Cliff Sosin
Cliff Sosin has never felt the need to go with the crowd. As a high school student during the heart of the dot-com bubble, he opted to short a basket of the most hyped tech names in a stock-picking competition. (He finished in last place.) Now, as the portfolio manager for CAS Investment Partners, a $360 million fund, Cliff still doesn’t shy away from making controversial investments. Through CAS, he has owned stocks such as Herbalife, LifeLock, and World Acceptance Corporation in the past.
Cliff seeks to invest in a concentrated portfolio of compounders – companies he defines as those that will grow their profits at a high rate over a long time horizon while also returning a large portion of capital to owners. In the current environment where obvious bargains have already been picked over, he has continued to find these great investments by constantly seeking to understand situations that, at first glance, seem problematic.
Cliff’s investment process relies heavily on the social sciences – experimental psychology, game theory and rational choice. He views investing as the applied practice of the social sciences much as engineering is the applied practice of the physical science. In better understanding how individuals and groups of people behave, Cliff believes he can develop an edge over the market.
At the 2018 Santangel’s Investor Forum, Cliff will explain how he uses experimental psychology to analyze securities and share a promising investment that is despised by the market.