : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201953634-the-event-driven-edge-in-investing
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Follow Ken Majmudar :
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenmajmudar/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kenmajmudar/
Substack: https://compoundideas.substack.com/
It's a real privilege to have with us today Asif Surya, founder and CEO of Inside Arbitrage. Asif brings a unique blend of deep technical expertise and market experience. Having started his career in technology during the early days of the internet and later transitioning into investing.
SPEAKER_03But I'd also noticed that sometimes you participate before the last spinoff happened and you pick up the spinoff at a very low price. I just got lucky on Vatnova doing as well as it did. The same thing with Western Digital and SandDisk, right? SandDisc was a cyclical memory division that a Western Digital wanted to get rid of in some sense.
SPEAKER_01So hey everyone, Ken here again with Vatsal, and we have a great guest today. Someone who I've really gotten to know over the last year or so, who I really didn't know at all. So Asif is Surya is based in the Bay Area and has an incredible research service that he's started with a very unique background. So I'm excited to have Asif on our Capital Alliance podcast today.
SPEAKER_03Thanks for having me on, Ken. Thanks, Watsal. It's a pleasure to hang out and talk to you guys for uh this podcast.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, awesome. Um, Asib, why don't you tell our uh listeners or or viewers, uh, I guess the video podcast, a little bit about you know, your backstory, your your um where you started, uh where you're from, and then how that uh brought you to where you are today.
SPEAKER_03Sure. So growing up, I was in India, the southern part of India, and I was at a state uh or in a state that was it had three kinds of weather. You had hot, hotter, and hottest weather. Uh and so after that, when I moved to Oregon, I it felt like I was in heaven. Um, you would you wouldn't see the sun for nine months in a year, it would rain all the time, and it was completely green. Uh so really uh like my time in Oregon, got started in technology and investing around the time the dot-com bubble was bursting. So I was uh fixing the Y2K bug for a university system, an enterprise level university system. I would fix parts of the system each night and they would get to use it the following morning. I also got started in investing during the dot-com bear market, which was very deep if you were invested in tech stocks. So, you know, got started with scars first instead of enjoying the upside, if you will. And that is a great way to get started with investing. You start to learn about risk management, you start to learn about the downside of things, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you do realize that you don't want to be leveraged, you don't want to go out too far on the risk profile. But on the other hand, it can also limit uh opportunities because then you know that you've gone through multiple bear markets and you want to be a little bit more conservative, and that creates opportunity cost. So I started investing during the dot-com bear market and then continued on through the great financial crisis, 2007, 8, 9. I had a long short portfolio then. I was short, uh, for example, a mortgage lender, I was short an RV manufacturer and things like that. But that still didn't help a whole lot uh depending on you know where you invested. That was with a very significant impact on the portfolio on the downside. So that is where I started thinking about event-driven strategies. I had read Greenblatt's book, You Can Be a Stock Market Genius, and that really appealed to me that you could focus on specific corporate events and that you might end up with uncorrelated returns that weren't driven necessarily just by broader market conditions. And given my technology background, I ended up building a set of tools. So one of the strategies I was interested in is called merger arbitrage. And I wanted to be able to track every active deal in the US and figure out what the spreads on the deals were. A spread on a merger arbitrage situation is the difference in the price between what an acquirer, say for example, Microsoft, is paying for a company's, for example, Activation Blizzard and where the company is trading at currently. So you have the opportunity to pick up uh the difference between the current price and the acquisition price. And so I ended up building tools and technologies around these investment strategies. And that's what created Inside Arbitrage after a few years.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. And just to go back to it really quick, because I I was curious about it.
SPEAKER_03So which part of India are you from? So I'm actually from the state of Gujarat. That's where my parents are from, but I grew up in the south. Yeah, so it was mostly Kerala.
SPEAKER_01I'm Gujarati too. Oh, so Kerala. Okay. So you're Gujarati, but you grew up in the south. Exactly. I grew up in the south. So do you feel culturally more Gujarati or more like from the South area?
SPEAKER_03So for any of your audience that's listening that is from India, uh, I am uh Khamandokla by origin, but I'm more Italy Dosa by uh, you know.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I think you're going up to the south. I i.e. you're more like culturally southern Indian. That's right. Yep. Yeah. Interesting. That's that's really interesting. Because I'm Gujarati. So um yeah, it's very, very interesting. Um, and what brought you to Oregon?
SPEAKER_03So I came to Oregon uh for a master's in computer science. Uh so I wanted to study and uh ended up there. Uh this was during the dot-com bubble, uh, 1998, 1999. Uh exciting time. Um my first course in grad school was actually artificial intelligence. Uh, and AI and machine learning back then was completely different from what it is right now.
SPEAKER_01Totally different. Yeah. I was a computer science graduate of Columbia University, but 1991. Oh, God. I used to actually, I used to like be very fascinated by AI in the 80s and the 90s, even to an extent. But at that point, I had moved on to like law school and then working as an investment banker. Uh but yeah, you know, it was it was expert systems and Lisp and you know, things like that. Uh but actually I had a very now a very successful uh friend who was at MIT when I was at Harvard Law School. And he was used to work in Patty May's lab, and it was about genetic algorithms. And some of that work, I think, has turned into some of the stuff. And neural networks also were were uh a topic of conversation as well. So just sort of I'm actually very happy to be alive at a time when all of that has suddenly started working, and now we have actual what I dreamed of is is real uh and accelerating is pretty pretty cool.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, in many ways, uh I was involved with a machine learning project in the 2010s, and we were using algorithms that had been written decades before that. Uh and the difference, I think, over the last decade or two has been about access to computational power and access to large amounts of data that didn't exist back then when we were learning about machine learning or using AI. Uh and that's been a huge transformation. Uh so the algorithms on the frontier models are getting better, but it was the data and the computation power uh that made a big difference to the field.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I want to come back to this topic because I think there's a lot here that isn't really been talked about too much publicly and probably hasn't been really thought through either. But uh I think we could have a nice conversation around that. So and then at that time, like what interested you in computers or IT or whatever?
SPEAKER_03You know, one of the things I enjoy was uh building enterprise systems like SaaS kind of systems uh using web-based technology. So you had this a period of time. It was a period of transition. People were transitioning from uh client-server technology to essentially the web and SAS. And that part was very exciting to me because you could build tools, you could build things, and you could see people using it the next day. Um and that was exciting to build systems at scale. I also implemented a large number of enterprise uh systems, Epicor for a retail company, um, NetSuite for another organization. And so being able to see how each of these SaaS companies were being used, although Epicor wasn't SaaS, it was old client server architecture, but NetSuite was SaaS. So watching that get rolled out across industries was tremendously exciting and gives me some perspective on what's happening with the software um failure, if you will, uh perception of failure at this point in time.
