David Waters, CFA of Alluvial Capital On Micro-Cap Deep Value Investing

ValueWalk’s Raul Panganiban interviews David Waters, CFA, the CIO of Alluvial Capital.

Q3 2019 hedge fund letters, conferences and more

Interview with David Waters

Transcript

Good morning podcast listeners. Today is a very special episode with David Waters, CEO of Alluvial Capital Management. Before this, he was at BNY Mellon as a portfolio analysts and a portfolio administrator. And before that he was a financial associate at Wilmington Trust. He’s a graduate of Grove City College with a Bachelor of Science and finance. He’s also a CFA charterholder. I want to welcome David to the show and I want to welcome all our listeners to a very special episode.

Welcome to ValueTalks with Raul.

Alright, wanted to welcome our listeners to a very special episode. I have David Waters. portfolio manager of Alluvial Capital. And David, welcome to the show.

Thanks a lot, happy to be here.

All right, if you can tell me about your background, and what led you to finance and investing?

Happy to. So I sort of come up a little bit non traditionally, I guess I grew up in a really, really rural area part of Pennsylvania. Nobody I knew had an investment portfolio or a broker or knew what a stock or a bond was, but but my dad was in business with with ups. And in 1999, when ups went public, that was a really big deal because he’d been buying stocks since the 70s, getting employee grants, things like that. And when they went public, he suddenly became very interested in the stock market naturally. So I started looking at the quotes in the Sunday paper thinking, this is a whole world I never knew about and you can actually make a lot of money this way. And it just so happened that was a time of the.com bubble. And so it looked like all you had to do was buy any stock in the world and it would be up 40-50% that week and it would double the next week and I thought wow, why doesn’t everyone in the world do this this is the easiest thing and well turns out it’s not nearly as easy as I thought it was the first time around but I kind of caught the bug. And so after that and in high school and in college, I would read everything I could get my hands on. When I first managed to scrape the money together from my summer job I bought my first couple stocks and probably lost lots of money as the early everyone does when they’re first getting started but it wasn’t too long after that, but I became more acquainted with value investing and really became the starting to apply myself that way and, and my skills began to develop and sort of my interest and so I got a degree in finance and and I went into banking and wealth management, but that was fairly dull. Honestly, I didn’t get to invest in the sort of stocks that interested me. Which even from the beginning where the small ones, the strange ones, the little discussed stocks. And so with that in mind, I began looking for ways to get into that