Millennium Portfolio Manager Veteran Joins Phoenix!

Videos will be rolling out in the next few weeks.

I’m extremely excited to share that Allen White has joined Phoenix.

Allen was a Portfolio Manager at Millennium for 10 years. Prior to Millennium, he worked for 8 years as a Portfolio Manager at Carlson Capital, where he began his career. Allen is now the CIO of Orchid Lane Capital, investing his personal capital. He is one of the finest investors I have spoken to and was on the top of my list of people I wanted to bring to the platform. I am thrilled to welcome him.

This will be the first time ever, anywhere on the internet, that you will be able to gain an in-depth understanding of a true winning multi-manager/market-neutral investment process. And even better… Allen’s investment process is generally on a 6-to-12 month horizon, which makes it suitable across investment styles and fund types. As we discussed in the post, Learnings from Head of L/S Equities, being overly reliant on the next incremental data point tends to lead to underperformance.

There is a lot of noise online - all the same fluff and commoditized information. No one actually shows you real trades they have done or what it really means in practice to generate alpha and form a differentiated view.

Allen has a truly market-neutral process, always trying to hedge out all possible factors, only isolating that one thing or the set of things he has a differentiated view on and is betting on. He is comfortable betting against short-term momentum and when a position goes against him, he tends to use it as an opportunity to build up the position.

In 2019/2020, he did a trade - long DPZ/short YUM (full timeline in the chart above).

As you can see, it proceeded to go against him by almost 10% over the following month which allowed him to build the position. It was back to flat in another week, up 30% overall in 4 months, up 70% from inception just pre-Covid and then went up a parabolic 250% by the end of March 2020. He only captured a fraction of that return as he was out before Covid hit, but it does highlight a lot of lessons. The inflection point for DPZ actually came on a day that they missed estimates and lowered their 2-3 year outlook (stock was down 6% premarket and finished up 5% on the day).

In the videos, Allen will do a full deep dive and discuss all aspects of the trade. He will also explore a current potential trade and cover his investment process, including but not limited to screening for ideas, portfolio construction and sizing, forming a differentiated thesis, conviction, risk/reward and much more. My personal favourite part is getting a glimpse of how a world-class investor fundamentally thinks about stocks and narratives.

Videos will be rolling out in the next few weeks. Join now: https://www.phoenixlearning.io.

Since some of you asked - if you are only part of Substack and want to join the full platform, you can just pay the difference. Reply to this, and I will get you set up.

Whether you are already at a hedge fund, looking to break in or simply trying to learn, I’m confident this will be a great investment for your knowledge and career.

I hope you join us and I’ll do my best to deliver for you.

Stefan

P.S. The next Substack writeup is coming next week.