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Vincent Aita

lines on the record: 73
first: 2024-10-03
most recent: 2024-10-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Sure. Well, again, one of the things I'd fall back on in terms of the culture of Citadel and how they develop people is at every step of the way, when you're on your journey, when you're an associate, they're training you to do the analyst job. When you're an analyst, they're training you to do the portfolio manager's job. So as an analyst there, for a year of my tenure, I actually had a carve out of a smaller subsector book that I was able to manage on my own under the watchful supervision of my portfolio manager, but I had the opportunity to start taking risks on my own. In step with that, Citadel has reputationless pretty well known, a risk framework that I think is probably second to none in terms of how they put guidance in place for you to understand the various risks your portfolio carries. And if you lean into learning that kind of system of investing,”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, again, serendipity plays an interesting role in this. I had a colleague of mine from my health core days, Jeff Green, who was brought on to start a new team at Citadel. And I knew that Citadel has, and I could tell you from having been there for seven years, it's absolutely true, a culture that tries for an organization that large to really lean into being a meritocracy, to evaluate the performance of analysts at various steps of their career, and to promote internally people who are strong performers. And so I thought is a bet on myself to go there that if I could be just as strong as analyst as I could be for the first year or two, that there would be an opportunity that opened up to grow there. And in fact, that's exactly how it played out. I was an analyst there for two years. And then when an opportunity opened up for an internal promotion to portfolio manager in the beginning of 2017, they promoted.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, that was definitely a big part of the motivation for coming in there and also for eventually for leaving, for going in there, I thought to be a well-rounded investor, I needed to have a wider aperture than just covering smaller cap biotech names. So I moved there to expand my coverage universe. After a few years of following that world, I really felt like I was ready to take the next step and to find an opportunity where I would be given that opportunity to prove myself and start to manage money.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The scientific complexity of the pipeline, and depending where they are in the narrative, there's oftentimes one part of that story might prevail over the other part of the story and lead to a skew in the pricing of that other aspect of the business. And so while the moves are maybe not as flashy as what you'll see in small cap biotech when a piece of news comes out and stock's up 100%, they're definitely idiosyncratic moves in nature and often have a bit of an asymmetry to them in terms of upside versus downside when that event happens. And so there's a lot of fuel for investment opportunities throughout the kind of story arc of larger companies in shorter time intervals. And that's really kind of what we rinse and repeat and did a lot of when we were at millennium.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's really interesting, I started off as I kind of mentioned before, focused on trying to come up with identification of opportunities in biotech where I felt like risk was mispriced at its heart. That's what we're talking about here. From a probabilistic lens of asking, you know, what the market is pricing into an equity for an event versus what I think the view is of that particular event. What's really interesting when you get into the larger, more complicated companies that have robust operating businesses moving into big pharma, moving into especially pharma companies, investors at the same time have to hold views of the cash flow generative potential of the operating business.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As really centers of excellence, as really kind of these multi strats that were already starting to dominate the landscape, and I wanted to experience what it is about those places that allow them to kind of consistently outperform. And so Millennium to me was another opportunity for me to expand out of the small cap biotech universe that I had been predominantly involved with for the first portion of my career and move into broader healthcare. So it was my first time covering European healthcare. I moved into larger cap pharma, generics, spec pharma, the whole landscape of drug development, it really opened up the opportunity set for me.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Millennium was intriguing as an opportunity for me because I had been through the earlier part of my career at a few, as you mentioned, smaller hedge funds. And I wanted to have an experience of what was already at that time. This is 2010, 2011 we're talking about, the emergence of a few”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of the performance that I was measured against, dictated by what the market did. And so I just kind of almost intuitively gravitated towards a market neutral style of investing where I thought any year, year in, year out, regardless of what macroeconomic conditions are, regardless of what the stock market does, if I'm successful at trying to identify idiosyncratic stock opportunities, we could generate returns irrespective of market conditions. And so that was very appealing to me. And so that's what had me pivot back in 2007 to the first market neutral hedge fund that I worked at. And I've been in market neutral investing ever since.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think where the second part of it is kind of easy to kind of start off with here, where it took me was the idea that there's mispricings to be found on either long or short opportunities depending on where kind of market view is on a lot of these names. For my own personal style and satisfaction, I didn't want to have”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is, and I think what I'm trying to imply is there's a lot of informational value that's already held within the valuations where these equities are trading that you can calculate a sense of the implied market probability of success for an opportunity for a company. Whether it's a product embedded within a larger company or whether it's, as you're referring to, a smaller cap, you know, kind of much more idiosyncratic binary event. And by looking at that information and contrasting that with an independently formulated view that you may have, if there's an opportunity that arises between the two to play some sort of kind of arbitrage and probabilities in your portfolio construction, that's the goal of the style of investing we do.