Ben Graham Centre’s 2026 Value Investing Conference: Dan Rasmussen on The Private Equity Bubble, Japan And Where Value Investing Still Works

At the Ben Graham Centre’s 2026 Value Investing Conference, Dan Rasmussen of Verdad Advisers opened his presentation with a parable about Greek shipping magnates; the parable is really about the single most dangerous habit in professional investing. His talk, “The Humble Investor,” was a pitch for what happens if you take the unpredictability of the future seriously, accept that you cannot forecast anything with confidence beyond the next quarter, and then ask what kind of investing actually holds up under that premise. His answer turned out to be a very specific kind of value investing, aimed at a very specific set of markets, most of which have been left for dead by the sophisticated capital allocators who spent the last decade convincing themselves they had figured out how to beat public equities.

The parable first. Rasmussen credited the story to his colleague Sam Hanson. Shipping rates spike. Greek ship owners look at their analysts and ask what the IRR would be on commissioning a new ship at the Korean shipyards, assuming current rates hold. The math works. 40 to 50 percent. So they place the orders. Two or three years later the ships start arriving, because that is how long the Korean yards take to build them, and the owners ask their captains how the new fleet is performing against targets. The captains tell them the fleet is underperforming badly, because shipping rates have cratered. The reason they have cratered is that every other ship owner in the world did the exact same math on the exact same day, placed the exact same orders at the exact same yards, and got their ships delivered at the exact same time.

Also see: Dan Rasmussen At Grant’s Conference: Private Equity Has A Leverage Problem

The mistake, Rasmussen said, was not bad math. The math was correct. The mistake was “competition neglect.” The ship owners failed to price in that they were playing a meta-game, and that the behaviour of every other intelligent actor in the market was going to shape the outcome of their decision as much as any analysis they ran on their own spreadsheet. That, in his view, is what almost every investor does almost all of the time.

Where Rasmussen actually operates, and why humility is the framework

Verdad runs a $1 billion quant-driven investment firm out of Boston with a particular focus on small, leveraged value stocks internationally, and Rasmussen has spent most of his career trying to formalize an approach to investing that starts from the premise that the future is essentially unknowable. The industries he hunts in are set by that premise rather than by any sector preference. If your starting assumption is that past earnings growth does not predict future earnings growth, and that the discount rates you are going to put against those earnings are themselves unpredictable, then the discounted cash flow model collapses. What you are left with is price and what it implies about consensus beliefs.

Rasmussen’s intellectual framework for this came from an unfamiliar source. He cited Mordecai Kurz, an economist at Stanford who Rasmussen joked is so obscure nobody ever cites him except Verdad. Kurz has a theory he calls rational beliefs, which sits in opposition to the rational expectations framework most of finance runs on.