Ravi Bhat picked the one corner of the market almost nobody wanted to hear about at the 2026 Sohn Montreal Investment Conference. The portfolio manager for equity arbitrage at Polar Asset Management Partners told the room his best idea was not a company at all. It was a structure, and a discredited one.
“You don’t have to love a company to make money from it,” Bhat said early on. His pick is the special purpose acquisition company, the blank-check vehicle that boomed in 2020 and 2021, drew a wave of bad press and an SEC clampdown, and then went quiet for three years as the banks walked away and issuance collapsed.
Most investors now ignore SPACs due to them being burned by them in the prior cycle. Bhat thinks that is exactly why the structure is interesting again. Polar has been trading these vehicles through every part of the cycle since the firm’s founder bought into the first modern wave more than two decades ago, and Bhat argues the risk and reward today is widely misread. The downside is cushioned by trust cash that comes back with interest. The upside, after the washout, is being given away.
Polar Asset Management Partners is a Toronto multi-strategy hedge fund founded in 1991 that runs roughly $5.5 billion. Bhat manages its equity arbitrage book, a discipline spanning special purpose acquisition companies and closed-end funds, and joined the firm around 2010. He came to investing by an unusual route, holding a doctorate in theoretical physics before turning to markets.
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