SPEAKER_01The SaaS pocalypse. We're gonna talk about that too.
SPEAKER_03I have a hard time saying that word, but yes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, okay. I'll say it for you. Um, how did you go from that to investing and being passionate about investment? Is it simply as much as like running into Joel Greenblatt's book? Or was there some more of an arc to it?
SPEAKER_03So I got started like most people as a you know, a traditional value investor. I read Ben Graham and you know Phil Fisher, so on and so forth. And then Greenblatt's book really appealed to me. So I read a bunch of books by that point. I'd been investing for nearly a decade at that point in time, uh, but it was more from the old school value approach, right? Uh you're looking at things that were trading at cheap multiples based on either you running a DCF model uh or looking at comparative valuation metrics or trying to project the future. Uh, Greenblatt's approach was different. It's specific events, it's a spin-off that would unlock value, for example, or a merger situation that helps you do better than, let's say, fixed income investing. So, for example, I normally did not focus on fixed income investing because interest rates were low in the US for the better part of 10 years. After the great financial crisis, all the way through after COVID, uh, until the inflation started going up in 2022, interest rates were essentially below 1%, except for a two or three-year period towards the you know 2017 to 2019. So, in that period, uh fixed income investing did not necessarily generate great returns unless you went out on the risk profile. And so merger arbitrage provided a very attractive opportunity to me at that point. You could get returns anywhere from, you know, let's say 6% to 15%, depending on the kind of mergers you participated in. If you went for the risky mergers, you essentially were constructing a portfolio that was like investing in junk ponds, high returns, but high risk. But if you were to invest in certain other kinds of mergers, you could pick up anywhere from six to eight to ten percent returns that had, in some ways, a profile that was similar to fixed income, but much better uh outcomes. And so that's that's one of the pieces that attracted me a lot to uh another side of event-driven investing.
SPEAKER_01So you read the book, but like how do you how do you figure out like which mergers or what's gonna, you know, what are the opportunities? Like it's a lot to keep track of.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and that's that's why I ended up building the technology tools around it. Uh, I was an active investor, you know, it was my passion at that point in time. Um, and I was I started writing on in public uh in 2006 on Seeking Alpha. And that helped create a network. People were reaching out, there were hedge fund managers that were reading what I was saying, and they started sharing some of the research around MA with me. So that helped me get a little bit of a head start. Keeping track of anywhere from 80 to 100 deals that are active in the US is not easy. Uh, and so I ended up building tools. We started pulling data directly from the SEC because you have to track the merger from the point of announcement all the way to closing, which could include shareholder votes, it could include antitrust review, uh, it could include financing contingencies, so on and so forth. So there were a lot of different events that you had to track along the way. Obviously, I learned by doing. So if you looked at what we were doing back in 2010 when we started, I think it was a very simple data set where we were mostly tracking the spreads. But over time, we ended up layering in some of the understanding and the complexity that comes with uh working with the strategy for a long period of time. And so I realized that a large number of hedge funds and other professional investors were starting to use our tools. They were free for a number of years. And then about eight years ago, as we had uh you know grown the platform, I figured it was time to potentially make inside arbitrage into a real business. And that's when I switched over uh to essentially making it a research platform and expanding from there.
SPEAKER_01And you you always did that along with your career, is that correct? Or that's right.
SPEAKER_03Until about uh until about five years ago, uh I did have a technology career, and uh five years ago I started focusing full-time on uh the research platform and investing.
SPEAKER_01Okay. I think this is a good time to tell our folks that I'm really impressed by the platform you built. Uh I I think it's largely subscription driven, if not all fully subscription driven, right, at the moment. That's correct. Yep. So but I know it's broader now than just merger arbitrage, also. So so talk about what the platform is, who it's for, you know, how it works, you know, how it helps investors. I mean, make it a you know, a broad discussion about insider arbitrage.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So we started out with two strategies. I was fascinated by what was happening with insider transactions. And these are legal insider transactions, not the one where somebody lets you know in advance about something that's going to happen. This is about company insiders. It could be a 10 person owner, it could be a CEO or a CFO, or even uh somebody on the board of directors that is buying stock or selling stock on the open market. When they do that, they have to file a form with the SEC called the Form 4 within two business days of the transaction. You do see that at times they forget and they file this form quite uh late, but for the most part, it's supposed to be done within two business days. And you know, I I remember reading a quote, I think it was by Peter Lynch, that said insiders sell for all kinds of reasons, but they buy only for one reason. They think the stock is going up. I think um that quote was said uh at a time when the insiders were not necessarily buying to signal the market. But over time, the insiders figured out that, you know, people like you and me might be looking at these insider transactions and they started buying just to signal the market. So you might see a cluster purchase, you might see a CEO buy. Uh so essentially they're letting you know, hey, we are buying, maybe you should take a look at a company. So that made the data a little bit more noisy. And so you have to kind of try to understand the motivation behind uh why they're buying. And can something you've said before, uh the who rather than the what is important. And again, the same thing applies with insiders. You really want to understand who is buying and what their motivation is and not just you know what they're buying. So I started out with insider transactions and merger arbitrage, mainly because uh, you know, again, with a technology background, I was able to process Form 4 filings we would collect it within minutes of it hitting the SEC. And we would do uh data analysis on the data to try to understand if there were patterns we could find, whether through machine learning or through traditional data analysis. So we started with those two pieces. And as we saw that, you know, we ended up with a large number of subscribers who were taking a look at this data. I figured I was going to expand to other event-driven strategies. And so we included spin-offs at some point in time. Uh so we started looking at upcoming spin-offs and completed spin-offs. Uh, then we started looking at stock buyback announcements. SPACs became very popular at one point in time. You had a whole SPAC uh bubble, if you will, in 2021, 2022. Um, we were tracking SPACs, and then most recently we started tracking activist investors a couple of years ago. And so this grew organically because as you think about companies, you realize that there is an overlap between things. And one really good example that I usually use is a company called Biohaven. So Biohaven was a company that made migraine-related drugs, and uh Pfizer