Interview #93 : Jacob Rowe (Rogue Funds)
Going rogue in the public markets
For this issue we have the pleasure of interviewing Jacob Rowe, Founder and CIO of Rogue Funds.
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Hi Jacob, thanks so much for taking the time out to do this interview.
Can you please tell readers about your background, and how you got involved in investing?
Hey Jon, Thanks for having me!
Surprisingly, I don’t have any background in the financial industry, and I am mainly self-taught.
I began teaching myself to invest around freshman year of high school/8th grade of middle school and mainly learned through reading investing books, accounting books, financial instrument books, and financial history books.
The first investing book I read was ‘You can be a stock market genius’ by Greenblatt and value investing immediately stuck with me and led me down the value investing rabbit hole.
I was extremely lucky to have started out with such a great book that stuck with me immediately, and still has a large impact on how I invest today.
After watching ‘The Big Short’ around 2015, I read the book and found a lot of interest in Michael Burry (especially once I found out about his connection to Joel Greenblatt).
I basically went on a deep dive internet search around 2016 reading all of his old blog posts on the Silicon Valley investor forum and his MSN money articles which gave me a ton of insight into deep value opportunities in the modern investing environment.
After that I just became addicted to reading anything I could get my hands on regarding value investing and financial history.
I graduated with degrees in mechanical engineering and quantitative economics, so another large chunk of my learning curve was through trial and error of investing my own capital combined with basic college economics and behavioral economics (any economics classes beyond basic econ classes felt like a waste to me as an application to investing but I squeezed out some value here and there).
My success in quantitative economics led to me getting a full ride of my senior year of college which along with any cash/returns I had laying around was my base capital to start the hedge fund.
I used my investing returns on the scholarship money and savings from my mechanical engineering job to start Rogue Funds in 2023. We have just completed an awesome first year at the end of April with returns of 66% net of fees (please view our marketing material on the website for more information on fee structure).
Why did you decide to set-up Rogue Funds and whom do you manage funds on behalf of?
I wanted to start a hedge fund almost as soon as I started investing in high school and I figured I could use a mechanical engineering degree to help get myself off the ground.
My initial plan was to start the Fund extremely small and just build a track record managing other people’s money and as I built a long track record, I figured I could build an investor base slowly but surely. This is exactly how it is playing out.