Harris Kupperman’s Praetorian Capital seeks out hysteria in every corner of the market, from bitcoin to natural gas.
Occasionally the best seed capital for a successful career in investing is lucky timing. In 1997, as a junior in high school, Harris Kupperman began obsessing over the stock market as the Asian financial crisis and then dot-com mania dominated the headlines. By the time he arrived at Tulane University two years later, tech stocks had soared nearly 200% since Netscape’s IPO in the summer of 1995 and would double again over the next few months. The future hedge fund manager noticed that many of these dot-coms ultimately crashed when VC lockups expired and early investors dumped their shares.
In early 2000, Kupperman, known to his friends and peers as “Kuppy,” took the $6,000 he had earned over the summer cleaning pools on the North Shore of Long Island and began buying put options—effectively shorting the stocks—of dot-bombs like Commerce One and Foundry Networks. When the bubble popped in March 2000 and the Nasdaq fell 80%, he made a small fortune.
“I had a few thousand dollars in my account at the beginning of the year, and at the end of the year I had a few hundred thousand,” boasts Kupperman, who is now 41. “It opened my eyes to the potential that if you think harder than the other guy, you can make a lot of money.”
Two decades later, his Praetorian Capital has $180 million under management and is up 593%, net of a 20%…
