Capital Management with David Baker: Mercadyne Fund’s Founder on Public and Private Investing, Generating Alpha, and Management Team Red Flags

QuantLayer Podcast

We spoke to David Baker from Mercadyne Funds, my first Portfolio Manager at Vikram’s first Hedge Fund analyst job many years ago. David is a really smart guy and he takes a unique approach to generating alpha by investing in micro and small-cap companies. He joins us to talk about all things investing. We cover a slew of topics: How he started investing and his first call with a management team at age thirteen, how he parlayed his experience as a broker to starting his first micro and small-cap fund, how he runs his current fund, risk management, and his current investment philosophy. We go over factors that make attractive investment opportunities (huge TAM, compelling biz model, accelerating sales growth, high insider ownership) and also red flags that he sees on a regular basis. He also talks about his experience investing in turnaround self storage units and finally, we finish up discussing his views on the current economy and what sectors he likes right now.

Topics:

• How he got into investing
• How law school helped mold his interest in investing
• On raising capital
• Types of stocks he invested in
• Investment thesis for small and micro capital
• What a multiple expansion is and how it works
• What he likes about the ZAG story
• Assessing management
• On trading psychology
• On private investing
• Self-storage investment profile

Link: FactSet Insight - https://insight.factset.com/

Profiles: Mercadyne - https://www.mercadyne.com Newsletters – Mercadyne - https://www.mercadyne.com/newsletters/