Capital Alliance Podcast

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In this episode of the Capital Alliance Podcast, Ken Majmudar sits down with Mike Nicoletti and Jason Wallace, co-founders of Top Mark Capital, a San Diego-based investment firm running a concentrated generalist fund and a dedicated healthcare & biotech fund.

Mike and Jason took an unusual path to fund management: they were operators first. They shared hard-won lessons from building (and shutting down) startups — including the painful realization that "winners stay alive long enough for good things to happen" — and how selling a clinical trial technology company to LabCorp shaped the way they analyze businesses today.

The conversation goes deep on what value investing actually means in 2026. Mike argues that value principles get arbitraged away over time — Graham's net-nets are gone, Buffett's float and intangibles edge got absorbed — so the real challenge is figuring out what comes next. For them, the answer runs through AI: collapsing switching costs, falling barriers to entry, and why the market may be mispricing great software businesses anyway.

We cover:
- From tech consulting and startups to launching Top Mark in 2012
- Why an operator background makes you a more patient investor
- How value investing principles get arbitraged away — and finding "the next thing"
- Hamilton Helmer's Seven Powers as an evolution of Porter's Five Forces
- Why AI is crushing SaaS switching costs — and why companies still aren't ripping out Salesforce
- A software company is "a sales organization wrapped around a product"
- The AI momentum market: memory stocks, data center bottlenecks, and vertical price action
- Are we living through a second industrial revolution? GDP, jobs, and the UBI debate
- The biotech funding winter, the thaw, and why ~40% of pharma in-licensing now comes from China
- Using AI in the research process — without outsourcing final judgment on the 10-K
- What a peer community means for fund managers outside the New York bubble

Follow Mike Nicoletti & Jason Wallace:
Top Mark Capital: https://topmarkcapital.com/
Telltales Podcast & Substack: https://telltales.substack.com
Mike on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeljnicoletti/
Jason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wallace21

Follow Capital Alliance

Capital Alliance on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mycapital-alliance/
Capital Alliance Website: https://mycapitalalliance.com/

Follow Ken Majmudar:
Substack: https://compoundideas.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenmajmudar/

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In this episode of the Capital Alliance Podcast, Ken Majmudar sits down with Evan Tindell, founder of Bireme Capital, a long/short equity fund.

Evan shares how he built Bireme Capital from a $20 million seed from Ballantyne to over $155 million AUM a rare trajectory in the RIA space.

He breaks down his investment philosophy, his approach to short selling, why he believes undervalued stocks are caused by cognitive biases, and how he thinks about asymmetric opportunities on both sides of the book.

We also go deep on the current market environment -- AI-driven valuations, quantum computing stocks, and where Evan sees the most compelling short opportunities hiding in plain sight.

And at the end of the conversation, Evan shares what Capital Alliance has meant to him as a fund manager -- and why investing in the right room of people turned out to be one of his best decisions.

We cover:

- How Evan launched Barium Capital with a $20M seed and scaled to $155M+

- His framework for identifying undervalued stocks through cognitive bias theory

- Why short selling requires a particular mindset -- and who it's right for
Apple, Intel, AI washing, and where the real short opportunities are today
The difference between "idea generation" and conviction

- How macro environments and narrative cycles create mispricings
What it actually means to be part of a peer community as a fund manager

Follow Evan Tindell : https://x.com/evantindell

Bireme Capital: https://www.biremecapital.com/


Follow Capital Alliance:

Capital Alliance on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mycapital-alliance/

Capital Alliance on X: https://x.com/CapitalAll79917

Follow Ken Majmudar:

Substack: https://compoundideas.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenmajmudar/

Join the Capital Alliance Waiting List Here: https://linkly.link/2ebz3

In this episode of the Capital Alliance Podcast, we sit down with Asif Suria, Founder and CEO of Inside Arbitrage, a leading research platform focused on event-driven investing strategies.

Asif brings a rare combination of deep technical expertise and decades of market experience. Starting his career in technology during the dot-com era, he transitioned into investing through some of the most volatile market cycles—from the dot-com crash to the Global Financial Crisis—before building Inside Arbitrage into a trusted platform used by professional investors worldwide.

We dive deep into event-driven investing, including merger arbitrage, spinoffs, insider trading signals, and activist strategies. Asif breaks down how he built proprietary tools to track hundreds of live deals, process SEC filings in real time, and generate high-quality investment ideas through data and pattern recognition.

He also shares how reading You Can Be a Stock Market Genius by Joel Greenblatt shaped his approach, why “seasons” exist within investing strategies, and how overlapping signals—like insider buying + spinoffs + M&A—can create asymmetric opportunities.

