How I Invest with David Weisburd

What if passive investing is actually one of the biggest active forces shaping markets today?
In this episode, I sit down with Michael Green, Founder and CIO at Tier1 Alpha Asset Management. Michael challenges the conventional view that stock prices primarily reflect fundamentals, arguing that the transaction itself moves prices and that the rise of passive investing has fundamentally changed who trades, why they trade, and how markets respond to capital flows.

Peter Hecht, Managing Director at AQR Capital Management, explains why diversification has to be measured by underlying risk rather than the number of investments you own. At AQR, diversification is a core principle: thousands of relatively small, uncorrelated investment decisions can collectively create an attractive return for a given level of risk.

What happens when a private equity firm refuses to chase every new opportunity and spends 30 years getting better at one thing?

David sits down with Michael Fisch, co-founder and CEO of American Securities, to unpack how the firm grew from a $71.4 million first fund to $23 billion in AUM without abandoning the investment discipline that got it there. Michael explains how private equity evolved from a sub-$1 billion institutional market into a multi-trillion-dollar industry, why American Securities resisted the temptation to expand into every adjacent asset class, and why seeing more deals matters almost as much as knowing which ones to reject.

David sits down with Byron Ling of Twelve Below to unpack the judgment required to invest at the earliest stages of technology. After roughly 30,000 founder meetings over the past decade, Byron believes the strongest signals rarely appear on a résumé. He looks for an almost biological drive to win, second-level thinking, exceptional learning velocity, clear communication, authenticity, and a sense of urgency that makes a founder difficult to compete against.

What can 32 years as a university CIO teach you about identifying exceptional investors before everyone else does?

David sits down with Scott Malpass, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Grafton Street Partners and former Chief Investment Officer of the University of Notre Dame, to discuss the patterns he learned from evaluating thousands of investment firms and building decades-long relationships with some of the world’s leading managers.