TOBIAS CARLISLE
Deep value investor and author who built a fund around buying the most hated stocks
An Australian securities lawyer who moved to America, wrote a book about buying the ugliest, most hated stocks in the market, and built an ETF around the strategy. Carlisle's "Acquirer's Multiple" takes Ben Graham's deep value approach and strips it to one number: enterprise value to operating earnings. Buy the cheapest stocks by that metric, hold them, and rebalance. It's unsexy, contrarian, and has centuries of data supporting it. He's the modern face of deep value in an era that hates deep value.
Net Worth
$20 million
Nationality
Australian-American
Time Horizon
Long-Term
Risk Appetite
5 / 10
CAREER & BACKGROUND
Born in Australia. Studied law at the University of Queensland.
Practiced as a securities and M&A lawyer before transitioning to investing. Moved to the United States to pursue value investing.
Wrote "Quantitative Value" (2012) with Wesley Gray, which applied quantitative methods to Ben Graham and Warren Buffett's value investing principles. Then wrote "Deep Value" (2014), which explored activist investing and mean reversion.
Both became cult favorites in the value investing community.
Launched the Acquirers Fund (ticker: ZIG) in 2019 — an ETF that systematically buys the most undervalued stocks based on the Acquirer's Multiple. He also hosts "The Acquirers Podcast," one of the most popular investing podcasts for value investors.
COMPANIES & ROLES
Acquirers Funds LLC manages the ZIG ETF. The fund systematically selects the most undervalued U.S.
stocks using the Acquirer's Multiple — a ratio of enterprise value to operating earnings that Carlisle argues is the single best measure of cheapness.
His website acquirersmultiple.com provides free stock screening tools and the Acquirer's Multiple for every publicly traded company. It's become a widely used resource in the value investing community.
"The Acquirers Podcast" has hundreds of episodes featuring deep conversations with value investors, quants, and capital allocators.
INVESTING STYLE & PHILOSOPHY
Carlisle is a systematic deep value investor. His approach: screen for the statistically cheapest stocks, buy a diversified basket, hold for one year, and rebalance.
No stock-picking intuition. No management meetings.
No earnings call analysis. Just pure quantitative cheapness.
The thesis is mean reversion — stocks that are extremely cheap tend to recover. Not because the businesses are great, but because the market overreacts to bad news and the statistical tendency toward mean reversion is powerful.
He draws heavily from Ben Graham, Joel Greenblatt, and James Montier. His contribution is making these ideas accessible, testable, and investable through a public ETF.
THE PLAYBOOK
Risk Approach
Moderate. The ZIG ETF is diversified across many stocks, which limits individual position risk.
But deep value stocks are often cheap for a reason — they're distressed, mismanaged, or facing headwinds. The portfolio can underperform for extended periods when growth and momentum dominate.
Carlisle is comfortable with prolonged underperformance because his backtests show the strategy works over full cycles. But living through a five-year stretch of underperformance requires serious conviction.
Money Habits
Lives in Los Angeles. Runs his fund and media business from there.
Low-key lifestyle. His main indulgence is his intellectual work — the podcast, the books, the research.
He's genuinely passionate about value investing history and theory.
BIGGEST WIN
His intellectual contribution. Carlisle didn't make his fortune from a single trade.
His win is building a body of work — books, podcast, ETF, screening tools — that has influenced a generation of value investors. The Acquirer's Multiple has become a standard tool in the value investing toolkit.
His ideas are used by fund managers and retail investors worldwide.
BIGGEST MISTAKE
Launching a deep value ETF during a decade that punished deep value. ZIG launched in 2019, and value stocks broadly underperformed growth stocks for much of the subsequent period.
The strategy's historical backtests are compelling, but live returns have been mixed as the market rewarded growth, momentum, and technology over traditional value metrics.
FINANCIAL PHILOSOPHY
Carlisle believes cheapness is the single most important factor in investing. Not quality.
Not growth. Not momentum.
Cheapness. His research shows that the cheapest decile of stocks — by enterprise value to operating earnings — outperforms over every long time period tested, going back to the 1920s.
He also believes most investors overthink things. The market is not that complicated.
Buy cheap, diversify, hold, rebalance. The edge isn't in analysis — it's in discipline and patience.
On value investing's future: deep value goes through periods of underperformance, but it always comes back. The human tendency to overreact is permanent.
FAMILY & PERSONAL LIFE
Private about family life. Lives in Los Angeles with his family.
His public persona is entirely professional — the deep value investing educator and practitioner.
EDUCATION
Born in Australia. Undergraduate and law degree from the University of Queensland.
Practiced law before transitioning to finance. Moved to the U.S.
to pursue investing and writing. No MBA — he's entirely self-educated in quantitative finance.
BOOKS & RESOURCES
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QUOTES (6)
Cheapness is the single most important factor in investing. Not quality. Not growth. Cheapness.
The human tendency to overreact is permanent. That's why deep value always comes back.
Mean reversion is the most powerful force in financial markets. Everything returns to the average eventually.
If a stock is in the cheapest decile by enterprise value to operating earnings, I don't need to know the story.
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