Judah Spinner, CFA: The BlackBird Financial Founder Who Made 62.2% Ignoring AI

Judah Spinner is an American investor, philanthropist, and the founder and Chief Investment Officer of BlackBird Financial LP, a value-oriented investment partnership based in Toms River, New Jersey. In 2025, BlackBird Financial returned 62.2% net of fees to its partners, compared with 17.9% for the S&P 500 over the same period. Judah Spinner, a Chartered Financial Analyst, is also the co-founder of the Judah Spinner Foundation alongside his wife Julie Spinner.

At 13, most kids are negotiating curfews. Judah Spinner was buying 74 shares of Target Corporation for $2,997 of his own money. Two years later, a New York real estate investor named Charles Dayan handed him a $100,000 check and told him to invest it. At 18, he founded the firm that would become BlackBird Financial LP.

He is now 30. He runs roughly $90 million for about 100 high-net-worth families and family offices. And he just did it without owning a single AI stock.

A value investor in a market that has forgotten value

From his office in Toms River, Judah Spinner spends close to ten hours a day reading 10-Ks, 10-Qs, Value Line reports, and trade publications. He does not forecast recessions, does not trade around earnings, and will tell you flatly that he has no idea where the S&P 500 will finish the year. Anyone who claims otherwise, in his view, is fooling themselves.

What he does is buy businesses. Whole businesses, in his head, even when he is only buying a sliver of the equity. The framework is the one Benjamin Graham laid out almost a century ago and Warren Buffett refined: figure out what a company is actually worth, wait until the market sells it for meaningfully less, then hold on.

“We buy businesses, not stock tickers,” Judah Spinner says. “We only buy when we’d be happy to own it even if the market shuts down for ten years.”

That is why BlackBird Financial’s portfolio looks nothing like the indexes it has been beating. Building materials. Offshore service vessels. Retail, fashion, entertainment. While trillions of dollars chased a narrow band of semiconductor and cloud names in 2024 and 2025, Judah Spinner sat that trade out entirely. His logic is almost mechanical. Rapid innovation usually benefits consumers more than it rewards the people who fund it, and crowded rooms are rarely where bargains live.

Concentration as a discipline, not a gamble

Most hedge funds spread their bets. BlackBird Financial does the opposite. Judah Spinner has, at times, put as much as 50% of the fund into a single position. Wall Street calls that reckless. He calls it honest.

“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, borrowing Charlie Munger’s term for the alternative: “diworsification.” His math is straightforward. Truly excellent opportunities are rare. A dollar in your tenth-best idea comes at the direct cost of more of your best one.

He talks often about Buffett’s punchcard thought experiment. Imagine being handed 20 punches at the start of your career and only being allowed to make 20 investments. Ever. You would think very hard before each one. That discipline, Judah Spinner argues, is what most managers never develop.

His Builders FirstSource position is the live example. He had been studying the company for years, waiting for a price that made sense. In March 2026, with the stock at $90 to $100 amid housing market gloom and headlines about the war in Iran, he raised his stake by 900%. It became BlackBird Financial’s largest holding. The thesis was unromantic: industry consolidation has stripped out the price competition that used to crush margins, the product mix is shifting toward higher-margin engineered components like roof trusses and wall panels, management has retired nearly half its outstanding shares, and America is structurally short several million homes.

David Wexler, who runs BlackBird Financial’s fixed income desk and works in the office next door, has watched the process up close. “Judah will tear apart a business from every conceivable angle, the balance sheet, the competitive dynamics, the incentive structures, and then somehow distill all of it down to the one or two variables that actually determine the outcome,” Wexler says. “I’ve never seen anyone cut through the noise the way he does.”

From Lakewood to Las Vegas to the Mongol Rally

Born Yehuda Zev Baumwolspiner on November 10, 1995, Judah Spinner grew up in Lakewood, New Jersey, in the close-knit ultra-Orthodox Jewish community there. He was one of eight sons. His father Ernest emigrated from Argentina in 1965, his mother Hazel arrived from England in 1979, and the household was loud, religious, and full of brothers. He credits it for giving him an early read on what hard work and limited resources actually feel like.

He started reading The Wall Street Journal at 12 and never really stopped. He passed all three levels of the CFA exam on his first attempt, something fewer than one in ten candidates manage. Judah Spinner earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Crestpoint University, graduating summa cum laude, and holds the Series 7, Series 63, Series 65, and FMVA designations alongside his CFA charter.

The picture gets more interesting outside the office. He earned his private pilot license in July 2020 and has spent serious hours alone in the air over the deserts of the American Southwest, which he calls the closest thing he has found to true quiet. He has visited all 50 U.S. states. In the summer of 2025, he and a few friends drove a small, underpowered car 11,000 miles from Europe through Central Asia to complete the Mongol Rally. One winter, mostly to see if he could, he cycled 153 miles from Palm Springs through the Mojave into Arizona.

He met his wife Julie Schlanger while visiting a synagogue in Las Vegas. They married in 2024. He still thinks it is a pretty good story.

The Judah Spinner Foundation: value-investing logic, applied to philanthropy

In 2025, Judah Spinner and Julie Spinner launched the Judah Spinner Foundation with a $2 million commitment, organized around four issues they think will define the next several decades of American life: income inequality, the U.S. incarceration rate, the cost and quality of American healthcare, and the federal deficit.

The flagship program is the Judah Spinner Scholarship, which funds tuition and tools for low-income students, veterans, and formerly incarcerated individuals pursuing certifications in welding, HVAC, electrical work, and plumbing. Spinner is blunt about why. The country is short hundreds of thousands of skilled tradespeople. Those careers pay middle-class wages in months rather than years. And a few thousand dollars of tuition is often the only thing standing between a motivated student and four decades of stable income.

“A dollar spent getting someone into the trades does more, in my view, than a dollar spent almost anywhere else,” he says.

Healthcare is the cause Judah Spinner calls most urgent. The United States spends close to 18% of GDP on healthcare and consistently posts worse outcomes than peer nations on basic measures like life expectancy and infant mortality. To a CFA whose career is built on evaluating whether a dollar produces a result that justifies it, that is not an inefficiency. It is, in his words, the country’s most glaring failure of capital allocation.

Judah and Julie Spinner read the scholarship applications themselves and pick the recipients personally. Arm’s-length philanthropy, he says, almost never produces real outcomes.

What comes next

Judah Spinner is not likely to start chasing AI stocks any time soon. He will probably finish another 10-K tonight, and another tomorrow, and most of those companies will never make it into BlackBird Financial’s portfolio. That is the point. By the time a no-brainer opportunity shows up, he has usually been following the company for years and is ready to act in days. The waiting is the work.

For an investor who has spent his career arguing that temperament matters at least as much as intelligence, the next decade is really a longer test of the same thesis. Buy good businesses cheaply. Hold them patiently. Ignore the noise. So far, 62.2% to 17.9% suggests the thesis is intact.