Joel Greenblatt
In 1995, Gotham Capital returned all of its limited partners’ capital closing the book on one of the best performing investment partnerships of its generation. Joel Greenblatt and his partner, Rob Goldstein, didn’t want out of the business; they just planned to invest their own money in the same concentrated style with which they’d had so much success. Then in 2002, a little experiment in systematic investing, intended to satisfy Joel and Rob’s intellectual curiosity, proved so encouraging that three years later, it formed the basis of Joel’s bestselling book, The Little Book that Beats the Market.
That book marked the beginning of a longer project, with five more years of tinkering and more than $20 million poured into research and development. The result of this significant effort: a proprietary database of stocks that may be the only one of its kind in the world and a new investment entity called Gotham Asset Management. The firm is based on an idea that is as simple to state as it was difficult to execute: Take the best of what Joel and Rob had learned about valuing companies over 20 years and apply it systematically to a much broader universe of stocks. At the 2014 Santangel’s Investor Forum, Joel will share an in-depth case study on a “special situation” he once owned and explain why he virtually abandoned investing in this category of stocks and decided instead to pursue something that on the surface seems so different.