was interested in acquiring the company, but they were only interested in acquiring the migraines portfolio of the company and not the rest of their pipeline. So they decided to spin off the rest of the pipeline at the point the merger would close into a separate company. And just to make it difficult for all of us, they decided to call the new company Biohaven as well. So you had the old Biohaven with the migraines company uh uh products that were gonna be acquired, and then you had the new Biohaven, and the whole management team of old Biohaven was gonna go into new Biohaven. And Pfizer, unlike most spin-offs, where the spin-off is actually loaded with a lot of debt to leave the parent with a cleaner and uh stronger balance sheet. In this case, Pfizer was gonna fund the company, the new spin-off with, I think, if I remember correctly, maybe $350 million in cash. So you had the situation where you ended up with a pipeline of drugs, you had $350 million in cash, and it was a merger. So you had a merger and a spin-off happening simultaneously. The stock was trading at, I think, about $141 when I got involved. Uh the deal price was $148.50. So I would pick up like $7 or $7.50 when the deal closed. So that was the merger arbitrage portion. And if you looked at how many shares were going to be outstanding in the spin-off after it happened, um, I calculated it to be about $7 per share. So I figured if nothing else, if it traded simply at the cash value, uh, I would pick up another $7. And so I participated in that merger. And then right before the deal closed, I noticed that just a few days after all the approvals were in, uh, an insider of the company bought stock at $148. So he was not buying it for the 50 cents merger arbitrary spread. That didn't want that did not make any sense. This was a board member who'd been on the board for several years. He had been an emergency room uh uh physician uh or a surgeon, so he had the medical background and he was excited about the pipeline for the new biohaven. And that's why he was buying. He wanted to be able to pick it up in the spin-off. The spin-off happened, uh company started trading a little over $7. My thesis was essentially complete at this point at that point, so I ended up selling the stock and then it went all the way up to $60 per share. They ended up doing a bunch of secondary offerings in which the uh insiders participated. So this was a situation where you know three strategies we were following a spin-off, merjabitage, and insiders came together. And so I realized that the power of the strategies is not just one strategy in itself, it's the overlap and the patterns that you start to observe over a period of time as you look at this data very closely every day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's that's really fascinating. Um, so you you mentioned six strategies? Yes. Six. Is there any way to have I don't know if you've tracked the data or whatever. Like, is there some strategies that relatively do better than others? Does it change over time, or is it like in the long run versus the short term? Let's help our our uh audience get an intuition about which of these might make more sense depending on who they are, what their time horizon is, or whatever.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, each strategy is very different. So there are six strategies. We added uh activists later on after that. Uh, there's a seventh one. I did end up writing a book called The Event Driven Edge and Investing that covers the six strategies. And each chapter in the book has two case studies. One where if you use the strategy, you actually made money, and another cautionary case study that told you where things did not go right, even if you use the strategy. So you get both sides of each strategy. There are times, just like there are seasons in the year, there are times when these strategies are favorable and they work well, and there are times when they don't. So merger arbitrage during that period of low interest rates was a very good strategy for me. For well over a decade, it worked out very well. And then the regulatory environment changed when Lena Khan was the head of the FTC and Biden was in power. You had a highly restrictive regulatory environment. And this isn't uh essentially a political uh statement that I'm making here, it's just the facts on the ground. Uh, you had a difficult regulatory environment, and so mergers not only were failing more than they would, for the most part, over the last 15 years, as we've tracked data, 95% of all mergers close. But during that period, you saw that mergers were failing that shouldn't normally fail. There was no real antitrust reason for these mergers to fail, or they were taking much longer to complete, uh, and which is very difficult because merger investors look at not just the returns you get on a deal, they're looking at annualized returns. So, for example, um uh last month I participated in a merger arbitrage situation where I was potentially making about 10% returns, but the 10% returns were going to happen in a period of three months. So in my mind, I'm thinking of it more like over 40% annualized returns, and that's attractive to me. But if that situation took six months to play out instead of three months, then it's 20% annualized returns, not taking compounding into effect, right? So the delays in mergers are a huge issue. So during a difficult regulatory environment with higher breaks as well as longer delays on the mergers completing, uh, merge arbitrage was not necessarily working out great. With the Trump administration coming in last year, it the whole uh script flipped and merge arbitrage was once again in favor. Similar thing was something I noticed with spin-offs. If you looked at the 2010 to 2022 spin-offs, uh for some reason a lot of those were not working. Uh but I've had some very good luck with spin-offs. Um, you know, I was participating in GE before the Werner spin-off happened. I'm currently in Honeywell at this point in time before the aerospace spin-off happens. And last year I participated in uh Western Digital before the Sand spin-off happened. And so you had to pick and choose within the strategy. Uh, and there are, for some reason, there are seasons within strategies. At the end of the day, I think it becomes an idea generation mechanism for you. Every night we look at insider transactions. Last night we looked at 31 transactions. This week we probably already looked at over 100 transactions. And so these are 100 companies I might not have looked at otherwise, and I'm paying attention to because of this. And so for me, I see these strategies as idea generation mechanisms from which I built extensive watch lists. And then the time you look for when the time is right. Maybe it's a macro issue that uh gives you the opportunity to buy, or maybe you see a second signal. Uh, the company where the insider was buying also announces a large buyback. And so you have a second signal saying the insiders are buying and the company is going to buy back. And maybe they have an accelerated buyback program uh that's going to help uh move the stock up. So it is about seasons within strategies, it's about overlaps within strategies, and it's about idea generation from these strategies.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I actually was thinking that same point because what's nice about event-driven things, say, like normally, like as an investment manager, you always have like a bunch of companies that you could be looking at, or you, you know, whatever. But like you, or you could do a screen and you come up with hundreds of companies, but there isn't really any urgency or way to say, why should I look at this one instead of that one? So you just maybe go through your screen at some pace, you know. Yep. But what's nice about events is that it's like actually increases the urgency to look at these ones right now, right? Absolutely. Because the time frame. To take advantage of whatever might be going on is a limited window.
SPEAKER_03That's okay.
