Perry Capital product David Sackler avoids peril by following the advice of his famous former boss: drill down deep – and we mean really deep.
It's the middle of a volatile trading session this past August, and David Sackler is checking out JDate.com, the online matchmaking service for Jewish singles. The 27-year-old founder of Moab Partners, a €200 million event-driven and fixed-income hedge-fund firm, isn’t looking for a date. He’s doing research. Sackler is trying to see how much traffic is being generated on the site as he readies to build a position in its owner, Spark Networks (LOV). He’ll be back tomorrow, and the next day. He comes at his quest to quantify JDate subscriber trends with the determination of a nice Jewish boy looking for intrafaith love.
Intensive firsthand research is the cornerstone of Sackler’s trading strategy. He honed this method at Perry Capital, the $15 billion hedge-fund firm started by former Goldman Sachs star arbitrageur Richard Perry. Sackler ran a portfolio at Perry while still an undergraduate at Princeton. “Richard Perry taught me that to overcome risk in the market, you have to know more than everybody else,” Sackler says. “Any movement is based on someone uncovering new information.” This philosophy underscores Sackler’s research process, which includes scouring SEC filings, speaking to company executives, clients and competitors and creating financial models.
“David has a tenacious approach to seeing if something is a worthwhile investment,” explains one former Perry colleague. “It’s hard to teach someone to be that thorough.”
Sackler, who grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, even took a relentless approach to investing in high school. He followed health-care stocks, scouring company Web sites and telephoning doctors to get any info he could.
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