By Judah Spinner began investing as a teenager and founded BlackBird Financial LP when he was just 18. We met in his Toms River, N.J., office shortly after he and his wife launched the Judah Spinner Foundation to discuss his approach to markets, and what he aims to achieve with his new Foundation.
You started early in finance. What drew you to investing?
When I was 10 years old, I learned that it was possible to buy into a large well-known company from merely a few dollars, and in doing so you would be entitled to a share of the company’s profits in the future. The fact that your capital alone can earn you money without putting forth meaningful labor was a fascinating concept.
Of course, earning a return on your capital is no trick and requires no skill. The difficulty is in earning a return beyond what is standard, which itself will fluctuate based on the interest rate environment. I began reading dozens of books on investing from Ben Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor” to “Common Stocks as Long Term Investments” by Edgar Lawrence Smith.
It felt only natural that when I had my bar mitzvah in late 2008, I used the $3000 I received as gifts from family and friends to buy 74 shares of Target at $40.50 each. In 2009, Target brought in more than $65 billion in sales on which it earned nearly $2.5 billion. To play a part in that no matter how small the role was an exhilarating feeling for me. Is that strange? Maybe. But it worked for me!
A couple of years later, my friend introduced me to his father, Charles Dayan, a successful New York real estate tycoon, and he entrusted me with $100,000 to invest. It was a daring move that benefited us both immensely.
At the age of 18, I started the hedge fund which eventually became known as BlackBird Financial. Since inception, we have substantially outperformed the broader and the vast majority of our competitors. Most recently, in the first three-quarters of this year, we produced a 71.4% gain versus 14% for the S&P 500.
You are known to have a different approach to investing than most of your competitors. What does this mean?
When business ownership is split into small slices, as they are on Wall Street, buyers tend to regard their shares as a short-term gamble on market movements. Further accentuating this is the fact that in public markets, you are provided with a quote every minute of every workday between 9:30 AM and 4:00 PM.
This has a dramatic effect on the mindset of market participants. Tune In to CNBC on any weekday morning and you’ll hear a lot of talk about where markets are headed in the next few months, what their price targets are for the year, and whether a stock is likely to “pop” after quarterly earnings are released. I listen in every morning on my way to work and I’m often amused by how closely it resembles a gambling parlor.
Imagine how investors would behave if they got a quote on their real estate investments as frequently as they do on their stocks. The focus would undoubtedly shift from the long-term profitability based on units, occupancy, rents, expenses etc. to short-term price gyrations. Where real estate is publicly traded (REITs), we actually observe this phenomenon in action.
In contrast, I think about the companies we own as businesses. It is madness for an investor buying stock to have anything else in mind other than the operating realities of the underlying business. I think of a stock only as a fractional interest in a business and always begin by asking myself:
“How much would I pay for all of this company? And on that basis, what will I pay for 0.1% of it?”
What are you looking out for specifically?
There are five questions I ask myself when analyzing a business:
- Do I understand the business and the industry in which it operates? The remaining questions can only be properly answered if I am intimately aware of what makes a particular business tick.
- Do they possess a durable competitive advantage? Most businesses do not.
- Do they have a star management team? Most CEO’s are keenly focused on their bonuses and the upcoming dinner at which they’ll be honored, not generating shareholder value.
- How much debt do they have? Most companies have some debt in their capital structure because it amplifies their returns on equity as long as the interest rate paid is lower than return on assets. The problems arise when there’s a recession and refinancing becomes difficult just when operating profits are at their weakest.
As Buffett says, “Cash is to a business as oxygen is to an individual; never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent. If it disappears for a few minutes, it’s all over.” While debt can be helpful at times (ask any real estate investor), I shy away from heavily indebted businesses to avoid their vulnerabilities. - Is the price attractive? Businesses are often overpriced, but on rare occasions there are wonderful companies that are almost given away. When that happens, I buy as much as I can without paying attention to the current gloomy economic and stock market forecasts.
The enormous advantage an investor has in public markets is that while he is offered thousands of opportunities, he only has to act on a few. Not only can you wait for a bargain, but for the particular one that you understand and know to be a bargain.
Many people try to get into your line of work but most fail. What do you think are the qualities that enable someone to be a good investor?
Patience is definitely a virtue in this business. The idea of waiting years before reaping the benefits of labor expended today is very difficult for most people. I think it’s also important to think independently. When the whole market feels that a company or industry is doomed, it’s very difficult to come to a different conclusion upon further research, and of course the same concept holds true when the public is optimistic about a given security.
Lastly, a good investor must be able to acknowledge when he doesn’t know something. Don’t be like Jim Cramer who can tell you if any one of thousands of stocks are a buy or a sell. You and I don’t know what level the S&P will be at in a year or what oil demand will look like in six months, and we should not give in to any false illusions to the contrary. Intellectual honesty is paramount in investing!
This sounds like good advice. Why aren’t you afraid of giving trade secrets to your competitors by sharing it?
