EPSILON THEORY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Chief Strategy Officer for the Human Rights Foundation
Ben Hunt is the creator of Epsilon Theory and inspiration behind Second Foundation Partners, which he co-founded with Rusty Guinn in June 2018.
Epsilon Theory, Second Foundation's principal publishing brand, is a newsletter and website that examines markets through the lenses of game theory and history. Over 100,000 professional investors and allocators across 180 countries read Epsilon Theory for its fresh perspective and novel insights into market dynamics. As Chief Investment Officer, Ben bears primary responsibility for determining the Company's investment views and positioning of model portfolios. He is also the primary author of materials distributed through Epsilon Theory.
Ben taught political science for 10 years: at New York University from 1991 until 1997 and (with tenure) at Southern Methodist University from 1997 until 2000. He also wrote two academic books: Getting to War (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997) and Policy and Party Competition (Routledge, 1992), which he co-authored with Michael Laver. Ben is the founder of two technology companies and the co-founder of SmartEquip, Inc., a software company for the construction equipment industry that provides intelligent schematics and parts diagrams to facilitate e-commerce in spare parts.
He began his investment career in 2003, first in venture capital and subsequently on two long/short equity hedge funds. He worked at Iridian Asset Management from 2006 until 2011 and TIG Advisors from 2012 until 2013. He joined Rusty at Salient in 2013, where he combined his background as a portfolio manager, risk manager, and entrepreneur with academic experience in game theory and econometrics to work with Salient's own portfolio managers and its financial advisor clients to improve client outcomes.
Ben is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (1986) and earned his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 1991. He lives in the wilds of Redding, CT on Little River Farm, where he personifies the dilettante farmer that has been a stock comedic character since Cicero's day. Luckily his wife, Jennifer, and four daughters, Harper, Hannah, Haven and Halle, are always there to save the day. Ben's hobbies include comic books, Alabama football, beekeeping, and humoring Rusty in trivia "competitions".
Job Titles:
- Contributor
- ET Contributor
Brent Donnelly is a senior risk-taker and FX market maker, and and has been trading foreign exchange since 1995. He is the author of The Art of Currency Trading (Wiley, 2019) and his latest book, Alpha Trader, is now available in bookstores worldwide.
Brent writes a well-known daily FX commentary called AM/FX and has experience as both a sell-side trader (HSBC, Citibank, Lehman Brothers) and as a portfolio manager at a major hedge fund in Connecticut. He trades tactical global macro. He has been quoted by The Economist, WSJ, Zerohedge, FT, CNBC and others.
ET contributor Brent Donnelly starts up where he left off, with a new launch of AM/FX and a new riff on the classic ET note, "Snip!".
ET contributor Brent Donnelly with an end-of-summer compilation of the top-of-mind topics at Camp Kotok!
ET contributor Brent Donnelly tries to wrap his brain around hedonic adjustments to CPI.
ET contributor Brent Donnelly gives a crash course in Market Profile analysis and applies it to Bitcoin since the Coinbase IPO.
ET contributor Brent Donnelly talks with Howard Marks about why traditional value investing is likely permanently impaired as a strategy and why Growth vs. Value is a false dichotomy. Boomshakalaka!
ET contributor Brent Donnelly captures the spirit and the content of our Epsilon Connect conference better than anything we could have done ourselves. Plus you get the slides from our presentations!
ET contributor Brent Donnelly went out and asked some people he respects what advice they would give kids heading off to college. Here's what he found.
ET contributor Brent Donnelly has some advice that's ostensibly for sell-side traders, but is actually for everyone in markets. And everyone who isn't.
The AI censors at YouTube banned a video by ET contributor Brent Donnelly for all the wrong reasons.
Meanwhile, the AI censors at Twitter won't ban an impersonator for any reason.
No one gives a clearer explanation of how financial institutions work than ET contributor Marc Rubinstein, and his primer on prime brokerage services (and its extension into crypto) is no exception.
Matt Zeigler went to Epsilon Connect 2024: Being Human in the Age of AI.
It took him a while, but he figured out what it's all about.
Neville's favorite links from recent months, including an interview with a collector of mathematical toys and an ode to the hack.
