David Zorub
The last two decades have been a golden age for alternatives, with the industry becoming more organized, more professional, and much, much larger. But the irony of this increasing institutionalization is that it has made generating returns more challenging. Both observation and research suggest that even in—perhaps especially in—a world of specialization and silos, the flexible, generalist, opportunistic investing mandate is a powerful avenue to outperformance. This is a vision of the ideal investor as Renaissance Man, who believes that breadth of knowledge is the friend, not the enemy, of depth of knowledge, and who lets in ideas from other disciplines to cross-pollinate his professional life.
Few embody this ideal better than David Zorub, who founded Parsifal Capital Management in May 2019. Over his 22-year career, David has traversed asset classes across the entire spectrum of risk premia, from public equity to credit to private equity to shorting to volatility—across industries, across geographies, and in multiple business settings, from entrepreneurial startup to institutional hedge fund firm. It’s perhaps no surprise then that he studied the Renaissance at Duke, and it’s certainly no irony that Renaissance scholarship itself rewards the same broad, cross-disciplinary philosophy prized by the Renaissance Man—and the Renaissance Investor.
At the 2019 Santangel’s Investor Forum, David will describe how Parsifal brings together all of these lines of thought, and will present an investment idea that demonstrates its go-anywhere, learn-anything approach in action.