Matthew Sweeney: Frameworks, Patience, and Edge

Hey guys! After what felt like three years in the making, this week’s guest is Matthew Sweeney, the founder and portfolio manager of Laughing Water Capital. Long story short, Matt was actually the first fund manager that I’ve ever cold email when I was getting into the game and he was kind enough to email me back right away.

Since then we’ve been able to stay in touch and talk about investment ideas. In this conversation, we dove into Matt’s 4 part decision making framework on evaluating investment theses:

Is it a good business?
Who are we partnering with?
What happens when something goes wrong?
Why it might be cheap?

We also discussed his journey as a portfolio manager, delay gratification vs opportunity cost, what is edge, originality, and thinking on what would the drunks in the bar say?

[0:30] Introduction
[4:00] Matt’s Framework for Finding Ideas
[24:00] Good Co, Bad Co
[29:00] Matthew’s Journey as a Portfolio Manager.
[45:00] Patience: Nature vs Nurture
[53:00] Delay Gratification vs Opportunity Cost
[1:01:00] Models and Valuations
[1:13:00] What is Edge?
[1:17:00] What Would the Drunks in the Bar Say?
[1:19:00] The Future of Laughing Water Capital.
[1:25:00] Originality
[1:33:00] Always Looking to Improve
[1:37:00] More from Matthew Sweeney and Closing Questions

Also, a big thanks to the following sponsors for making the podcast a reality!

Quartr

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Mitimco

This episode is brought to you by MIT Investment Management Company -- also known as MITIMCo, the investment office of MIT. Each year, MITIMCo invests with a handful of new emerging managers who it believes can earn exceptional long-term returns in support of MIT's mission. In order to help the emerging manager community more broadly, they created emergingmanagers.org, a website for emerging manager stockpickers.

For those looking to start a stock-picking fund, or those just looking to learn about how others have done it, I highly recommend the site. You'll find essays and interviews by successful emerging managers, service providers used by MIT's own managers, essays MITIMCo has written for emerging managers and more.

TIKR