Chris is an entrepreneur, manager, and hands-on software engineer with decades of experience across diverse industries including technology, entertainment, automotive, and financial services.
Chris studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, but left the doctorate program A.B.D. to work as a software engineer. After a rewarding few years at NeXT Computer, Inc. and Apple, he launched CodeFab in New York where he built some of the earliest dynamic publishing, entertainment, and online music store web sites.
Later on, Chris spent nearly 10 years at Viacom's Kids and Family division leading an ever-expanding collection of teams that built and evolved properties like Nick, Nickmom, Shockwave, ParentsConnect, AddictingGames, NickJR, and Noggin as well as their underlying common infrastructure.
Switching gears from megacorp to startup, Chris went small and joined as the first technical hire at DipJar, Inc., where he led the team that built the systems and infrastructure that powered the successful launch of a company whose goal is to enable simple, frictionless gratuities and donations with a compact and friendly payment terminal.
Prior to joining Second Foundation Partners, Chris was a co-founder of Alpha Drive, Inc. a cloud simulation services provider for the emerging autonomous vehicle industry.
Chris's favorite things are experimenting in the kitchen and traveling with his wife Liang and their children, Charlotte and Sanford.
Job Titles:
- Contributor
- ET Contributor
Dave Nadig is currently an "independent financial futurist" and will tell you what that means as soon as he figures it out. Dave is best known for his work over the years with financial advisors and the Exchange Traded Fund industry. He co-founded Cerulli Associates in the early 1990s, went on to be Managing Director at Wells Fargo Nikko before selling the firm to Barclays to form BGI, before THAT got bought to become Blackrock/iShares as it exists today. He ran money very badly in the dotcom era under the umbrella of "MetaMarkets" where he published now laughable commentary on "the New Economy" of that moment. In the early 2000s he joined what would become ETF.com, where he helped build their ETF Data and Analytics business which was sold to FactSet in 2017 or so. Most recently Dave was part of the team that formed and sold VettaFi to the TMX group from 2020 to 2023.
Reality: Dave is a rabbithole diving curiosity monkey who lives in the woods of Western MA with his wife of some 26 years. His kids are up and grown, so at any moment you will likely find Dave hiking, reading, flying drones, riding bicycles, making music, meditating, playing games, making content and generally trying to understand how to have meaning in life during the decline of Western Democratic Capitalism.
ET contributor Dave Nadig is not only singlehandedly bringing back the zine, he's using it to explain ETFs better than anyone!
ET contributor Dave Nadig was there at the beginning of ETFs, and he's forgotten more about their structure and operations than I will ever know.
Job Titles:
- Consultant
- Contributor
- ET Contributor
David Salem is a consultant to institutional investors and family offices, a Contributor to Epsilon Theory, a frequent speaker on investment-related topics, and served most recently (2018 - 2019) as Co-Chairman of New Providence Asset Management (NP).
Prior to NP, David served as Chief Investment Officer of Windhorse Capital Management, which combined with NP at year-end 2017. Previously, David served for 18 years as founding president and chief investment officer of The Investment Fund for Foundations (TIFF), which managed upon David's departure over $8 billion on behalf of more than 800 endowed charities. Prior to TIFF's founding in 1992, David was a partner at GMO.
David received a JD cum laude from Harvard Law School and an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where he was elected a Baker Scholar. A longtime member of the District of Columbia Bar, David has held adjunct faculty positions at Middlebury College, from which he earned his undergraduate degree summa cum laude, and the University of Virginia, and served in the White House Counsel's office while enrolled at Harvard.
David's active speaking schedule has included talks at numerous universities, including Harvard, Northwestern, and Oxford and at conferences organized by the Association of Governing Boards, CCC Alliance, the CFA Institute, the Council on Foundations, the Foundation Financial Officers Group, the London Business School and NACUBO among other organizations.
David's extensive volunteer labors have included service as a trustee of Middlebury College, the Center for Effective Philanthropy, the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City and the Core Knowledge Foundation, and as a member of the investment committee of The Atlantic Philanthropies.
ET contributor David Salem makes the case for an investing corollary to baseball's Wins Above Replacement (WAR). It's a defense of value investing, but with a twist.
