ccasionally the best seed capital for a successful career in investing is lucky timing. In 1997, as a junior in high school, Harris Kupperman began obsessing over the stock market as the Asian financial crisis and then dot-com mania dominated the headlines. By the time he arrived at Tulane University two years later, tech stocks had soared nearly 200% since Netscape’s IPO in the summer of 1995 and would double again over the next few months.
Two decades later, his Praetorian Capital has $180 million under management and is up 593%, net of a 20% performance fee and 1.25% management fee since it began taking in outside capital in 2019. During both 2020 and 2021, his fund, which makes concentrated bets in only about a dozen investments, returned more than 100%.
He believes bitcoin rises when the Fed injects liquidity into the market, as it did in the early days of the pandemic, and sinks when the central bank tightens. He bought bitcoin at about $9,200 in the summer of 2020, and by the end of that year the cryptocurrency was the largest position in his portfolio.
Kupperman graduated from Tulane in 2003 with a degree in history, opened a hedge fund and moved to Miami. His fund did reasonably well, but in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, he shuttered it.
Anyone in Fiat is investing in a Ponzi scheme