Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Investing, Inflation, Tariffs and the Search Fund Model with Adam Patinkin, of David Capital Partners LLC 4-3-25
Thu, 03 Apr 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker speaks with Adam J. Patinkin, CFA, Managing Partner of David Capital Partners. Adam shares insights into his firm’s investment strategies, the power of search funds, his journey into the finance world, and his perspectives on inflation, tariffs, and macroeconomic trends shaping the markets.
Who is Adam Patinkin and what is David Capital Partners?
this is scott becker with the becker private equity and business podcast thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant founder and managing partner of an investment firm we're joined today by adam patinkin he's the founder and managing partner of david capital partners it's an alternative investment firm headquartered in chicago also has offices in london
Adam, can you take a moment and tell us a little bit about David Capital, yourself, how you decided to get this started, and a lot more?
Yeah, great. Scott, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you, and I've been really looking forward to this conversation. So just a quick background. I'm a Chicago guy, as you know. Went out east to college, and after graduating, I joined a long-short equity hedge fund here in Chicago called Sheffield Asset Management. They managed about a half a billion dollars.
And then when I was 25 years old, the principals there offered to back me to go out on my own. And so I created David Capital Partners. We're a long-term oriented alternative investment firm based here in Chicago. Our flagship strategy is a long-short equity strategy where we purchase stocks that we think are undervalued but have a clear catalyst path to being fairly valued.
And we also go short companies that we think are overvalued and that we call supply-side shorts, where there's a lot of supply coming in, overbuilding of an asset class, too much production, competition, something supply driven to cause the share price to go down. And we've been doing it for over a dozen years. And that's our main focus. In addition, we also manage some co-investments.
And then we also have an investment for a management company and a private company called Flamingo, which is a SaaS company for the multifamily apartment industry. And I sit on the board of that company as well.
So we do a number of different things, but for the most part, our focus is on finding these really terrific undervalued businesses with a clear catalyst event path across developed markets and the public markets and investing in them.
And let me ask you a question. At what point, college, after college, before college, that this was the world you wanted to be in. And what sort of inspired you to go in this direction? Talk a little bit about what the background was to wanting to become a professional investor and thinker about the markets and so forth. And you are a brilliant thinker about the markets.
Talk about how that interest was sparked.
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