Ben Graham Centre’s 2026 Value Investing Conference: Palisade’s Veru On Why The Small-cap Super Cycle Is Starting With Help From AI

At the Ben Graham Centre’s 2026 Value Investing Conference, Dennison “Dan” Veru of Palisade Capital Management opened his pitch with dry self-deprecation that only makes sense if you’ve spent the last decade running a disciplined strategy in the worst possible environment for it. He said there was probably no worse place to be over the last several years than managing small-cap value. His whole toolkit, he said, has been disciplined bottom-up fundamental analysis, and for most of his career that has worked. Since the end of the global financial crisis, in the part of the market where valuation still mattered, it largely hadn’t.

His talk, “The Small Cap Super Cycle Begins,” was based on his belief that the long winter for US small caps is finally ending. The shift has in-fact already started. It just isn’t priced in yet. And for investors willing to position against a market that is still overwhelmingly concentrated at the top, he thinks the risk-reward on the other side of that trade is the most favorable it has been in his entire career.

Where Veru actually operates

Palisade runs bottom-up US small and mid-cap strategies out of Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Veru has been there for a long time. Specifically, he is Senior Partner and Chief Investment Officer Dennison “Dan” T. Veru worked with Palisade’s founders from 1986 to 1992 and joined Palisade in 2000, according to the $4b AUM firm’s website.

The industries Veru hunts in are set by the composition of the Russell indices rather than by sector preference. Financials and industrials together make up roughly 36% of the Russell 2000, which is a very different sector mix from the top-heavy technology concentration in the S&P 500. His portfolio consists of companies that have built genuine moats in narrow niches, that generate real free cash flow, and that have cut their cost structures hard over the last several years because they had to. He noted in passing that his firm historically loses roughly 10% of its portfolio every year to M&A, because the kinds of companies he owns end up in make-or-buy decisions for larger acquirers.