Interview #65 : Brandon Daniel (Atai Capital)

Long-Only | Concentrated | Small-Cap Value

For this issue we had the pleasure of interviewing Brandon Daniel, founder and portfolio manager of Atai Capital.

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Read the last two interviews with Wayne Jones (Ganes Focused Value Fund) and Javier Pérez Álvarez (Edelweiss Capital).

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Hi Brandon, thanks so much for taking the time to do this interview. 

Can you please tell readers about your background, and how you got involved in investing?

Certainly, I was first introduced to investing, more specifically value investing, during an internship at Breach Inlet Capital. I spent my last two years of college interning there and have to give credit to the portfolio manager as well as his analyst for helping lay my value investing foundation.

They’re both great guys and do really phenomenal research that I had the privilege of experiencing and participating in firsthand. I went into that internship not knowing anything about value investing and left with an incredibly strong passion for it.

Early on in the internship, the portfolio manager there recommended that I read Margin of Safety, and that was kind of when the light was switched on, and I realized that stocks were more than just numbers on a screen.

After graduating college, I was unable to secure a buy-side role, so I ended up taking a job as a commercial credit analyst for a year before eventually picking up a buy-side job at a rather large firm in Florida. I worked there for around 6-months, quit, moved back to Texas, and decided to start my own firm.