About Gregory Blotnick
I started this platform during MBA at Columbia Business School, which consisted mostly of trading markets in the back row of the classroom. That passion evolved into understanding the ways our brains work against us to create the “behavior gap” in investing.
All the modern portfolio theory they teach in business school turns out to be useless in practice. It assumes people are rational. Anyone who’s spent five minutes watching actual investors knows this is wrong. We’re emotional, biased, and often our own worst enemies. That said, I still enjoy reading academic theory and research while also trying to combine it with case studies of my own investing mistakes…of which there are plenty…and I still spend a lot of time studying the legends, Buffett, Munger, and other great thinkers who figured out how to profit from human nature rather than fight it.
Michael Platt: “I want market makers, people who know that anything can happen. The type of guy I don’t want is an analyst who has never traded – the type of person who does a calculation on a computer, figures out where a market should be, puts on a big trade, gets caught up in it, and doesn’t stop out. And the market is always wrong; he’s not. Market makers know that the market is always right. You are wrong if you are losing money for any reason at all. Market makers have that drilled into their head. They know value is irrelevant in times of market stress; it’s all about positions. They understand the markets will trade against positions. They get it. It is built into their books. It colors the way they think. I look for the type of guy in London who gets up at seven o’clock on Sunday morning when his kids are still in bed, and logs onto a poker site so that he can pick off the U.S. drunks coming home on Saturday night. I hired a guy like that. He usually clears 5 or 10 grand every Sunday morning before breakfast taking out the drunks playing poker because they’re not very good at it, but their confidence has gone up a lot. That’s the type of guy you want – someone who understands an edge. Analysts, on the other hand, don’t think about anything else other than how smart they are.”
Currently
- Building Valiant Research LLC
- Growing my writing portfolio
- Working on academic research
- Publishing my latest book, Essays: De Rerum Natura.
Previously
- Founder and Managing Partner at Brattle Street Capital, an investment firm focused on long/short strategies in small and mid-cap Consumer equities.
- Analyst at Citadel LLC and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, covering the Consumer sector within market-neutral portfolios.
- For more past work, you can learn about me here or visit my Linktree page which serves as a writing compendium. You can also find me on socials (Facebook | YouTube)
Education and Certificates
I completed my MBA at Columbia in 2014, focusing on both investing and trading. Before that, I studied finance at Lehigh University and graduated in 2009. That said, the only genuine education I’ve ever gotten has come from making mistakes with real money and trying to understand why I kept screwing up.
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- Columbia Business School, MBA, 2014
- Lehigh University, Bachelor’s of Science in Finance, 2009
- Buckingham Browne & Nichols, 2005
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- Research Interests: Behavioral finance, market psychology, risk management, Consumer & Retail equities
- When I’m not working, I’m trying to become a better writer. I’m particularly drawn to the intersection of economics and storytelling and I try to study biographies of legendary investors and entrepreneurs. A consistent theme in my writing is the psychological drivers of market behavior, where I frequently explore how emotions and cognitive biases create the exact inefficiencies that skilled investors can exploit.
Recent Work
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- Newest Post: 10 Unglamorous Truths of Hedge Fund Management
- Previously: Long/Short Equity – Single Manager Death Spiral
- Other articles: Gregory Blotnick on Crunchbase
- Newest Video: Escape from Rock Bottom
- Also available on my Instagram
- Newest Research: Lost Illusions: Macroeconomic Indicators
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- “Most macroeconomic indicators perform poorly when tested for their ability to predict stock returns. Worse, investors often fall prey to statistical traps and cognitive biases that make bad data look convincing…Ultimately, The Illusion of Foresight argues that successful investing is less about outsmarting the economy and more about avoiding common mistakes. Forecasting is inherently difficult, and most macroeconomic indicators add little predictive value. The way forward lies in humility and discipline: acknowledging the limits of prediction, resisting the temptation of seductive narratives, and focusing on evidence-based signals.”
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- Newest Post: 10 Unglamorous Truths of Hedge Fund Management
Let’s Connect
Please reach out via X at @gregoryblotnick.