We cover:

- How Asif transitioned from tech to investing during the dot-com crash
Building Inside Arbitrage and turning it into a subscription business
- The fundamentals of merger arbitrage and how to track deal spreads
- Why insider buying can be powerful—but also misleading
- The concept of “idea generation” vs. conviction investing
- How macro environments impact strategy performance
- Real-world case studies combining multiple event-driven strategies
- Why timing and urgency matter in event-driven investing

This episode is a masterclass on finding non-obvious edges in public markets.

Follow Asif Suria:
Inside Arbitrage: https://www.insidearbitrage.com
X : https://x.com/AsifSuria
Asif's Book The Event Driven Edge in Investing : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201953634-the-event-driven-edge-in-investing

Follow Capital Alliance:
Capital Alliance on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mycapital-alliance/
Capital Alliance on X : https://x.com/CapitalAll79917

Follow Ken Majmudar :
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenmajmudar/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kenmajmudar/
Substack: https://compoundideas.substack.com/

Join the Capital Alliance Waiting List Here: https://linkly.link/2ebz3

In this episode of the Capital Alliance Podcast, we sit down with Matthew Peterson, Managing Partner of Peterson Capital Management and a 25-year veteran of the investing world.

Matt is one of the most respected concentrated value investors of his generation. He spent nearly a decade at Goldman Sachs in credit risk consulting across New York and London before walking away to launch his own fund, with just $100,000 of his own capital and $25,000 from a friend.
Matt shares how he went from teaching English in China and modeling credit risk for Goldman to building Peterson Capital Management into a multi-fund platform with $40M+ AUM, a 13.7% long-term annualized return, and a 60%+ net return year in 2024.

He opens up about the "Valley of Death" every emerging fund manager has to survive, the year a public company in his concentrated portfolio turned out to be fraudulent, and the years of going without a paycheck while clawing back to high watermarks.

We cover the "Who, Not How" mindset shift that transformed his business, his frugal-vs-cheap framework for high-ROI spending, how he uses AI agents and 50,000-run Monte Carlo simulations to build conviction on macro and energy trades, why he believes oil and gas will stay higher for longer, and how a casual backyard barbecue in Omaha grew into the Berkshire Soirée, one of his most powerful marketing assets.

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In this episode of the Capital Alliance Podcast, we sit down with Saurabh Mukherjea, the Founder and CIO of Marcellus Investment Managers.

Saurabh is one of India’s most influential fund managers, a prolific author of bestsellers like Coffee Can Investing, and a pioneer in democratizing investing for the Indian public.

Saurabh shares how he went from being an immigrant kid in suburban London to building the fastest $1 Billion AUM firm in India.

Follow Saurabh Mukherjea:

Marcellus Investment Managers: https://marcellus.in
Saurabh on Twitter/X: https://x.com/saborwm

Saurabh’s book Coffee Can Investing : https://www.amazon.in/Coffee-Can-Inve...

Capital Alliance on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/myca...

Follow Ken Majmudar :

Linkedin :   / kenmajmudar 
Instagram :   / kenmajmudar 

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In this episode of Capital Alliance, we sit down with Pieter Slegers, the founder of Compounding Quality, one of the world’s fastest-growing stock research newsletters with 480,000+ email subscribers and 500,000+ social media followers.

Pieter shares how he went from stocking shelves at 13 and losing 60% on his first investment to building one of the largest investing newsletters in the world all while developing a disciplined quality investing framework that professional and retail investors alike have come to rely on.

We cover his 15-point stock analysis framework, why he believes S&P 500 returns could drop to 5–6% over the next decade, how he built his audience from zero, the economics behind a newsletter business, and his honest take on what AI means for stock research.

Follow Pieter Slegers: :

Compounding Quality Newsletter: https://www.compoundingquality.net
Pieter on Twitter/X: https://x.com/QCompounding
Pieter’s book:   / the-art-of-quality-investing 

Follow Capital Alliance:

Capital Alliance on LinkedIn:   / mycapital-alliance  

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In this episode of the Capital Alliance Podcast, we sit down with Gautam Baid to discuss the real business of building and running an investment fund.

We covered how he launched a US-based fund investing in the indian market from scratch. How he  structured operations, raised capital, and scaled AUM with a long-term focus on durability.

This conversation is designed for fund managers and operators interested in the mechanics of fund management beyond performance, including capital raising, firm structure, and investor relations.

If you’re a fund manager operating at scale and interested in peer-level conversations around capital, structure, and long-term durability discover The Capital Alliance Mastermind by clicking here : https://mycapitalalliance.com/

Follow Gautam Baid on X : https://x.com/gautam__baid
Check Gautam's Book "The Joys of Coumpounding" : https://www.thejoysofcompounding.com/

Follow Capital Alliance on Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/company/myca...