This Multi-Billion Hedge Fund is Run By Humanities Scholars

Announcing my new interview series!

Hosting a dinner seminar late September in NYC to read Thiel’s Straussian Moment and Optimistic Thought Experiment in relation to parts of Girard’s Battling to the End, apply to join:

I’m fascinated with history’s thinker-doers: Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Benjamin Franklin. There’s no greater achievement than calling your shots: laying out a theoretical worldview, then executing ruthlessly to bend reality.

There exist people like this today, who write a manifesto and go build a $100B company on top. And I’m launching a new series to interview these modern greats, featuring Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Jim O’Shaughnessy and more.

If you feel pulled both by the joys of understanding and the thrill of action, this series is a masterclass on how to integrate the two.

The inaugural episode today is with Colin Moran, founder of one of the best-performing, multi-billion hedge funds on wall street in the last 20 years.

And yet, he couldn’t be further from your average money-manager: Colin is a devout Christian whose primary concern is rescuing Catholic art, music, and architecture. He studied intellectual history at Duke and Oxford and wanted to be an academic. His fund is not run by quants of ivy-league athletes but a nerdy group of humanities scholars who studied classics, theology, musicology, and history.

Colin analyzes each company as if close reading a Great Book. And he attributes his best investments to following his intellectual curiosity: writing an academic essay on the nature of creativity, for example, resulted in one of his best investments in Shopify.

He calls this process “following the fun” … it turns out the best way to make money is not to think about making money.

Topics We Cover:

2:09 How to Read a Company as a Text

5:58 Follow The Fun, the Money Will Come

11:54 Great Founders: Autistic, Megalomaniac, or Vengeful

15:46 The Limits of Reason in Investing and Faith

25:40 Colin’s Intellectual Influence: John Henry Newman

32:03 Faith and Investing Share Uncertainty

47:58 Colin’s Story From Ivory Tower to Wall Street

1:15:37 Classical Liberals vs. National Conservatives

1:23:10 Judaism and Christianity: A Marriage of Convenience?