SPEAKER_01That's exactly right. And so I really I like that as a way to filter through a larger number of possible things to look at the ones where the timing could be very relevant. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, Kim. So has your experience been that sort of everything has its season and the seasons come and go? Or are there one or two that really seem to perennially work better?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, the seasons come and go. And I'm reminded of what Jim Simmons of Renaissance Technologies was talking about. You know, as uh all of you know, they run one of the most successful quant-focused funds out there. And they have a number of strategies they use and they experience the same thing. They will see that strategies are working for a period of time and then they go cold and they essentially put them into inventory. They put it on the shelf, uh, and then they realize, okay, maybe there's a different time or a different market cycle when the strategy works and they bring it back. I've seen the same thing with event driven. On insider transactions, it's evergreen in the sense you will get a lot of ideas constantly. Uh, but there is a macro overlay that actually gets really interesting there. During COVID, uh, two weeks in uh the second half of March, we saw for the first time in over 10 years of tracking the data that insider buying surpassed insider selling. Uh, so we had never seen that before. Usually insiders are selling 20 to 30 times as much as they buy each week. And so we track this data each week, we can compute that. And so for the first time ever in a decade, I saw insiders buying more than they were selling. So they saw the COVID disruption, and it was a very significant disruption, both in terms of human life, in terms of economic impact on various countries. But the insiders who were deeply familiar with the company felt that the selling was overdone and you know the stocks were worth a lot of money. So they were buying very significantly and they were not selling at the same time. So that was a big macro signal for us. Uh, it helped us position more bullishly after that. And obviously the Fed stepped in and you know nuked that bull market, uh bear market, if you will. But we have also seen patterns within industries. So, for example, in May 2020, when uh WTI crude futures went negative because nobody wanted to take delivery of a large number of oil uh barrels in Cushing, Oklahoma, you had this situation where a lot of the energy stocks were down quite significantly. And then the energy insiders started to buy quite a bit of stock on the open market. So you saw cluster buying not just within a company, but across companies in that industry. And that was an absolutely wonderful time to have exposure to energy. There was another time uh similar to that in uh early 2023 when Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, uh, and First Republic were failing. You saw regional bank insiders step in and buy hand over fist. We just couldn't keep up with the number of insider transactions we were seeing for regional banks. And then you saw that happen with the biotech sector in late 2024, early 2025. You could see a lot of insider buying in companies that had FDA approved products that were seeing revenue grow, but the market couldn't care less about biotech companies. And so um, normally I don't invest in biotech companies. They are in my too hard pile. I have no scientific background to understand which drugs are going to get FDA approvals, which ones will fail. But the insiders were buying so much I had to pay attention. I ended up buying some and it worked out great. So uh with insiders, the flow of ideas is constant. And then you start to see the patterns where they are concentrating heavily within a sector because that industry or sector has been hurt quite significantly above and beyond where it should be. Uh and so that that is that provides an interesting uh industry level signal for us.
SPEAKER_01How often does a strong insider purchase not end up being an indication of a great subsequent investment opportunity? Like how often are insiders kind of wrong, like maybe even though they're putting their money where their mouth is?
SPEAKER_03Very often. Uh and this is the this is a challenge with the strategy, right? Because very often they're buying to signal the market, as I mentioned earlier. And then there are situations where we saw a five million dollar purchase by the CEO of Pinterest, the social media company. And if you read the footnotes of the Form 4 filing, he mentioned that he was buying because he would get another additional five million from the company if he bought on the open market. That was part of his employment contract. And so when we saw the workday CEO, Carla Schinbach, who is no longer with the company, also buying maybe about $2 million worth of stock on the open market, we went and looking for that footnote to see if he was going to get paid by the company. There was no footnote in the Form 4 filing, but we found the clause on, I think, page three of his employment contract. And we realized that he was gonna get paid twice as much or more if he bought $2 million worth of stock on the open market. And don't hold me to the exact numbers. It could have been $2 million, it could have been five million. So there is a certain level of depth you have to have with the data to understand which of these are uh valuable insights, which of these are things you have you would best ignore. And so with insiders, they get it wrong quite a bit. But what you want to do with insiders is you want to use that as an idea generation strategy for companies might that might not have come across your radar otherwise. So that's how I see them. And then you start to pick up on patterns on which insiders you need to focus on. Maybe it's not the CEO purchases, maybe it's an uh independent board member uh that has an investing background that has essentially no reason to signal uh to the market through their purchase uh that they find the company attractive. Maybe it's a board member that's been on the board for a decade and has never bought before, but is making an opportunistic purchase now, not under a 10 B Phi plan, which are established plans uh that some insiders put in place that let them buy over a period of time. So those patterns can become very important and interesting. And so that's why a lot of people look at insider uh buying or selling and they dismiss it because they see that the insiders are wrong quite a bit. And like value investors, insider also insiders also tend to be early. Uh they they you know they get excited, they say, Oh, my stock is down so much. Uh, it's a great value and I need to buy, but often it'll continue going down because the market, um, you know, the mean reversion tends to overshoot the mean on both sides.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that makes sense. So I'm gonna ask you, just out of curiosity, like maybe a tough question, but like if you could only do one for the next 10 years, which one would you want to keep? And which would the which of the other ones would you be willing to sort of say, okay, I can't do this one for for the next 10 years. Out of the six or seven, you say I only get to keep one, which one would you keep?
SPEAKER_03It is a difficult question, Ken, because it removes the power of the overlap for me. Right? The overlaps are very important for me. I need to see like two or three things coming together. Um it also removes the seasonality. I mean, the year is less fun if you only have one season uh during the year. Right. But but that said, if I'm limited and you had to make me pick, I would pick insider transactions because of just the sheer amount of idea generation I can get from it. And for some reason, uh in some ways being irrational, I I like that idea. I like I like that strategy a lot.
SPEAKER_01If I got and if I let you keep one more, which is the number next one that you you say I wanted this one as my next team member.
SPEAKER_03So at this point, merger arbitrage hasn't been quite as attractive because now with the Trump administration, spreads have narrowed quite a bit. Interest rates are still high enough, you could get some money in a CD or a bond. Um, but I like the strategy a lot because if you were to think as a traditional money manager who does like 60% stocks, 40% bonds, or however they do the asset allocation, the merger arbitrage provides that fixed income quality, if you will, to the portfolio. So that's why I started with insider transaction and the merger. Insider transactions created the ideas for the equity side, merger arbitrage created the idea for the fixed income side. And hopefully they're both, unless you end up in a very deep bear market like the great financial crisis, they are hopefully a little bit uncorrelated with each other.
SPEAKER_01Got it. And just for context, what are the other five that you didn't pick in your top two?
SPEAKER_03Beyond that, I would be very interested in spin-offs. I think they really unlock uh value uh if they're done right. You have to look at them and understand do you want to be involved with the parent or the spin-off? Um, and so you need to pick and choose. It's not always about participating in the spin-off. It's uh it could also be that uh the spin-off is leaving the parent in a much better shape and you want to be in the parent. That that was my logic with GE and GE Vernova. In fact, Verno was an underperforming division uh that GE wanted to get rid of. And that was my analysis as well when I participated. But I'd also noticed that sometimes you participate before the last spin-off happened and you pick up the pinoff at a very low price. I just got lucky on Vernova doing as well as it did. The same thing with Western Digital and Sandisk, right? SandDisk was a cyclical memory division that Western Digital wanted to get rid of in some sense. And they had probably made a mistake by acquiring SandDisk, and Seagate did not do that. So you had a huge difference in valuation between Western Digital and Seagate. And so once again, there I wasn't buying it for SandDisk. I got lucky with Sandisk. So sometimes you know you just increase the surface area of your luck by looking at some of these situations. So I would say spin-offs would be the third one that I would be interested in. Activists, if you follow the right ones, uh like Elliott Management has done very well in several situations I've been involved with, uh, I think is very helpful as well. Western Digital had uh Elliott involved, uh, Honeywell that I'm currently participating has Elliott involved. So you have somebody with deep experience that is agitating for change at the company. Uh so that that would be another area that I would be very excited by. Uh SPACs have come back in favor now, and for people who want to have uh those free warrants as uh lottery tickets that might pay off into the future, uh, that's attractive, but it just hasn't been an area that I'm as excited about as the rest of my uh the strategies that I use.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. And how much of your portfolio is in activist things or event-driven things versus just you know other things?
