Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Founder & CEO, Positive Sum · 4 appearances on the record.
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the founder and CEO of Positive Sum and host of the podcast Invest Like the Best, produced by Colossus. He previously served as CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management and authored the book Millennial Money: How Young Investors Can Build a Fortune.
45statements → 16claims → 14claims resolved → 79%fully supported → 3.96/5average certainty → 2.13/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 24said about them ↓
11 supported 1 partly supported 2 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 16 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 15 assertions · 4 opinions · 17 insights · 8 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 16 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 14 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Patrick argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
O'Shaughnessy: Momentum forecasts fundamental growth better than valuation multiples
“What fascinates me about this is momentum does a better job of forecasting future fundamental growth than price does. So the highest momentum decile has better future fundamental growth than the most expensive, let's say PE decile or free cashflow yield decile…”
Their most notable contradicted claim
O'Shaughnessy: OSAM has almost zero portfolio overlap with AQR and LSV
“Our overlaps with other quants are shockingly low. Like we have this little cool program that we can show people this on the fly and they won't believe us. Like they'll ask about AQR and LSV and these other great managers, you know, really, really, really stro…”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Patrick O'Shaughnessy on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Patrick O'Shaughnessy said on Capital Allocators that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
O'Shaughnessy: High quality metrics do not generate excess returns; low quality destroys them
“In the quantitative sense, high ROEs or gross profitability or whatever your measure of quality is really isn't indicative of strong future excess returns. What's really useful about quality is that very bad quality, so really over levered balance sheets, comp…”
O'Shaughnessy: Publicly sharing quant findings produces stronger signals via feedback
“In quant research, this is really interesting, which is that you actually get a stronger signal. We found when you share your general findings, not necessarily the code or the particulars, but the general findings with a broad audience, then all of a sudden yo…”
O'Shaughnessy: Momentum forecasts fundamental growth better than valuation multiples
“What fascinates me about this is momentum does a better job of forecasting future fundamental growth than price does. So the highest momentum decile has better future fundamental growth than the most expensive, let's say PE decile or free cashflow yield decile…”
O'Shaughnessy: Momentum Alpha Exhausts Within One Year and Reverts to Negative Returns
“So you earn all of your momentum, all of your alpha, rather, in the first one year holding period, and then you actually need to get the hell out, because it reverts. And typically, depending on where you're looking at the data, within two years or so, it's ac…”
O'Shaughnessy: Almost No Funds Have Pure Machine Learning Models in Live Production
“To be clear, I don't think almost anybody has a lot of that in production today, but those tools are becoming more and more useful.”
O'Shaughnessy: OSAM has almost zero portfolio overlap with AQR and LSV
“Our overlaps with other quants are shockingly low. Like we have this little cool program that we can show people this on the fly and they won't believe us. Like they'll ask about AQR and LSV and these other great managers, you know, really, really, really stro…”
O'Shaughnessy: Machine learning algorithms always fail at predicting stock returns directly
“You can feed all the best data in the world to whatever ML algorithm you choose. Let's say it's like a decision tree or something. And if you're trying to predict returns, it always falls apart. It never works.”
O'Shaughnessy: Reducing tracking error is much easier than finding new alpha
“It's actually far easier to shape down tracking error than it is to find new alpha. I could run a much lower tracking error process with not that much additional research. I can't just go find new alpha.”
O'Shaughnessy: Quants will inevitably replicate any repeatable investment strategy
“If there is a repeatable strategy where we can build a big enough sample size and do the right kind of research, a quant is going to figure it out. And the question is when, not if.”
O'Shaughnessy: Factor alpha comes from execution discipline, not awareness
“That says that the source of the excess return is not knowing about the thing. It's doing the thing.”
O'Shaughnessy: No asset manager is applying tech platform principles holistically
“Asking whether or not we can apply those principles to a very simple old school asset management business. And the answer, at least in my view, unequivocally so far as yes, and nobody else is doing it. Or at least they're not doing it holistically as part of h…”
O'Shaughnessy: A High-Quality Twitter Following Functions Like Having an AGI
“That having a big, smart, diverse group of people that follow you on Twitter is literally like having an AGI. I believe that that is true. It's the best search engine in the world. So if you're looking for something, ask a big group of people, you're going to …”
O'Shaughnessy: S&P 500 still beats hedge funds on a Sharpe ratio basis
“I think on Sharpe ratio, it still would have been the S&P.”
