About
Biography & Background
About Gregory Blotnick
Gregory Blotnick is a former hedge fund manager and equity analyst who lives in Palm Beach County. Blotnick has covered the consumer/retail sector for approximately a decade at hedge funds of varying investment styles. Blotnick’s most recent experience involves firms with shorter-term market-neutral focuses, including Citadel and Schonfeld. He served as an analyst at both firms, as part of a $1B portfolio at Citadel and $400m portfolio at Schonfeld. Prior to that, Blotnick was at North Elm Capital, a fund with a cross-capital structure “credit approach to equity” focus, a highly-concentrated portfolio and multi-year holding periods. His experience also includes analyst duties at Exis Capital and Doubloon Capital. He first began his hedge fund career in 2009.
Early Life & Education
Gregory Blotnick was born in New York City in 1986 and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he graduated from Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in 2005. He is the son of Srully Blotnick, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School where he’d earned his PhD in cell biology in 1994. Gregory later earned a B.S. in Finance from Lehigh University in 2009, became a CFA Charterholder in 2012 and completed his MBA at Columbia Business School in 2014, where his academic interests began heavily gravitating toward portfolio management and investor psychology.
Investing Career
Blotnick launched his investment career as an equity analyst at Doubloon Capital, a Connecticut-based hedge fund, before joining New York firms Exis Capital and North Elm Capital. In 2017, he joined Citadel LLC as a Consumer sector specialist, where he contributed to a portfolio managing over $1 billion in gross market value.
In 2019, he founded Brattle Street Capital LLC, an investment firm focused on long and short opportunities within small and mid-cap Consumer equities. According to Blotnick’s comments to Opalesque New Managers, he believed current market conditions presented an excellent opportunity for concentrated bets on consumer-focused stocks. Blotnick observed that smaller and mid-sized consumer companies were becoming increasingly polarized – dividing into those with recession-resistant business models and others facing significant financial distress.
His strategy involved going long on resilient companies with stable growth companies while shorting businesses approaching insolvency. Despite the possibility that a recession could be years off, Blotnick anticipated that the retail industry’s struggles would eventually impact smaller players as well. He expected that smaller and mid-sized retailers would face mounting challenges maintaining operations, potentially leading to store closures and bankruptcies even during periods of relative economic stability.
Brattle Street's Objective
Blotnick believed that his experience in both market-neutral/short-term and cross-capital structure/long-term styled funds would serve as a competitive advantage, stating that the combination of these two acquired skillsets is unusual to find and would allow the fund to be fully ‘duration-agnostic’ with new idea generation.
The Fund’s framework was broken down into two categories: “Short-term drivers of price” versus “Long-term drivers of value.” Brattle Street’s competition – the greater asset management industry – tends to be pigeonholed into one of these two schools of thought. Short-term investors pay little attention to the long-term drivers of value. Long-term investors pay little attention to short-term drivers of price. The Fund’s objective was to blend both approaches: think long-term, but be ready, willing and able to exploit short-term mispricings along the way.
Investment Process
The Investment Manager maintained updated estimates of ‘fair value’ for each business. Conviction in these estimates is what drove the construction process for the Partnership’s portfolio. Sometimes, the current stock price and the Fund’s estimate of ‘fair value’ were identical. Sometimes, the two differ. Occasionally, the two are miles apart. Those opportunities are what the Partnership would seek out – wide disparities between the market view and the manager’s view.
If a stock were to drift too far below the manager’s estimate of ‘fair value,’ it would be added to the portfolio’s long book. When the stock reverted back to fair value, the Partnership would take profits and exit the trade. If the stock overshot and ended up well above ‘fair value,’ it became a portfolio short. This repeats, ad nauseum, for each stock under coverage. From this process, the Partnership’s portfolio would take shape. The Partnership itself had no implicit long or short bias, and any resulting “tilt” is simply an output.
Blotnick’s belief was that portfolio construction process is one which is repeatable and methodical. It is designed to remove emotion from investing. If performed correctly, it should consistently ‘grind out’ excess returns without dependence on broad market conditions.
Writing & Publications
Blotnick is a long-time writer and contributor to financial media. His writing career started in 2012 under the pseudonym Brattle Street Capital, named after the street where he grew up in Cambridge. His Twitter handle, @brattlestcap, gained recognition as a “must-follow” and was named a top influential account by both Business Insider and Forbes. Over the past decade, his written work has been featured in publications including Forbes, Fortune, Kiplinger, NewsMax, MarketWatch, CFA Institute, Seeking Alpha, and many others. His work regularly explores applied behavioral finance, highlighting the psychological and emotional biases that lead to poor decision-making both in investing and business leadership.
Memoir & Ongoing Work
Blotnick’s debut memoir, Blind Spots: A Riches to Rags Story, is a personal account of failure, introspection, and the psychological traps that even experienced professionals fall into. The book has been praised for its honesty and insight by editorial outlets including Kirkus Reviews, The US Review of Books, and Manhattan Book Review. Today, Blotnick continues to write and speak on topics at the intersection of investing, psychology, and ethics, emphasizing that unchecked bias, ego, and overconfidence can undermine even the best-educated and highest-achieving individual.
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