Today’s letter is a guest column from Polina Marinova Pompliano, the founder of The Profile. Each week she helps tens of thousands of people study the world’s most successful people and companies. You can sign up here to read future editions.

Good morning, everyone!

After four years of writing The Profile, I've studied how the most successful and interesting people in the world reason their way through problems, rise up in times of hardship, and perform under extreme pressure.

Many of those people exist in the world of finance, and we often like to point to the big-name investors. What about the more obscure figures — the ones who keep a low-profile but whose track records speak for themselves?

I've highlighted many of them in my weekly newsletter, and I've learned valuable lessons by studying their approach to life and business.

Below are five of the greatest investors whose stories you may have never heard.

1. Arne Alsin, the Man Who Abandoned Value

When Arne Alsin, the founder of investment firm Worm Capital, wrote about investing in disruptive companies two years ago, one commentator called it “one of the dumbest articles ever written.” After a 274% year, Alsin isn’t the one who looks dumb.

How?

He gave up on every investing principle he had once held. Alsin says: “I just totally gave up and said, ‘I’m going to do the exact opposite.’”

A forensic accountant by training who had formerly worked for Peat Marwick, Alsin switched from being a classic Warren Buffett–style value investor who scoured balance sheets to being one who obsessively embraced the disruptive promises of Silicon Valley and the new economy.

(Read more here.)

2. Mark Spitznagel, the Investor Who Capitalizes on Catastrophe

Hedge fund investor Mark Spitznagel likes to wait for the perfect moment, the perfect crisis. And he's very patient.

His $4.3 billion (assets) firm Universa Investments always loses small sums until one day a black swan appears. That swan appeared in 2020 in the form of a global pandemic, and the tables turned for Spitznagel.

The firm's flagship “Black Swan Protection Protocol” fund earned its near two dozen institutional investors a staggering 3,612% last March, putting its 2020 gains at 4,144%. (Read more here.)

3. Cathie Wood, the CIO With the Hottest Hand

Cathie Wood is already in the pantheon of top money handlers over any period in the past five years, and has been the most persuasive — and so far prescient — champion of Tesla. Her actively managed Ark Innovation ETF is the best performer among 584 funds with at least $1 billion of assets in the global equity market.

Her focus on innovation, “centered around genome sequencing, robotics, artificial intelligence, energy storage and blockchain technology,” enabled Ark Innovation ETF to increase 127 times, to $2.4 billion from its $15 million grubstake in 2017. In the process, the Ark ETF rewarded its shareholders with more than three times the return of the S&P 500 Index and more than twice the Nasdaq’s bounty.

(Read more here.)

4. Orlando Bravo, Wall Street's Best Dealmaker

Few outside of finance have heard of the 49-year-old Orlando Bravo, but he is the driving force behind Wall Street’s hottest firm, which has $39 billion in assets: Thoma Bravo.

Bravo has sold or listed 25 investments worth a total of $20 billion, four times their cost. His secret? He invests only in well-established software companies, especially those with clearly discernible moats.

Bravo’s firm has done 230 software deals worth over $68 billion since 2003 and presently oversees a portfolio of 38 software companies that generate some $12 billion in annual revenue and employ 40,000 people.

The opportunities today are the biggest I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Right now we are in a huge, exploding and changing industry.”

(Read more here.)

5. Dawn Fitzpatrick, the Powerhouse Running a $26B Fund

When Dawn Fitzpatrick started her career as a 22-year-old at the American Stock Exchange, traders made bets on how long she would last. She lasted.

Fitzpatrick became one of Wall Street’s most powerful women, and now, she is the chief investment officer of Soros Fund Management. She manages $26 billion of billionaire George Soros’s personal and family wealth.

“As an investor,” she says, “you have to continuously evolve and learn.”

(Read more here.)

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NOTE: This guest column was written by Polina Marinova Pompliano, the author of The Profile (and my wife!), a weekly newsletter that features longform profiles of successful people and companies each week.

Sign up for The Profile here!

-Pomp

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THE RUNDOWN:

MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative Raises $4M for Effort to ‘Harden’ Bitcoin: The MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative is spinning up a multi-year effort dedicated to Bitcoin research and development. The program raised $4 million from prominent backers including CoinShares’ Meltem Demirors, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, among others, as well as corporate entities including Fidelity Digital Assets. It has made the long-term health of the Bitcoin protocol its key area of focus. Read more.

Coinbase Has Set a High Bar for Crypto Firms Looking to List, Says Institutional Rival: Coinbase’s public filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has set the standard when it comes to disclosure and risk for any other crypto businesses thinking about going public, according to the CEO of the largest institutional crypto exchange. With its public filing, Coinbase has issued minimum viable standards for methods of operation, risk management and risk awareness in crypto, said David Mercer, CEO of London-based LMAX Group. Read more.

NBA Top Shot Overwhelmed by Demand in Record $1M Pack Drop: Dapper Labs’ booming digital collectibles platform, NBA Top Shot, just completed its most anticipated NFT release yet, selling 10,631 packs of basketball videos hashed to the Flow blockchain for a record $1.05 million in revenue. The project’s latest pack drop, which at its peak had over 200,000 hopeful collectors waiting in line for what are essentially serialized National Basketball Association highlights, pushes total pack-generated revenue to $7.38 million for the 8-month-old NBA Top Shot, according to data crunched by CoinDesk.Read more.

Google Finance Adds Crypto Data Tab: Google Finance, a data site maintained by the tech giant, now has a dedicated “crypto” field. And it has prominent placement, too. Right at the top of the page, where users can “compare markets,” crypto is listed among the five default markets, which also includes U.S., Europe, Asia and “Currencies.” For some, like the “Documenting Bitcoin” Twitter account that surfaced the new feature, this appears to be a signal of crypto’s growing mainstream presence. Read more.

3 US Regulators Probing Robinhood’s Actions Amid GameStop Trading Craze: Robinhood, the popular trading app for stock, options, gold and cryptocurrencies, has said it is fielding enquiries from several U.S. watchdogs over recent trading halts and other issues. According to a Reuters report on Saturday, the company said Friday that it's in settlement talks with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority over temporary curbs to trading of certain stocks, as well as its policies on options trading. It's also been contacted by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Attorney General’s Office, per the report. Read more.

LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE POMP PODCAST HERE

Robert Breedlove is a bitcoin educator and runs the “What is Money?” show.

In this conversation, Robert and I discuss:

• Current state of bitcoin

• Corporate America protecting their balance sheets

• When central banks will join us

• What the world will look like in 25 years

I really enjoyed this conversation with Robert. Hopefully you enjoy it too.

LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE POMP PODCAST HERE

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You are receiving The Pomp Letter because you either signed up or you attended one of the events that I spoke at. Feel free to unsubscribe if you aren’t finding this valuable.

Nothing in this email is intended to serve as financial advice. Do your own research.