SPEAKER_03All of it. Um every single idea I participate in has some event-driven angle to it. There is one portfolio uh that is that tracks the inside arbitrage portfolio. So one of my personal portfolios tracks exactly what we do for inside arbitrage, which is event-driven strategies. Earlier this year, we did switch to using a quantitative model uh for our clients and for myself, uh, for most of our clients. Some chose uh still uh discretionary uh picking, if you will. And so those quant models do have some event-driven factors in them, uh, but there might be some company through the model uh that might not necessarily have any event uh driven exposure to them.
SPEAKER_01What was the logic between switching to a more quantitative approach?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so we ended up building the quant model for our ideas that we were looking at in inside arbitrage. As I mentioned, this week we probably looked at over a hundred insider transactions. So every night we look at insider transactions, we look at buyback announcements, we look at spin-off announcements, new mergers. And so in a given week, we were running across dozens, if not sometimes hundreds of companies. And the human mind just can't process that much information or retain it. The processing it is one thing, retaining it and memory is a different thing. And in many ways, when you think about machine learning or AI, it is about pattern matching, which is what we as humans also do. Uh we use our prior experience and knowledge, and hopefully wisdom. Uh, knowledge doesn't equal wisdom in all cases, uh, to pattern match against a set of new ideas. And what I realized was there was no way to do in-depth work on this volume of companies. And so we ended up building a quantitative model as our first filter. So think of it as a screen, a favorite screen that people use. And this quant model became a screen. So if a company scored, let's say, over uh 70 on a quant model, then we will take a deeper look. That was the idea behind it. So that's why we first built the quant model and we used it for a period of 14 months. And as we kept using it, it built a confidence in the model. And we realized uh this is actually quite useful as a tool for us to invest, as a tool for us to whittle down and figure out um companies we should focus on. So once we did that, we actually did the back testing. So we didn't do the back testing to pick the factors. I've done enough uh machine learning and things to know that you could torture the data to make it confess, and essentially you could overfit the data if you will. Uh so we didn't use machine learning um to build the model, but we did go and back test after we'd been using the model for 14 months. And the results we saw from that were exciting enough. We figured that it was, it made sense to switch to a quantitative approach.
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SPEAKER_01And can you talk about like who subscribes to your service? Um and is it is it sort of like different things for different like say if somebody I would assume some of them are just individual investors like you started with who are interested in event-driven things. Uh, but there must be also institutional. Is it so and what's the if I'm interested in subscribing, like what are my options? You know, what's the cost? What do I get? Uh talk about that.
SPEAKER_03So we started out uh focusing on event-driven investors who are often professional and institutional investors. Uh, they were hedge fund managers because there aren't that many retail people seeking out merger arbitrage as a strategy, if you will. Insider transactions are more accessible in some sense, it makes more sense. MergerAb is a little bit harder to get your head around. So we started out on that front, but we had uh whole spectrum of retail investors to institutional investors, uh, and more recently, uh some of the largest ones. So, for example, some of the largest merger arbitrage funds use our data. Uh, they're paying customers. Uh, probably one of the top five uh largest quantitative firms in the country uh or the world uses our data as well. Uh so as we built it out, we realized that we had ended up building tools and a long history of quality data that it started attracting that level of institutional clients uh to sign up. And in terms of what we offer, we had a we had a premium plan that included a combination of tools as well as content. So we do the analysis as well. So, for example, this week, we wrote about a company that was seeing both insider transactions as well as a large buyback announcement that was nearly 17 or 18% of the company's market cap, and it included an accelerated buyback. So we did an in-depth uh article about the company, uh you know, comparing it to competitors, looking at how the SAS SASO Palace policy or SAS Accompalace, whatever we call that, was impacting this company. SAS Pocalypse. SAS Yeah, can I just ask you to say that? So that's impacting the company, and you could see that because the stock is down so much, the insiders and uh, you know, the company is buying back stock. So we do the analysis as well. And then at some point we realized there were a group of retail investors that didn't care as much about the tools, they just wanted the analysis and the ideas. And so we created a lower tier called IA Plus that is mostly just the content and the ideas that we write about. Uh and so uh retail investors gravitate towards that. Professional investors who like uh having access to the data use IA Premium. And then we created a higher tier called IA Professional that introduces introduced uh, for example, a C VR database, uh contingent value right database that we had built over 15 years. Uh, the activist part of it that was a seven strategy, if you will. Uh so certain additional tools that might appeal more to the largest institutions. Uh, we ended up creating a tier for that as well.
SPEAKER_01And we can put this stuff in the show notes, but how does somebody uh subscribe? What's the cost for the entry, you know, the the the beginning tier that you can get some ideas in a newsletter format, I suppose?
SPEAKER_03So IA plus is about $480 a year. Uh I think on a monthly basis it's $50 a month. Uh IA premium is $1,200 a year, and IA professional is $4,500 a year, uh but includes four seats. So different people within the organization can maintain their own portfolios, watch lists, mergers they're interested in, so on and so forth.
SPEAKER_01That's great.
SPEAKER_03That's that's a good value. Hopefully, yes. Uh in a large enough portfolio, I can see it adding value.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, like just one idea could more than pay for even if you were a professional subscriber, you know, working with just not huge amounts of capital. So I I I think that to me that sounds like great value. I mean, a lot of when I, you know, I I had written research at one point with a with a partner, actually a really well-known guy named Maurice Stahl. You know, there was a whole business of people that um they sell, you know, research to hedge funds and things like that. And many of those funds, I I don't know if it's changed now because this is going back when I started Ridgewoods. We were talking 20s, some years ago. But um, I know that some many of those subscription services were like $20,000 for one series of reports. But the thing was, like a lot of these firms, they have what's called soft dollars. So they're essentially told by their brokers who they're trading hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars of trades that hey, you know, we'll give you soft dollars so you could spend it on research or you could spend it on Bloomberg or whatever. Airline miles or Amex points or something. It's by being a customer, you get some value back, you can spend it on whatever, in that case, research or whatever. I I don't know if that system has changed because this was even pre-2004. But um, certainly to me, when I hear the pricing, I I think it's an amazing bargain.
