DAN RASMUSSEN

Rasmussen started at Bain Capital in private equity, then moved to the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest. Along the way he wrote American Uprising, a history of the largest slave revolt in US history, which became a New York Times bestseller in 2011.

He won Harvard's Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for top undergraduate work, was a national medalist in rowing, and made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. In 2014, while a graduate student at Stanford, he launched Verdad to pursue his idea of replicating private-equity returns in public markets.

In 2025 he published a second book, The Humble Investor, about the limits of forecasting.

Verdad Advisers, formerly Bain Capital and Bridgewater Associates

Rasmussen tries to copy the old private-equity playbook using public stocks and data. The engine starts with a universe of about 15,000 stocks in developed markets.

Every month Verdad's algorithm finds roughly 500 that are small, cheap and carrying real debt, then narrows to the 150 most attractive. In plain English, he buys tiny bargain companies with two or three turns of debt, the same profile that made 1980s buyout deals so profitable, but without the ten-year lockup or the sky-high fees.

He argues that value times leverage, applied to small companies, is where the returns actually come from.

The bigger win is the argument itself. Rasmussen published research, some on SSRN, showing that historically private equity bought companies at roughly a 40 percent discount to public markets, and that about 60 percent of the industry's profits came from the cheapest quarter of deals.

That evidence became the foundation of Verdad and a widely cited critique of how modern buyout firms operate. He turned an academic insight into a real strategy and a real firm before he was 30.

A small, cheap, levered value strategy is brutal to hold through the long stretches when value stocks lag growth, and Rasmussen's approach can trail badly in those periods. That is the built-in cost of his style, not a one-off blunder.

He is also making a bold bet that public markets can reliably mimic private equity, a claim plenty of investors dispute, and if he is early or wrong on a cycle, his levered small-caps are exactly the stocks that fall hardest.

Rasmussen's whole philosophy is humility about forecasting. He argues markets are volatile because humans make big prediction errors, and that the investor's real edge is fundamentals over forecasts, humility over hubris, and tested rules over dogma.

He is deeply skeptical of today's private equity, which he says now buys small, expensive companies with lots of debt, the opposite of the cheap deals that built the industry. He would rather run a transparent, rules-based strategy in public markets than pay huge fees for an illiquid black box.

His advice, bluntly, is to be very wary of illiquid asset classes.

Rasmussen keeps his personal and family life largely private. Publicly he is known through his firm, his books and his research writing rather than any details about his home life.

Rasmussen graduated from Harvard, where he won the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for outstanding undergraduate work and was a national medalist in rowing. He later earned an MBA from Stanford, and it was there, as a student, that he actually launched Verdad.

Starting a hedge fund while still in business school is not the normal path.

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