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 now runs the firm from his home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Benjamin Franklin