SPEAKER_03Thanks again. Yeah, you're right. Uh I think some of that has changed. The software part of it has changed. Uh, you know, brokerages probably aren't making as much in transaction fees as probably they're making on making loans to some of these funds. Um I think some of the rules around it has changed as well. But that could that could be a potential revenue stream for for somebody who's aligned with that. I'm glad you brought up Murray Stall. I think he started out uh with spin-offs, uh the research service.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. So what about one of his reports was spin-off report or something like that? I forgot what his exact name of it.
SPEAKER_03Yep.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And we used to see him start one of his reports. I forget which one.
SPEAKER_03Interesting. And we used to see his insider purchases all the time. He he buys uh, you know, he is part of Horizon Kinetics, he buys uh TPL, uh Texas Specific uh Land. Um, yes, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he's a very brilliant guy. Extremely erudite, very intellectual, um, very independent thinking. Uh so his research is actually super interesting to read. And I've met him a number of times. I've been, I really respect him. So um, and also I should tell people who are listening that you have a great podcast as well where you interview a lot of great people with your daughter, who I uh who I think is great as well. Uh so tell people about that, and then I'll let Latsal ask a couple of questions as well. I'm sure he has a bunch of things that he'd want you to talk about.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we launched the podcast a little over a year ago in January of 2025. Uh, my daughter Tamana has been working with me for the last four years. Uh, she has been looking at these insider transactions with me every night. We look at the footnotes together, so on and so forth. Um, you know, and I had her start to uh write some of the research with us. And the first few companies I gave her were all regional banks. And she was, you know, after a few weeks, she was like, uh, this stuff is really boring, these regional banks. I don't know why you keep me making me look at these. And as you remember, this was in early 2023, and the regional bank insiders were buying quite a bit. And then the Silicon Valley uh failure started to happen. And by that point in time, she had started to get grasped uh what was happening with regional banks, how to think about these companies, that the Silicon Valley Bank whole scenario actually was something that made sense to her and was interesting. So, together, after she'd been working with me for a while, she decided to go study business economics at UCLA. Uh, we decided to do a podcast together, uh, just to, on a weekly basis, talk about the most exciting event-driven strategies or stories that came about. And we figured we'll have maybe one guest a month. Uh, and more recently, it's been a little bit more frequently on the guest side. Uh, but it's been great to tap into somebody who has been following, for example, uh the Paramount and uh Netflix war for Warner Brothers. And this is somebody who's, you know, was in uh previously an equity research investment banker focused on TMT, and he was following the situation really close. And so it was great to get somebody like that on for an hour and just talk about what's happening with that uh merger situation. So it's been uh we've been highly fortunate to kind of have some guests uh who are experts within the field uh and just come and talk to us about this and explore ideas. Um, can you introduce me uh to Evan Tindal, who's part of the Capital Alliance? Uh, he was a guest on our podcast as well. And so just having the ability to have these conversations with these experts has been very enriching for both of us.
SPEAKER_01Definitely. Uh Vatal, do you have uh any things you want to talk to us about?
SPEAKER_02How do you think about different event-driven opportunities like spin-offs, activist involvement, and even things like SPACs? And how do you decide where to focus your attention?
SPEAKER_03That's a very interesting question. I've never had uh that question asked before. So let me think about that for a minute. In value investing, often we think about buying something that is at a reasonable price, maybe a good business that might have a catalyst, right? A lot of people focus on a catalyst. In event driven, you're starting from the catalyst. Uh, so the catalyst is already happening. Somebody's announced a spin off situation, somebody's announced a merger. And so somebody who wants to succeed at event driven investing, your catalyst is already in place. Now you're essentially assigning. Probabilities. Probabilities that the deal will close, probability that the spin-off is structured in such a way, hopefully not uh you know, loaded with so much debt that they're not going to do well. Uh so you start looking at the situation and you start assigning probabilities to them. So you have to be extremely detail-oriented. You have to pick up on every single twist and turn of the merger situation or the spin-off. Uh, you also have to be somebody who thinks very probabilistic, which is why a lot of the merger arbitrage folks uh sometimes end up doing very well in other areas of investing. Uh so if you think of John Paulson and his trades, uh, he did extremely well. He was a merger focused investor. Uh but it essentially ends up inculcating these habits in you where you are very detail-oriented and you think probabilistically. And I think that carries through into other realms of investing if you decide to go past event-driven.
SPEAKER_02Is your entire portfolio built around uh event-driven strategies, spin-offs, activist involvement, and what led you to introduce a much more quantitative model into your process?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so you you you hit it on the head. Um, the difference between the perception versus reality, you're trying to somehow tread water in that uh ocean, if you will. And you're hoping that your perception is uh more relevant than what the market is telling you uh is happening. And so with event-driven, what happens is you get some external input from the insiders buying, for example. Uh, and so you'll see across the industry that a lot of insiders are buying, and that might help you with your perception of what's going on, or you might see significant buyback announcements with accelerated inside uh buying, if you will. Uh so you get these external inputs. So obviously you have a view of the market, you have a view of the industry, that's your perception. And then what's happening? The market is telling you something different potentially. And often these days, with the markets being as efficient as they are, if you go against the trend or if you go swim against the current, you're gonna drown. Um, and so if you do choose to do that, you you feel like you make the biggest money when your perception is correct and the market is wrong. Um, the input the event-driven stuff provides, either through insider transactions or buybacks, might help you build some confidence to stay the course, right? Uh often as investors, if you've done the deep work yourself, you also have the conviction to stay with the idea for the long run. Uh but if you haven't done the deep work, then you don't. In this case, uh, the events are providing some of that uh input and a pattern matching to you. When an industry is in trouble, you often see that there are bankruptcies first, and then there is MA activity, and then you start uh to see that you know these companies start to emerge out of that downturn. But before the bankruptcies and before the uh MA happens, uh you often see the insiders because they are quite early. Uh and so if you start seeing a significant amount of insider buying, you should realize that they're going to be early and the next few months might not be the best. But if you think longer term, uh that might work out well.
SPEAKER_02With uh so many opportunities, insider trades, mergers, buybacks, how do you actually process that volume of information and what pushed you toward building a quantitative screening system?
SPEAKER_03And you're absolutely right. Uh, that's the reason, as I mentioned in the book, I had one case study for each chapter where something did not go right. You have to understand when how and why when things go wrong. Things can go wrong for a number of reasons. We talked about Lena Khan at the head of the FTC, uh, and there was a merger between Tapestry and Capri. This is the company that owns Coach that was acquiring the company that bought uh that owns Michael Cores. Uh and the CEO of Capri was buying this week, uh, just as a heads up. Uh, it was interesting to see that. So, this was a merger where there should not have been any antitrust issues uh under a normal uh uh antitrust environment. And so it did get blocked. And um you're essentially what you were doing is you were not just pattern matching against your previous experience with mergers and probabilistic thinking, you have to pattern match against a new environment and you have to say, how does this change things? Even though the deal makes sense, the regulatory environment is so different that you need to readjust your probabilities based on that. So I think some of that happens. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02What separates a successful event-driven investor from a more traditional value investor, especially in terms of thinking about catalysts and probabilities?
