Stark Investments

Brian Stark’s interest in hedging, arbitrage and special situation investing began during high school while working for his father, Henry, a sole accounting practitioner.  Henry stimulated Brian’s interest in the financial markets when he gave Brian a pioneering book about convertible arbitrage investing, Beat The Market (Edward O. Thorpe, 1967).  Brian began investing in convertible arbitrage on a small scale in partnership with his father and continued investing throughout his college years at Brown University, where he formed and tested his investment theses on arbitrage.  During his years at Harvard Law School, Brian wrote an initial draft of his book, Special Situation Investing, Hedging, Arbitrage and Liquidation (Dow Jones, 1983).  It was while attending law school that Brian became friends with Mike Roth, the future co-founder of Stark Investments.  (Read more about the Early Years.)

Brian and Mike worked together at Stark Capital Management, LLC in New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut, prior to forming Stark Investments in 1992.  In 1993, the team relocated to Wisconsin, where both co-founders had grown up, and began hiring key talent to build out operational and investment infrastructure.  By the late 1990s, the Firm had expanded beyond convertibles, applying its investment acumen across a much broader range of instruments, strategies and geographic markets.

In the early 2000s, Stark diversified beyond public debt and equity markets into other asset classes.  Today, Stark has evolved into a true multi-asset manager, investing in commodities, real estate, loans, private equity, and intellectual property, in addition to the traditional public equity and debt markets.  As we have done throughout our history, Stark continues to search for what we believe are the best risk-controlled investment opportunities in inefficient markets, where investment information and opportunities have been overlooked, misinterpreted or mispriced by other managers.