Wagner: Grounding downside risk in opaque situations enables aggressive sizing
Herb Wagner · Herb Wagner – Opportunistic Value at Finepoint Capital (EP.460) · Sep 22, 2025 · at 35:43
Herb Wagner shares Finepoint Capital's framework for taking large positions during fast-moving market dislocations.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“What I found is that in these situations that are fast moving and opaque, if you can ground yourself in some kind of downside scenario and get conviction around that, Then you can actually make something really large, and you can be very aggressive.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Herb Wagner
Wagner: Private credit is too competitive to deliver attractive risk-adjusted returns
“When I look at what's going on in that market right now, it strikes me as pretty competitive and not really a great place to find attractive risk adjusted returns.”
Wagner: Slow-moving climate risk creates mispricings against volatile annual reinsurance swings
“Year to year, you don't have big changes in the risk of a large hurricane. Over 10 years, 20 years you do, which is kind of what we've seen, but it's a slow moving increase in risk. That's what's fascinating to us is because you can have these year to year cha…”
Wagner: Finepoint buys Asian derivatives at 80% discount due to pod shorting
“So we actually have recently found a derivative in an Asian market That we're buying for 10 to 20% of what we think it's worth, so 80 to 90% discount, and it's solely the result of the fact that there's a market in Asia that has such a large demand to be short…”
Wagner: Cheap value investing fails because tech disruption accelerates business decline
“One of the reasons that value investors have underperformed in the last 10 years is that
There's a lot of technological disruption that's taking place, and it takes place faster than it used to.
When we underwrite a mediocre business and we project out cash fl…”