SPEAKER_03No, it's difficult. I've probably looked at well over a thousand deals at this point in time, right? So I'm pattern matching against a larger data set, if you will, uh, as I think about this. And each situation is unique, which is why the detail oriented part of it is important because you can't just say, all right, I've seen this before, you know, this is spread is 3%, it's likely to close, or the spread is 12%. Uh, for example, Sintas this week uh acquired another uniform company and the spread is almost 12%. And that makes sense because there are only three or four uh uniform uh companies, if you will, that provide uniforms corporations. And when Syntas is trying to acquire one of the biggest companies in the industry, you can see that the spread is 12%. Now at this point in time, the question becomes what kind of probability am I gonna assign to this? And what is the market telling you? And is there a mismatch there? Even before I looked at the spread, I looked at the deal and I was like, this is gonna have a really hard time getting through regulatory approval, right? So that's the pattern matching part of it. You just look at it and you say, I we've done work on Vestis, which was spun out of Aramark. This is another uniform company. So we'd already done the work on what's happening with professional uniform companies. And so when the as soon as the deal was announced, it was like, you know, this is gonna have a difficult time, despite an easier regulatory environment. So you're pattern matching, not just against a thousand mergers you must have looked at, you pattern matched against the experience you had with the industry when you looked at a spin-off in the same industry. So I think of it as a mosaic, Watson, uh, where you're pulling all this information together from all these strategies that we've looked at for decades, if you will. Uh, and hopefully that gives you a little bit of an edge. It doesn't always uh, you know, we we we get it wrong, I get it wrong quite a bit. Uh, but hopefully over a long enough period of time, uh your outcomes are better.
SPEAKER_01I want to come back around to SaaS and AI. It's both are, you know, a lot going on there. Uh is there any insights that you're getting from the signals through all these different uh data that you're collecting that might be interesting for the people who are trying to figure out what should I make of the SaaS pocalypse? All these companies have traded down. Is it more of an opportunity or is it more of a an impairment of a moat that might be more permanent?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, can so I'll break it down into two parts of this. So one is uh the impairment of the opportunity, if you will, um, or impairment of the moat rather. Yes, that is impairment of the moat. AI is uh transformational. Nobody fully understands or knows how the whole thing plays out at the end of the day. But yes, it means that could be uh more startups uh that show up on the radar uh that have vibe coded some part of a feature, if you will. But again, if you have some background in technology, if you've written code, if you've built enterprise systems, you know that it's up, it goes above and beyond just writing code. I wish it was that simple. Maybe 20 to 30 percent of a company that is related to technology or SaaS might be about code. You also have to find the customer uh market fit. Uh, you have to basically figure out how to fund the company or figure out what your customer acquisition costs are, how long you're going to retain customers. There's a whole lot more to building and uh scaling a software business than just writing code. So I think there's a sense of people thinking established companies that have that deep expertise in the domain are going to get disrupted overnight. I don't think that's going to happen as the market is perceiving it will. And I'm saying this as somebody who's written a lot of code, uh who uses AI, who understands that the frontier models are very powerful. So it's not as somebody who is completely agnostic or not interested in AI. On the other hand, these companies are also not sitting on their hands watching this uh play out. They are starting to use AI. They're encouraging the developers to be more productive by using AI. They are buying uh AI companies. Uh, so Berkday has acquired four AI companies in a row or five AI companies in a row. Um Salesforce.com uh is pushing agent force. All the conversation is about AI and agent force. And at the same time, they're using this market disruption to borrow money. They just announced a large debt offering uh to buy back stock and they're going to do accelerated buybacks. So I can see that these companies are not sitting there watching this play out in front of them. They are participating in it either by using AI internally or by participating in the capital markets, either through buybacks or you see a large number of insider transactions. I've seen over 30 insider transactions in software or software adjacent companies since the start of this year, and over 60 buyback announcements uh at these kind of companies over the last year. So I have a rich data set that I'm you know exploring and uh writing about. Uh I'm gonna write about it this weekend actually. So I feel like yes, uh things have changed, but uh the market might be overdoing things as it usually does, and the pendulum has swung too far to the other side. Now that said, to begin with, the pendulum was very much on the wrong side because uh the SAS companies were being afforded valuations that didn't make any sense. Everybody was focused on adjusted this and adjusted that. Um stock-based compensation was uh you know not being looked at. So nobody was paying attention to GAP profitability, and all of a sudden now that's come into view. So you have this, I think it's a two-step thing. Terminal values are now in question. Um, people are looking at uh these extreme levels of stock-based compensation and the fact that gap profits don't exist, and then on the other side, uh AI, right? So I think some of the rationalization that has happened in valuation is simply because people are now looking at this the way they should have been looking at them all along.
