Aug 21, 2026 · 52 min · 11 segments
As summer interns wrap up their placements on Wall Street and look toward full-time roles, standing out in an increasingly competitive hedge fund job market has never been more vital. In this episode…
Brett CaughranGuest
Drew NicolHost
Tom KehoeHost
And, and so you've now stepped away, as you say, from the front lines and you set up a new business, Fundamental Edge, right? Which that jumped out to Drew and I, you know, as a real no-brainer business idea.
Can you talk to us a little bit about Fundamental Edge? Who's it aimed at in terms of types of candidates or folks that would sign up to Fundamental Edge, um, where they come from and how does it all work?
So I've really been contemplating the concept of investment training since 2009 when I was at a Tiger Cub fund.
I was interviewing to hire junior analysts for our teams and I came across analysts who had been through John Griffin's class, the founder of Blue Ridge Capital at the University of Virginia.
These students were exceptionally prepared for the interview process and, and seemed like they had been on the buy side for three or four years.
And so that was really the first check to me that, hey, some of these tools could be actually taught in the classro-classro-classroom context.
Fast-forward to 2015, uh, Steve Cohen from SAC Capital, Point72 at the time spoke at the Milken Conference and cited a hedge fund talent crisis, right? And Steve did something about it.
In 2016, he formed the Point72 Academy, uh, which is, you know, six to 12-month internal training program to take naive investors and teach them everything they need to know to, to be good, to be good buy, buy side, buy side analysts.
I spoke with a handful of analysts who had been through that program and I came away with the exact same conclusion in 2015, 2016 as, uh, as I did ... as I did in 2009, that the in-classroom training program to teach buy-side analysts can be, can be effective.
Certainly, this will always be an apprenticeship business to some degree, but I, I really felt like there was an ability to teach these concepts in the classroom that could be, could be u- could be used on, on, on, on, on the desk.
And so as I did that analysis of the Point72 Academy, I really connected the dots, felt that there was a big opportunity to take what I had been doing in the classroom at Arizona State to, to an actual business model, and take really many of the, the small items about the business that I had learned the hard way over 13 years and put them into an a- an analyst academy.
The Analyst Academy is a six-week, 60-hour program that basically teaches young analysts in, in the first five years of their career everything that I would wanna train my analysts at a large hedge fund, right? The basics of earnings season, how to do good research, how to construct a model, how to conduct a, a meeting with management, how to think about idea generation on the long side and the short side.
I use the analogy of a driver's education, right? I, I can't teach an analyst how to be an F1 driver just the same way I can't teach an analyst how to be an analyst in your specific strategy.
But I can teach driver's education, how to pop a clutch, find a turn signal, the basic rules of the rules of the road.
Many times in the buy side in institutional investing, we expect analysts to figure this stuff out on their, on their, on their own.
And so really what we're trying to do in the Analyst Academy is codify those basic tools and teach those tools up, up, upfront so that the, the learning curve can be shortened and accelerated for, for new, for new buy-side analysts.
And so for the last year, we've had about 300 analysts through the Analyst Academy.
M- increasingly, many large institutional funds are sending their new analysts to us for, for, uh, uh, effectively basic training.
And then a third are in the bucket that are high, high potential candidates who are on the cusp of break- breaking into the buy side.
And so our programs are really not about learn the basics of investing, certainly not about how to day trade your way to wealth, right? It took me seven to 10 years of hard-fought investing before I could even be right 52% of the time in the, in the, in the, in the markets.
And, and so you've now stepped away, as you say, from the front lines and you set up a new business, Fundamental Edge, right? Which that jumped out to Drew and I, you know, as a real no-brainer business idea.
Can you talk to us a little bit about Fundamental Edge? Who's it aimed at in terms of types of candidates or folks that would sign up to Fundamental Edge, um, where they come from and how does it all work?
So I've really been contemplating the concept of investment training since 2009 when I was at a Tiger Cub fund.
I was interviewing to hire junior analysts for our teams and I came across analysts who had been through John Griffin's class, the founder of Blue Ridge Capital at the University of Virginia.
These students were exceptionally prepared for the interview process and, and seemed like they had been on the buy side for three or four years.
And so that was really the first check to me that, hey, some of these tools could be actually taught in the classro-classro-classroom context.
Fast-forward to 2015, uh, Steve Cohen from SAC Capital, Point72 at the time spoke at the Milken Conference and cited a hedge fund talent crisis, right? And Steve did something about it.
In 2016, he formed the Point72 Academy, uh, which is, you know, six to 12-month internal training program to take naive investors and teach them everything they need to know to, to be good, to be good buy, buy side, buy side analysts.
I spoke with a handful of analysts who had been through that program and I came away with the exact same conclusion in 2015, 2016 as, uh, as I did ... as I did in 2009, that the in-classroom training program to teach buy-side analysts can be, can be effective.
Certainly, this will always be an apprenticeship business to some degree, but I, I really felt like there was an ability to teach these concepts in the classroom that could be, could be u- could be used on, on, on, on, on the desk.
And so as I did that analysis of the Point72 Academy, I really connected the dots, felt that there was a big opportunity to take what I had been doing in the classroom at Arizona State to, to an actual business model, and take really many of the, the small items about the business that I had learned the hard way over 13 years and put them into an a- an analyst academy.
The Analyst Academy is a six-week, 60-hour program that basically teaches young analysts in, in the first five years of their career everything that I would wanna train my analysts at a large hedge fund, right? The basics of earnings season, how to do good research, how to construct a model, how to conduct a, a meeting with management, how to think about idea generation on the long side and the short side.
I use the analogy of a driver's education, right? I, I can't teach an analyst how to be an F1 driver just the same way I can't teach an analyst how to be an analyst in your specific strategy.
But I can teach driver's education, how to pop a clutch, find a turn signal, the basic rules of the rules of the road.
Many times in the buy side in institutional investing, we expect analysts to figure this stuff out on their, on their, on their own.
And so really what we're trying to do in the Analyst Academy is codify those basic tools and teach those tools up, up, upfront so that the, the learning curve can be shortened and accelerated for, for new, for new buy-side analysts.
And so for the last year, we've had about 300 analysts through the Analyst Academy.
M- increasingly, many large institutional funds are sending their new analysts to us for, for, uh, uh, effectively basic training.
And then a third are in the bucket that are high, high potential candidates who are on the cusp of break- breaking into the buy side.
And so our programs are really not about learn the basics of investing, certainly not about how to day trade your way to wealth, right? It took me seven to 10 years of hard-fought investing before I could even be right 52% of the time in the, in the, in the, in the markets.
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