Harvest Interview Series: Peter Lupoff of Tiburon Capital Management

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As part of our ongoing efforts to provide our readers with the highest quality investment content, ValueWalk is now offering the Harvest Interview Series.

The Harvest Interview Series provides exclusive access to financial business leaders including money managers, institutional allocators, research firm founders and other top investment professionals. Interview questions are crowd-sourced from thousands of professional managers, allocators, and investors. The most relevant and interesting questions are selected and then posed anonymously to the Interview Series subject.

Harvest Interview Series: Peter Lupoff of Tiburon Capital Management

Peter Lupoff is an owner-member and founded Tiburon Capital Management, an event-driven investment advisor, in 2009. Peter formerly was a Managing Director at Millennium Management, the New York based Multi-Strategy hedge fund where he managed an allocation of the Millennium Partners flagship fund employing identical event-driven strategies. Previously he was Managing Director and Senior Portfolio Manager of the Robeco WPG Distressed/Special Situations Fund.

During the course of Peter’s more than twenty-year investment career, he can be credited with initiating some of the meaningful advances that have taken place in the distressed and high yield markets. In the late 1980s, Peter envisioned that a liquid secondary market in bank loans would provide institutional investors with an alternative debt instrument to conventional bonds. As such, he became one of the first traders of bank loans, which revolutionized liquidity and existing trading conventions. In the mid-1990s, he conceived of “bankruptcy and default-triggered puts” for suppliers to troubled companies, thereby expanding their use of derivatives and creating another new investable product for institutional funds and trade creditors.

Peter Lupoff’s experience in deep value equity and distressed investing strategies began in 1990 where he began working with Marty Whitman of Third Avenue Funds. Peter’s bottom-up approach is largely informed by this experience. His acumen and theses regarding risk and trading to defend NAV are informed by his experiences with Izzy Englander and Millennium Management. Funds Mr. Lupoff have managed or co-managed have achieved awards such as GAIM’s Top Performing Emerging Distressed Manager, MARHedge’s Event-Driven Manager and an Institutional Investor nomination as Hedge Fund House of the Year.

Peter Lupoff is a regularly featured discussant on academic papers related to, and consultant to, The Federal Reserve Bank regarding market shocks and liquidity. Mr. Lupoff provides expert testimony on matters related to hedge funds, trading and his specific strategies.

Khai Nguyen: Peter, welcome and thank you for joining us.

Peter Lupoff: Thank you very much.

KN: You started Tiburon Capital Management in 2009. Why did you decide to launch your own hedge fund and how did you plan to differentiate it from other hedge funds, especially Third Avenue and Millennium where you were started?

Peter Lupoff: Well, Third Avenue and Millennium were terrific places to get started. I liked talking about Marty Whitman and Izzy Englander, each as important personalities that helped make me who I am and we, at Tiburon, who we are today. I learned deep value from Marty from ‘90 to ’98. He’s an academic at heart. Still teaches at Yale and really is one of the ranking thinkers in deep value and, you know, it was a classic thing that Marty would walk into the trading room and say, “The world will figure out that we’re right.” Often I would mutter to my friends: “If only it happens in our lifetime.” Which is kind of how I got to the place where I started to focus on events, and event-driven. I took the deep value sensibility I learned at Third Avenue, applied probability weighting of plausible catalysts and our own methodology BRACE began to unfold.

Peter Lupoff, Chief Investment Officer

Tiburon Capital Management LLC

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