SPEAKER_01That's great um insight. Obviously, we we this is the Capital Alliance podcast. It's not limited to obviously anybody in Capital Alliance, and this is the I think at least the fourth episode. So uh, but you're the first person on the podcast. There'll be others who isn't a member who's experienced the community. Uh so I'd love to share um sort of uh obviously we're selective about it's a curated community. Uh it's only for founders and partners of folks involved in professional investing at some level. Uh, but so share a little bit about your experience and what um what it's what's been the value uh or why you decided to make an investment of time and and uh money to be a member of Capital Alliance.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so I was at a dinner last weekend uh and some close friend of ours were asking us, uh they were asking me, uh, we notice you've been traveling quite a bit. What's causing you to go to all these different places in the country all of a sudden? And I was telling them about Capital Alliance. I was like, I joined this group that Ken and Watsell have created, and uh we get together three times a year, and it's essentially like your personal board of directors. And I can take any business issues that I have, or I can take any personal issues, thankfully nothing on the personal side yet, but I can take the business issues to them or personal issues, and you get this extremely smart group of people who are successful in their own right, like providing you feedback. Uh, we were talking about pattern matching, and so they're pattern matching against their knowledge and wisdom, and providing you a level of feedback you would normally not expect to receive otherwise. And so that's what I told them. And everybody at that dinner table was quite surprised, and they're like, this is very powerful, very useful. Uh and I was like, Yeah, that's exactly why I'm involved with this. So essentially that's my answer, Ken. I I really like the fact that things that I'm grappling with as an entrepreneur, as somebody who's building my company, uh, where I'm in my head most of the time trying to think of, you know, how should I, which direction should I go? And should I add an eighth different strategy? Do I go to a new geography, if you will? Should I switch to a quant-based model or should I continue picking and choosing stocks for client portfolios? These are the kind of questions I think I brought to the Capital Alliance and I've received feedback from the group. And that is very valuable to me. Um, the other thing that is valuable, and I think uh is gonna become increasingly more valuable over time, is we live in a virtual world. We're doing this over Riverside Studio. We are probably all three in three different geographic locations. But I think people are gonna value in-person interactions a whole lot more going forward with things like deep fakes and people not being real, people uh saying all kinds of things when they're not in front of a person. Uh, people are, I think, starting to crave the human connection, in-person connections. And so I think this ability to come and meet multiple times a year uh and not just share ideas with each other, not just uh ask for input from others, but this ability to connect at a human level in person, I think is going to be very valuable. Uh so I enjoy that part of it as well. Another thing that Capital Alliance has is everybody gives something. Uh as you say, we are go-givers in some sense, not just go-getters. And we all have had very rich experiences uh over decades. And so we've figured out a few things. And so the ability to share these things with the group, I think, supercharges their uh progression through their career or through their business. Uh so I think that that part of it is also very valuable for me personally.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Yeah, I also find it just really fun. Now I look forward to seeing everybody. Um obviously, like I created the group with Vot Sell's uh help uh because I want to be in the group. That was really my selfish motivation. Um, and of course, I was fortunate enough that I learned the model from a different group. It's just in a different domain, and I got so much value out of it that I was like, wow, wouldn't it be so great if there was a group just like this for investors? Uh and I actually looked for it, didn't find it. So therefore we created Capital Lines. But I'm obviously we just had our meeting in San Diego not that long ago, and it could the group continues to grow and gel. And you know, now every time we get together, it's like seeing our, you know, long our family that's been dispersed. And you look, I look forward to it, you know. And obviously we had a great experience on um, so uh you know, we're gonna have other folks from Capital Alliance on the podcast as well. Uh, but it's it's amazing to see an idea take shape. Um, and of course, like Pobri talks about, you know, clone things that are good, clone, clone success. That's kind of what we're doing. We're taking a successful model and just cloning it in this domain. Um, so definitely can't thank you and others who jumped into the pool with us early enough because without you guys, um, it doesn't exist at all. It's just an idea still in somebody's head in my head.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely can. And I'm thankful you guys thought of, including me in this group. Um, you're right about the fun part of it. Being on Michael's yacht the other day uh in San Diego and seeing a dolphin in the wild for the first time uh while we were sailing. And I made an amazing connection on that boat ride as well. Uh we're having him on the podcast tomorrow on our podcast. Uh so you know, just just the fun part of it, the connections, all of it, I I think it adds tremendous value.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, awesome. Um, and uh let's end with uh so what's the future of uh inside arbitrage and where do you want to take it? And what are what are uh what are things that you're working on to continue to be the leader or a leader in um in event-driven uh investing? And you could even say what's the future of event-driven investing if you have any insights on that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think I want to continue to expand the platform. I've had a lot of fun building this. Um, it's been uh very profitable in the sense that I get to use this platform for my own investing. I get a chance to work with my daughter, launch a podcast with her. So it's very fulfilling on so many different fronts. Having bootstrapped it all along uh you know has both its advantages and disadvantages, but at least I'm able to control the destiny of the company to some extent. What I'm excited about is using the same patterns and applying it to other countries, if you will. So we we want to expand to different countries, maybe it's the Canada, maybe it's the UK and other places. So while I'm excited about that, and that's the direction I want to go, I also realize that there are a lot of nuances. So we've figured out a lot of nuances over several years when it comes to mergers or insider transactions. Uh so picking those up uh is going to be difficult as we go into different markets. Each of these markets behave differently, if you will. The regulatory rules are different. Uh so on the one hand, I'm excited about that kind of expansion. On the other hand, I also realize it's challenging. It's not just about collecting data, it's about understanding that insiders cannot sell and buy within a six-month period. There's a SEC short swing rule. So, what kind of rules like that exist in Canada? What kind of rules does the UK have? What does Australia have? Uh so that's gonna be the challenge part of it. But then in business, as you know, you want to do the hard things. Uh, that's what gives you an edge, and that's what leads to success over a period of time. So that that's what I'm excited about, taking what we've built and applying those patterns to other countries.
SPEAKER_01I'm glad you brought that up. So, how many other countries have enough data that you could apply or look for other these maybe just insider transactions, but maybe there's there's other things too where you can comparably get enough data to where you can find signal?
SPEAKER_03Uh I think on MA activity, you probably have a smaller data set, uh right, unless you're in like uh England, London. So there you might get more MA activity. Uh in Canada, it might be a little bit less. So it depends on each strategy. For example, in the UK, if you wanted to do a buyback, uh you have to actually announce that information, I think, on a daily or a weekly basis. So we might have richer data in the UK than we do in the US. Because out here they announce the buyback. And then if you want to see if a company actually bought back stock, you're relying on the 10Q or the 10K data to see what happened to shares outstanding. In the UK, you get the data constantly. So I figure in some sense we will lose some fidelity and access to certain strategies. In some cases, we'll gain more. And what we learn from those countries, we will be able to apply back to the US as well.
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, international, the international opportunity is probably vast. And we aren't even touching on countries like India, Japan, Korea. Exactly. I mean, there's the whole long tail. So that's that's an exciting opportunity for um for your platform. Um, well, Asif, I think we're at the close of the episode, but uh I want to thank you for taking the time. Um, I personally learned a lot. I think this people should watch this episode and and share it with others because I think that event-driven investing is an opportunity. It's a niche, but it's a really very rich niche. And um it's one that I think most of us long-term investors haven't really focused on enough. I mean, that's one of my takeaways from this episode. I think I'm gonna have to, you know, figure out uh to how to subscribe and start reading your stuff or for at a minimum. Um, because like I said, just one idea um is all it would take to make the whole effort worthwhile, um, especially given, you know, the amount of capital and that we manage, for example. Uh so thanks a lot for so generously sharing. I recommend people to follow your podcast. We're gonna add it in the show notes. They should get your book and read it, and they should become subscribers. Um, those are my three takeaway recommendations.
SPEAKER_03Thank you so much, Ken and Watson. Uh, this has been a pleasure for me. And it's it was great to see you a few weeks ago. It's great to do this again. Uh it's such a short period of time.
SPEAKER_00All right, awesome. Thank you. Thanks for watching this episode. Click the screen to catch our past episodes with Sarab Mukherjea and Matthew Peterson. And to apply for the Capital Alliance mastermind, hit the first link in the description.