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So I thought early on in my career, and it's been something that has carried through in my personal style, to really kind of look at the world under a much more probabilistic lens, where you're just asking yourself, where are there situations where the herd is thinking one thing, consensus has one level of thought, but you've got a good foundation to believe why reality has a much bigger percentage chance of not playing out that way.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I stayed there for about three years. I moved on to another firm, Kilkenny Capital, which was a Chicago based firm, also focused mainly in biotech, but a smaller cap healthcare investor. And that was the next three years of my career. From there, I really started to get my first inkling of process and thinking about the drug development world in a probabilistic lens. I think previously or commonly, you go about the investment world looking for people who are tremendously successful because they find ideas and they have maximum conviction and those ideas play out and they look like heroes, which is terrific in those individual success cases, but is littered with failure of people who fail to find that opportunity.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I came in as a junior analyst. My role was just to dig through business plans, dig through drug development, and try to handicap what would work, but equally as interestingly, what's going to fail. And I got a lot of reps at seeing different attempts at drug development, rinse and repeat over a number of years to try to get those initial kind of training on how the drug development process kind of really works and how that interacts with the equity markets.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was Lindsay Rosenwald was the founder there. And actually, interestingly, Joe was director of research there for a number of years before he moved on to start perceptive.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first gig was at Paramount Capital Asset Management. Paramount was a small boutique biotech firm that had investments in both private equity side and public. They were crossover investors in the early days of doing that”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a firm that has been tremendously successful as healthcare investors. And so when I was trying to network and find people. Spoke to Izzy about it and he said, Why don't you talk to my son Joe? And then conversation with Joe, which we was kind enough to give me a portion of his time, opened the door to other people to talk to, you know, inroads into the industry and then just knocking on doors found an opportunity for me.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, like in many things in life, there's serendipity to finding opportunities. And one of the professors at Columbia who was a mentor of mine and I had worked with Izzy Edelman, his son, Joe Edelman, founded perceptive.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might appreciate the domain expertise I had coming out of a scientific background, and I could learn the finance side of it. So I went straight to the buy side at that point.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, absolutely. For me, I thought the knowledge base that I developed, the science itself, was evolving so rapidly. You know, the unlocking of the sequencing of the genome. Was going to provide this thought going to be a new golden era of drug development. And it might have taken 20 years to come, but the genetic medicines that are being developed now and the whole approach to medicine today is much more based on what I describe as biology. As opposed to chemistry first, where previous generations of drugs were really all oral pills that were chemical compounds that by serendipity they found out a way it might impact a disease. Now, it's much more biology driven. And so at that time, with the background I had, I thought, you know, the world of finance.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, absolutely, but you know. But I came to the conclusion that the knowledge base I had that finance provided an opportunity for me for me personally I am a lifelong learner And one of the things in finance that's fascinating to me that keeps me going even till today is that you never stop learning. You never stop trying to become more of an expert at what you're doing, but just more experience learning from. The world and it's a constant, constant process. And that's fascinating to me.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That sounds really fascinating. So that was an initial career path that I was kind of really intrigued to study. Obviously, I'm still excited to talk about that type of stuff. But I realized that at a certain point that science was not going to be the path for me. It involved further and further specialization and doing work in centers of excellence that are not necessarily geographically where you'd want to spend your life. And so I wound up choosing New York. And so then the thought was if I wasn't going to be academic, where could I take the knowledge base that I had developed and find a passion to apply it in a different direction?”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're saying, you know, the idea is that Darwin was right on a more obvious phenotypic level for some of the things that are very easy to track But if you're talking about the actual fuel of evolution, what drive it on a molecular genetic level, it's much more driven by mutations that really don't have any impact on fitness. And random genetic drift. And so, and”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had thought originally that I was going to be an academic scientist. I did my PhD work at the Columbia Genome Center at a time where we had one of the chromosomes in the genome project. And so we were involved in that first push to sequence the genome. And I had thought that academics was going to carry me forward, my individual work was related to the study of actually evolution on a molecular level. There's a whole rabbit hole that you could go down, you know, kind of chasing that, but suffice to say that I think that Darwin, in his explanation of evolution, does not necessarily fully describe the phenomenon that you see on a molecular genetic level. And we were much more in the camp of, I was much more in the camp of following Moto Kimura's neutral theory of evolution, which is go down yourself.”
2024-10-03 · Masters in Business · The DNA Behind Good Investing with Vincent Aita · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source