ET contributor David Salem is back with five core tenets for achieving 5+% real returns over the next few decades.
Harper is the Web and Content Manager of Epsilon Theory and has been since 2019.
A graduate of the University of Southern California (2019), Harper has been a part of the pack since the very beginning. She is responsible for updating and maintaining the website as well as assisting Ben and Rusty with any tasks that come up. Recently she's taken charge of the PPE distribution and ships out several thousand masks each week.
Harper currently lives with her family in Redding, CT. When she's not working, Harper can be found making trivia for her family and playing in one of her many Dungeons and Dragons games.
Job Titles:
- Senior Investment Manager at Kiva
Luke Burgis wrote a book that I think is really good. It's called Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, and we recorded a podcast to talk about it. Luke has graciously agreed to contribute an occasional essay to Epsilon Theory, and there's lots more great stuff where this came from on Luke's substack: Anti-Mimetic.
Luke has co-created and led four companies in wellness, consumer products, and technology. He's currently Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Director of Programs at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship where he also teaches business at The Catholic University of America. Luke has helped form and serves on the board of several new K-12 education initiatives and writes and speaks regularly about the education of desire. He studied business at NYU Stern and philosophy and theology at a pontifical university in Rome.
Marc Rubinstein has over 25 years experience as an analyst and investor in the financials sector which he distills into a weekly newsletter, Net Interest, which I think is a really great read! Between 2006 and 2016 he was senior analyst and portfolio manager on the Lansdowne Global Financials Fund, a fundamental long/short equity fund focused exclusively on the global financials sector. Prior to that, Marc was an Institutional Investor ranked analyst on the sell-side, most recently at Credit Suisse, where he was a managing director overseeing its European banks team. As well as writing Net Interest, Marc is an active angel investor in fintech. He can be contacted via his newsletter or on Twitter (@MarcRuby).
ET contributor Marc Rubinstein was there at the beginning when Chinese banks went public, and he's here now to review the sector.
Job Titles:
- Contributor
- ET Contributor
Matt Zeigler has worked in the financial industry since 2007, and been a full-fledged music nerd since 1980-something.
He is currently a Managing Director and Private Wealth Advisor with Sunpointe Investments, and the author of the Cultish Creative blog and newsletter.
ET contributor Matt Zeigler knows it was "The Fourth Turning", and he's got a thing or two to say about generational theory.
Job Titles:
- Contributor
- ET Contributor
Neville is CEO of Kiva, a San Francisco-based non-profit technology company that has facilitated more than $1.2 billion dollars of loans to financially excluded communities in 83 countries and is aiming to bring financial identity and credit history to the 1.7 billion who are currently outside the financial system.
Before running Kiva, Neville was CEO of Quid, a pioneer in using Natural Language Processing and Graph Theory to understand the Narrative.
Neville is originally from the UK and, before moving to the US, has lived and worked in China, the Middle East, Malaysia and across sub-Saharan Africa, working variously as a music and pop video producer, the publisher of China Economic Review, a consultant at McKinsey, and as as an executive at private equity backed companies. He originally trained in studio arts in Manchester.
Epsilon Theory contributor Neville Crawley is back with an interview of Adam Julian Goldstein, discussing Adam's fascinating new work on anxiety. If, like me, you have the entrepreneurial bug (and it is a bug, not a feature), this is a must read!
ET contributor Neville Crawley is simply one of the wisest people I know, and he outdoes himself in this killer Rabbit Hole note.
ET contributor Neville Crawley is back from time well spent at an amazing library, with thoughts on no-end state architecture, marketing alpha, DOD AI, wonderfully goofy blogs, and a new addition to the Rumsfeld canon: unknown knowns.
Niall Ridgley is a screenwriter and playwright who writes about sports and media for Second Foundation. Follow him X, Substack, and Instagram for more of his curated, hyper-specific takes.
Niall's most recent film work includes the award-winning indie comedy American Cuck (2025) and indie drama Bud (2024). His most recent plays to go up have been Malarkey, Cairns, The Helsinki Cycle, and Red Sky Summer, with The Helsinki Cycle published by Smith & Krauss for Best Male Monologue of 2021.
