Nia Bowers
Photo Courtesy of Nicole Tran
Judah Spinner’s BlackBird Financial returned 62.2% last year by investing in unglamorous stocks the rest of the market overlooks.
From his office in New Jersey, Judah Spinner watches the financial world chase artificial intelligence with the fervor of a gold rush. Trillions of dollars have poured into a narrow band of technology stocks, all on the bet that AI will reshape the global economy. Spinner isn’t buying it.
Instead, the 30-year-old founder of BlackBird Financial has staked his reputation on the opposite bet: unglamorous companies with steady cash flows, conservative balance sheets, and stock prices that appear divorced from their underlying value. Last year, while the S&P 500 gained 17.9%, Spinner’s concentrated portfolio — spanning building materials, offshore vessels, retail, fashion, and entertainment — returned 62.2%.
“We buy businesses, not stock tickers,” Spinner says, describing an approach that hearkens back to the partnership model Warren Buffett ran in the 1950s. “Most investors today are trying to figure out what other people will pay for a stock next quarter. We’re trying to figure out what a business is actually worth—and we only buy when we’d be happy to own it even if the market shuts down for ten years.”
It is a philosophy that has drawn a devoted following among high-net-worth investors frustrated with conventional wealth management. BlackBird manages money for just over 100 clients and family offices, nearly all of whom arrived through referrals rather than marketing. The firm invests exclusively in public equities but holds only a handful of positions at any given time, each subjected to a demanding checklist: an understandable business model, a durable competitive advantage, strong management, and a price offering a substantial margin of safety.
That concentration is deliberate. “Focus is the key to maximizing your potential — in life and in investing,” Spinner says. “And it requires something very difficult: saying no to hundreds of ideas, even ones that are very good.” He explains that putting a dollar into BlackBird’s tenth-best idea, even if it’s attractive, comes at the expense of buying more of the firm’s best idea. “While diversification is the conventional wisdom on Wall Street, we think it makes no sense for the professional investor who actually knows how to evaluate a business,” he says, invoking Charlie Munger’s term for excessive diversification: “diworsification.”
Spinner embraces what he calls the “punchcard approach,” inspired by a Buffett thought experiment. “Warren said that investors would be far better off if they were handed a punchcard with 20 punches when they got out of school and could only make 20 investments over their entire lifetime,” Spinner says. “They would think long and hard before each decision. That discipline keeps you focused on your best ideas.”
Take one of Spinner’s favorite holdings: Builders FirstSource, the country’s largest supplier of building materials and prefabricated components.
Following its 2021 merger with BMC Holdings and subsequent acquisitions, the company has assembled a coast-to-coast platform emphasizing higher- margin products such as trusses and wall panels.
“They’ve consolidated the industry, shifted to higher-margin products, and repurchased nearly half their outstanding shares over the past five years,” Spinner says. “That is exactly the kind of disciplined capital allocation we look for.”
Another substantial holding is Tidewater, which operates offshore service vessels supporting oil and gas operations. The company holds the leading position in an industry that has undergone dramatic consolidation since 2015, when oversupply and fierce competition drove down rates. New vessel construction has nearly halted, while roughly 4% of the global fleet retires annually, creating supply constraints that have steadily pushed day rates higher.
Spinner calculates that if day rates reach $40,000, the level needed to make new builds economical, Tidewater would generate over $1 billion in incremental revenue, equal to more than 40% of its current $2.5 billion market value. Because most costs are fixed, nearly all of the incremental revenue would flow through to the bottom line. “As the fleet continues to tighten, we also expect utilization to improve, providing yet another tailwind,” he says.
Such opportunities don’t come around often. “I wholeheartedly agree with the notion that opportunity comes to the prepared mind,” Spinner says. He spends the vast majority of his time reading Value Line reports, 10-Ks, 10- Qs, and other business publications. “If you’ve studied thousands of businesses, when that one great opportunity finally presents itself, you recognize it instantly and you’re ready to act.” In most cases, by the time he decides to invest, he has already been following the company for years.
The discipline didn’t emerge overnight. While most teenagers were focused on college applications, Spinner was already managing meaningful capital for others. By 13, he had begun investing his own money in individual stocks.
Two years later, a New York real estate developer entrusted him with a six- figure portfolio. Before his 19th birthday, he had raised more than $1 million to launch what would become BlackBird Financial.
Those early years reinforced a lesson Spinner considers crucial: intelligence matters a great deal in investing, but temperament matters just as much. What separates successful investors from the rest isn’t analytical horsepower — it’s the capacity to let facts and reasoning, rather than emotion, dictate your decisions.
He cites Benjamin Graham’s observation that stock-market investors turn a basic advantage, liquidity, into a liability. “The fact that you can trade every day does not mean that you should,” Spinner says. “You wouldn’t buy and sell an apartment building every day, and if you did, you’d have a lousy result. The real estate investor is shielded by the fact that he cannot buy and sell his holdings frequently.”
Stock investors, he argues, would be well served to adopt a similar mindset. “Treat the market like it’s closed most of the time,” Spinner says. “Your advantage comes from thinking like an owner while others are reacting to the latest news cycle.”
BlackBird’s approach reflects this philosophy. The firm operates more like an old-fashioned partnership than a modern hedge fund. It doesn’t attempt to forecast recessions or time interest-rate cycles. It doesn’t trade around quarterly earnings. It doesn’t chase policy headlines from Washington. Ask Spinner where the S&P 500 will finish the year, and he’ll tell you flatly that he has no idea, and that anyone claiming otherwise is fooling themselves.
The focus remains squarely on individual businesses whose intrinsic value, in his assessment, substantially exceeds current market prices.
Afternoon sun filters into Spinner’s New Jersey office, casting light across stacks of annual reports and Value Line pages most investors will never read. Outside, the world churns through another day of market headlines, AI predictions, and quarterly earnings surprises. At his desk, Spinner works through page 47 of a 10-K from a company few have heard of. By evening, he’ll have finished it and started another. On occasion, a no-brainer opportunity will present itself. When it does, he’ll act. Until then, he waits.
By Michael Harrington