Using Shorts To Fund Longs: Vintra’s Fruchter On How His Strategy Has Evolved [In-Depth Interview]

The 2025 Sohn London Conference has wrapped up, but Hedge Fund Alpha is bringing you interviews with some of the event’s managers. In an interview with Hedge Fund Alpha, Avi Fruchter of Vintra Capital shared his background, strategy and more.

Background on Avi Fruchter

He said he fell into accounting by chance.

“Actually, I was one of those kids whose parents always told him that he should be a lawyer because I always enjoyed debating and deconstructing arguments,” Fruchter said. “And so I thought I was going to be a lawyer, and then I somehow managed to botch up my law school application.”

He was offered a place for the following year but didn’t want to waste a year. Thus, he signed up for an accounting course, which he liked, and ended up completing a degree in accounting. However, he didn’t want to go into an apprenticeship and become an auditor.

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Pursuing finance

Fruchter then went to London to do a master’s degree in finance because he had studied accounting and knew he liked analyzing businesses through their accounts. In fact, that’s how he discovered that he enjoyed analyzing businesses.

While Fruchter was working on his master’s degree, he was offered an internship at Atticus Capital.

“They told me, it's just two months,” he said. “Make sure you have a job after that, because there's no way we're hiring someone without experience. It was one of the big funds at a time where, at the peak it was about $20 billion in assets. In 2008 it was probably one of the biggest funds in the world at the time and an activist as well.”

Two months turned into six months, which essentially turned into a permanent position at Atticus Capital. Fruchter worked as a research analyst there, able to look at anything, anywhere, except it had to be something not covered by the firm’s other analysts.

“So I ended up looking at a lot of niche businesses in different places in the world,” Fruchter explained. “And within a few years, I got a pretty broad understanding of many sectors and the things that are interesting and not.”

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