Jeff had just completed his MBA from the University of Oxford Saïd Business School and was teaching valuation at the Oxford Saïd Finance Lab when he started working on the ideas behind what would become Thorpe Abbotts. During his time at Oxford, Jeff gained insights into how mispricing occurs when financial theory meets the empirical world. For Jeff, teaching valuation illuminated the mistakes investors often make when forecasting future cash flows to value a business. Understanding the behavioral underpinnings of those mistakes—how behavioral bias drives a wedge between market prices and fundamental value—became the driving force behind the behavioral-focused approach that would later define the firm’s investment strategy. Teaching at Oxford also allowed Jeff to tap a diverse set of intellectual resources from the university to augment his research. The result was an idea to use a variety of quantitative methods to identify the behavioral mistakes of other investors. This approach would go on to become the core search process in Thorpe Abbotts’ investment process.

Jeff soon partnered with Robert Leedom, a friend from his undergraduate days at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Robert and Jeff shared a passion for investing, and Robert brought an immense amount of quantitative knowledge to the project. Robert had studied economics and data science, with degrees in both fields. He honed those skills while working in risk and capital modeling at Bank of America.

With Jeff’s background in valuation and behavioral economics, and Robert’s background in data science, the two men set out to redefine how investment managers search for investment ideas. The premise was simple—if an investor can identify situations where other investors are making behavioral mistakes at scale, they will have found fertile ground for potential mispricing and convex investment opportunities. Jeff and Robert sought to create a quantitative method to achieve this goal. The result would be a proprietary search algorithm that produces ideas with a high probability of being mispriced. Such a search strategy would redirect analysis time and effort to identifying the factors that have caused behavioral misjudgment. This tool would give any analyst or portfolio manager a more substantial likelihood of success, as the idea set from which they selected investments would be primed with mispricing to exploit.

Jeff relocated the firm to Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2018 after he and his wife Christina returned from England. Jeff and Robert continued to develop and refine their algorithm and search process. They launched the fund in November 2019. In 2020 they brought in Adrian Moral, a graduate from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business who had interned at Thorpe Abbotts in 2019. Adrian added tremendous talent to the team and has helped Jeff and Robert further refine their algorithms and investment process. The three men run Thorpe Abbotts from their offices in downtown Charlottesville. A culture of innovation and creative thinking about behavioral investing lies at the heart of the organization.

Benjamin Franklin