O'Shaughnessy: Factor Strategies Like Momentum Should Never Be One-Off Trades
“So unless you really buy into these concepts at a deep level and are willing to stick with them through cycles, I think you probably shouldn't apply them at all. You shouldn't apply momentum into a one off trade. You should apply it in the right way systematic…”
O'Shaughnessy: Equity returns only stem from growth, multiple expansion, or capital returns
“When you're holding for that long, and you think about equities at an elemental level, I think there's just three ways to earn return. The businesses you own grow. In sales, earnings, EBITDA, whatever it is, free cash, the multiples of those fundamentals expan…”
O'Shaughnessy: Companies buying back 5%+ shares annually historically outperform peers
“Super normally high buyback yields, and a simple definition of this might be a company which is buying back five percent of its shares or more in a one-year period of time, which is a lot. That's a big deployment of capital. That kind of company historically h…”
O'Shaughnessy: Top Decile Momentum Stocks Show Supernormal Operational Growth in Year One
“All we know is that of the highest momentum decile stocks, just in very, very simple terms, those stocks in the next year have super normally high operational growth.”
O'Shaughnessy: Value Stocks Continue Generating Marginal Alpha for Up to 10 Years
“So if you buy in value today, you, on average, earn a little bit of alpha for a really long time. Most of it's early on, but you continue to earn marginal monthly alpha for up to 10 years.”
O'Shaughnessy: R&D spending factor added zero incremental alpha to master model
“So we did a lot of work around like R and D type spending. And when you plug it in, it Is both value and momentum in some interesting different ways and sectors. But when you plug it in into the master model as a factor, it was completely gone. It literally di…”
O'Shaughnessy: Negative stock returns are concentrated in the worst factor decile
“Most of the really interesting return, in this case, negative, bad return that you want to avoid, is concentrated in the tails, in the worst decile.”
O'Shaughnessy: Qualitative analysis and portfolio concentration protect discretionary managers
“If you can handicap future scenarios based on all that you know about a business or an industry or a trend or whatever it might be, that's going to be hard for quants to replicate. And if you can concentrate In portfolio construction, that's also going to be v…”
O'Shaughnessy: OSAM Strictly Prohibits Researchers From Discarding Failed Studies
“And in our case as a business building, we've got a pretty strict rule around OSAM when it comes to building. You can't just do a research study and if it doesn't work, just like forget about it. You need to bring it into our ecosystem in a way that can be use…”
The other half of the tape: Patrick O'Shaughnessy's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 22 times in 17 episodes on Capital Allocators. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 12Morgan Housel 2Josh Brown 2Tom Lydon 1Khe Hy 1Jenny Heller 1Gavin Baker 1David Rosenthal 1
Statements about Patrick O'Shaughnessy, by other people (2)
Housel: Outlier Founders Like Musk and Bezos Are Tortured, Not Ambitious
“Patrick said the phrase that he would use to describe their personality is not driven by It's not ambitious. It's tortured. They wake up every morning tortured that they are not more successful, bigger, richer than they are. And I think that's true for virtual…”
Baker: A high-IQ social following sharpens investment ideas and drives venture deal flow
“Our friend Patrick O'Shaughnessy has said having a big
High IQ following is actually a superpower, and it really is. So I think for sharpening your ideas, it's incredible. Then there's a whole nother dynamic. It really matters for deal flow.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2024 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 5 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Jennifer Heller – Beginner's Mind with Professional Wisdom at Brandywine (Capital Allocators, EP.211)
- Crypto for Institutions 4: Ari Paul – Exploiting Inefficiencies in Crypto Trading (Capital Allocators, EP.183)
- Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182)
- Crypto for Institutions 2 – Michael Sonnenshein – A Path to Entry (Capital Allocators, EP.181)
- Crypto for Institutions 1: Eric Peters – The Macro Case for Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.180)
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2018 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
Appearances (4)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Ted with Patrick O'Shaughnessy – Lessons from the World's Elite Money Managers (Capital Al | Mar 22, 2021 | 9m |
| Patrick O'Shaughnessy – O'Shaughnessy Asset Management (First Meeting, EP.01) | Jun 10, 2019 | 59m |
| Deep Dive into Hedge Funds (Capital Allocators, EP.34) | Dec 18, 2017 | 23m |
| The Bet with Buffett (Capital Allocators, EP.05) | May 2, 2017 | 21m |