Niall graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and received an MFA in Playwriting & Screenwriting from the Actors Studio Drama School. He continues to immerse himself in the NYC city culture from his base in the East Village and enjoys playing his particular brand of mediocre golf.
Job Titles:
- Contributor
- ET Contributor
Peter Cecchini is a contributing author to Epsilon Theory, founder of AlphaOmega Advisors, and formerly Chief Markets Strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald
Peter has also previously served as Cantor's interim Co-Head of Equities and head of its equity derivatives business. Prior to joining the Cantor family, from January 2007 to December 2009, Peter was a Partner and Portfolio Manager at Seven Bridges Management, LP. Seven Bridges was an event-driven, special situations hedge fund seeded by Ulysses Management (the successor to Odyssey partners). The fund took long and short positions throughout companies' capital structures and invested selectively based on a macro-thematic approach. Prior to Seven Bridges, Peter spent four years at BNY Mellon's predecessor, Mellon Financial Corporation (within its Mellon HBV Alternative Strategies, LLC subsidiary) most recently as a Managing Director and group head of distressed investing. He directed securities selection, portfolio construction and portfolio hedging. Until its acquisition by Mellon Financial, he spent three years as an analyst and senior analyst at HBV Capital Management. From 2005 through 2007 and upon its emergence from bankruptcy, he sat on the Board of Directors of a North American integrated aluminum producer. Peter has chaired or served on numerous equity, unsecured, secured and bank steering committees. Before joining HBV, he spent several years as a consultant at a firm he co-owned. Peter speaks routinely at conferences and appears on various media outlets.
Peter is an avid boxer, having boxed to raise money for Petra Nemcova's charity All Hands and Hearts, which provides services and builds schools for children impacted by natural disasters. He holds an MBA from Columbia University (Dean's List), a JD from Boston University School of Law (American Jurisprudence Scholar) and a BA from Haverford College (in Economics). He is an inactive Member of the NY State Bar.
ET contributor Pete Cecchini isn't buying the reflation / small-cap rally Narrative, even with a mini Blue Wave.
ET contributor Pete Cecchini remembers. Better yet, it's the perfect foil for figuring out a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Market.
ET Contributor Pete Cecchini looks at the monetary and fiscal policy stimulus coming out of Washington and sees a staggering price to pay in lost real growth and massive institutional corruption.
ET contributor Peter Cecchini makes a strong case that the Fed is playing a dangerous game with its constant use of the "exigent circumstances" exception to Section 14 of the Federal Reserve Act.
Job Titles:
- CEO
- Co - Founder
- Co - Founder and CEO of Second Foundation Partners
Rusty Guinn is co-Founder and CEO of Second Foundation Partners, LLC, and has been a contributing author to Epsilon Theory since 2017.
Before Ben and Rusty established Second Foundation, Rusty served in a variety of investment roles in several organizations. He managed and operated a $10+ billion investment business, led investment strategy for the second largest wealth management franchise in Houston, and sat on the management committee of the 6 th largest public pension fund in the United States.
Most recently, Rusty was Executive Vice President over the retail and institutional asset management businesses at Salient Partners in Houston, Texas. There he oversaw the 5-year restructuring and transition of Salient's $10 billion money management business from legacy fund-of-funds products to a dedicated real assets franchise.
He previously served as Director of Strategic Partnerships and Opportunistic Investments at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, a $12 billion portfolio spanning public and private investments. Rusty also served as a portfolio manager for TRS's externally managed global macro hedge fund and long-only equity portfolios. He led diligence, process development and the allocation of billions of dollars across a wide range of indirect and principal investments.
Rusty's career also includes roles with de Guardiola Advisors, an investment bank serving the asset management industry, and Asset Management Finance, a specialized private equity investor in asset management companies.
He is a graduate of the Wharton School, and lives on a farm in Fairfield, Connecticut with wife Pam and sons Winston and Harry. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Houston Youth Symphony, and with Pam has been a long-time supporter and founding Friend of the Houston Shakespeare Festival. He also serves as a member of the Easton Volunteer Fire Company in Easton, Connecticut. Rusty spends his free time smoking meat, working his apple orchard, enjoying whisky, badly butchering progressive rock drumming and jeopardizing long-term relationships through high-stakes board games.