None of this can be considered a secret. My philosophy was clearly laid out in 1934 by Ben Graham in his book, “Security Analysis”. That’s more than 90 years ago! Warren Buffett, who turned 95 on August 30, has followed this philosophy since the 1950s and has achieved one of the industry’s most revered records. Many others have also produced impressive results by implementing the same principles. Put simply, it works!
Why then, don’t more participants invest this way?
It’s a matter of temperament. When prices are flashing in front of you, it’s all too tempting to focus on those gyrations rather than the comparatively dull business economics.
Even so, you would expect more investors to overcome their natural tendencies. After all, many of them have very strong work ethics, are very intelligent and are certainly motivated to succeed. Why don’t they identify what works and do whatever it takes to implement it?
I don’t have the answer. I can only observe that the same question can also be asked about other areas of life. The world is full of brilliant people making decisions that ultimately work against their own self-interest.
This type of question is probably better posed to a philosopher or psychologist. It’s one of those interesting elements of the human experience that keeps life interesting, that’s for sure!
What is BlackBird invested in?
At the beginning of 2025, our three largest investments, in order of size, were Alibaba, Dollar General, and Avis Budget Group. Since then, we’ve pared back our positions in Alibaba and Dollar General, each by more than half, and we’ve exited Avis. We still like all three, but prices are a lot higher relative to value, so we’re somewhat less enthusiastic.
We also made new investments in Tidewater, Constellation Brands, Lululemon, Builders FirstSource, Texas Roadhouse, Natural Alternatives International, and others. I wrote about many of these companies after we invested, and you can find those write-ups on our website.
Tell us about the Judah Spinner Foundation. How much of your time is devoted to that compared to BlackBird?
The Foundation is primarily a financial commitment. My wife and I have already committed $2 million in funding by the end of next year, and if we believe we’re having a significant impact per dollar spent, that figure could climb dramatically. That said, I don’t anticipate the Foundation will be too taxing from a time standpoint for the foreseeable future.
What problems are you aiming to address?
Julie and I believe the United States has more going for it than any other country on earth. But we also see real problems that need addressing.
For one, while we have the strongest economy on the planet, the prosperity hasn’t been widely shared. In the mid-20th century, most Americans saw rising living standards. Since the 1980s, despite enormous economic growth overall, the bottom quartile has not seen much improvement.
Our country also has roughly two million people incarcerated. It’s the rare exception when someone leaves prison better than when they went in. This system needs reform. Another issue we care deeply about is our healthcare system. We have the highest costs in the world by a wide margin, yet our outcomes lag those of every other developed country. Why do we accept this?
And the government has allowed our deficit to explode. We ran big deficits during the financial crisis and for several years thereafter, but we brought them down as the economy recovered. We raised the deficit again during COVID, which was exactly the right thing to do, but we’ve yet to curb it to a sustainable level. We now have more debt relative to GDP than at any point since the end of World War II. It can be sensible to run a deficit during war, recession, or a pandemic, but it’s past time to tighten our belts. If we don’t, we’ll pay a heavy price.
I want to reiterate that our country has so much going right. Highlighting these issues shouldn’t be cause for gloom. There will always be areas to improve, and Julie and I hope we can play a role in polishing this gem that is the United States.
What have you done so far?
We recently launched the Judah Spinner Scholarship, which provides funding for trade-school education. The aim is to help the bottom quartile, by income, dramatically improve their standard of living without a four-year degree. We also believe success is the best antidote to crime, so a lower incarceration rate is a likely byproduct.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of applications we’ve received so far. I think we’ll be very happy with how this money is spent. That said, every initiative will be closely monitored. We’ll press the gas when something works and eliminate efforts that aren’t effective. I allocate capital for a living, and that discipline should be just as important at the Foundation as it is at BlackBird.
Will you enter politics to tackle healthcare or the deficit?
Not likely. I genuinely love what I do at BlackBird, and I think I can make a bigger impact by leaning into what I’m already good at.
People often ask why politicians seem so compromised. To me, a big part of the answer is survivorship bias. The ones who stay in power are usually those willing to make trade-offs, often at odds with the public interest, to keep key donors and constituencies happy. That dynamic has always existed, but it got supercharged after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, which opened the floodgates to massive political spending.
Picture a bill in Congress that would meaningfully lower healthcare costs, but it’s fiercely opposed by industry lobbyists. Every member of Congress then faces a familiar choice: vote for the public good and risk getting steamrolled by a well-funded primary challenger or play it safe and protect their career. And if they lose their seat, what influence do they have left?
To make it worse, they often know the bill probably won’t pass anyway. So why blow up your political future for a vote that won’t change anything?
The system rewards survival, not courage. That’s how you end up with politicians who don’t represent their constituents. I believe most of them start out with good intentions, but over time, they adapt to a system that punishes idealism and rewards self-preservation. And honestly, I don’t blame them.
All of which is to say: there are often more effective ways to influence policy than running for office.
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