E23: What is SPAC Arbitrage? with Jamie Wise from Periscope Capital

SPAC Arbitrage. While it may sound complicated, we are lucky to have Jamie Wise, President & CEO of Periscope Capital, as our guest on The Unlimited Podcast to explain. In fact, we'll go all the way back to basics to understand what "arbitrage" is and why investors have been trying to find arbitrage opportunities forever.

Prior to launching Periscope Capital in 2009, Jamie was a managing director at Moore Capital Advisors Canada, a multi-strategy Canadian-focused hedge fund. Prior to Moore Capital, Jamie was a Managing Director and Portfolio Manager at BMO Capital Markets where he led an internal proprietary trading group (we'll explain what that means as well). At BMO, Jamie was appointed the youngest Managing Director in the firm’s history. He has an undergraduate business degree (hons.), graduating first in his class from the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in 1998 and holds a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.

Jamie is also the founder of Buzz Indexes, creators of the BUZZ index (NYSE:BUZZ), also known as the VanEck Social Sentiment ETF. BUZZ uses AI to measure investor sentiment across millions of social media posts each month, ranking the top 75 stocks in the BUZZ NextGen AI US Sentiment Leaders Index™.

Brian and Jamie discuss what it takes to be successful as a young professional, SPACs 101, the beauty of asymmetric returns, how AI is being used in markets today, and much more.

If you like what you hear, please don’t hesitate to rate us kindly. And if there are particular topics you’d like covered, please let us know.

Timestamps

0:00 Disclaimer & Intro

5:02 Jamie's journey to founding Periscope

11:43 Entering the finance industry as a young professional

15:01 What does "arbitrage" mean?

19:46 Developing investment strategies using AI

29:05 SPACs 101

39:02 SPACs in today's market

44:09 What's the arbitrage opportunity in the SPAC structure?

51:24 How does Periscope decide which SPACs go into the fund?

57:01 Where does this strategy fit in an investor's portfolio?

59:11 Outro & Disclaimer