Valiant Research LLC, an independent research provider with a focus on the Consumer & Retail sector, officially launched this past month.
The firm is headed by Gregory J. Blotnick, formerly the portfolio manager of New York-based hedge fund Brattle Street Capital, which he founded after leaving hedge fund giant Citadel LLC.
Blotnick states that his goal is to help individual investors think and operate like a professional, giving them the tools to develop a risk management framework and investment process that lets them approach the stock market with confidence.
“Over the last five years there has been a proliferation in market interest,” said Blotnick, “which is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, there has also been a concurrent increase in people offering uninformed market advice, which is not a wonderful thing. New traders and investors are overpaying for services written by people with no professional experience, steering them in the wrong direction and putting them in a worse position than if they had done nothing at all.”
While Valiant also offers research to institutions, Blotnick believes that servicing the individual investor is where he can make the biggest impact.
“I saw an opportunity to build something differentiated with Valiant,” Blotnick said. “It has always felt to me like professional investors thumb their nose at the idea of teaching what they know to a group that is sorely in need: the individual investor. This creates a gap in the market, and that gap ends up getting filled by self-proclaimed experts with no credentials or pedigree.”
Blotnick says that he has been reading investment newsletters since he began his career in 2009. After graduating from Lehigh University, Blotnick was hired as an analyst at Doubloon Capital, a hedge fund founded by Tom Hudson of Pirate Capital. He went on to join Adam Sender’s Exis Capital before pursuing an MBA at Columbia Business School. In 2017, he was recruited by Citadel as a Consumer/Retail sector specialist and joined a five-person team managing over $1 billion in gross market value.
Despite having spent the entirety of his career in finance, Blotnick is no fan of Wall Street.
“99% of this industry exists to overcharge mom-and-pop investors who don’t know any better. The financial advisory model is one big wealth transfer where retail investors are overcharged first on the front end by fees paid directly to the advisor, and second on the back end in the form of high expense ratios. The back-end fee comes from the providers of these overpriced and poor-performing products, which the advisor is paid to steer clients into with no regard for the client’s welfare.”
Valiant Research’s mission, says Blotnick, is to teach investors how to fish, giving them an investment process they can use forever rather than giving them one-off investment ideas.
“Successful investing is about three things: Discipline, Patience, and Humility,” Blotnick says. “Every mistake I’ve made was from violating one or more of those three pillars, and they form the core of Valiant’s framework and research process. Our hope is that through ongoing education, we can cultivate these three traits in our clients and put them on a path to become successful, independent, and hopefully profitable investors all on their own.”
Valiant’s latest research can be found at https://www.valiant-research.com
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