Investing in Financial Services in the AI Era

May 14, 2026

Friends,

We are excited to share this interview with Ted Bealin, founder and CIO of Aptera Capital.  Aptera is a new long/short hedge fund focused primarily on financial and consumer investments.  Previously, Ted worked at Rock Ventures, the family office of Dan Gilbert, founder of Rocket Mortgage.

This interview covers a range of topics, including Ted’s views on private credit; the outlook for depressed building and residential real estate markets; his favorite broker and exchange ideas; and thoughts on the insurance cycle.  He also discusses innovation in consumer fintech and how AI is impacting the industries he focuses on.

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I am also excited to announce Raging Capital Ventures’ 5th annual Ideas & Networking Conference on October 1, 2026 at the Standard Hotel – High Line in New York City.  We have confirmed four outstanding speakers, including:

  • David Orr, founder and CIO of Militia Capital, a hedge fund with ~50% annualized returns since inception in 2021, as well as the Militia Long/Short Equity ETF (NASDAQ: ORR)
  • Meb Faber, host of the acclaimed The Meb Faber Show podcast and co-founder and CIO of Cambria Investment Management, who has over $3 billion in ETF assets under management and is a leader in tax-efficient 351 ETF exchanges
  • Robert Robotti, a legendary and well-known value investor who runs Robotti & Co.
  • Michael Gibson, co-founder of the 1517 venture fund and author of Paper Belt on Fire who helped to start the Thiel Fellowship

The event will start with lunch at 12:30 PM and conclude with cocktails on the High Line River Terrace starting at 3:30 PM.  Here are some photos from last year’s conference: https://ragingcapitalventures.com/2025-ideas-networking-conference-highlights/

Click here for more information on the Speakers and Agenda and to register.

Space is limited and we expect a sell-out — I hope you can attend!

Enjoy!

Best Regards,

William C.  Martin

Topics in this Issue of An Entrepreneur’s Perspective:

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Interview with Ted Bealin, Aptera Capital – How will AI Impact the Finance Industry?

Welcome!  Tell us a little bit how you got into investing, including some of your early work experiences.

Thank you for doing this, Bill. I’ve admired you and Raging Capital for a long time. I always appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.

I got into investing because it combines two different aspects of my personality. I went to a liberal arts college, where I double-majored in philosophy and economics. I also played football there at the Division III level. I mention this because I think the liberal arts student in me loves the intellectual challenge of investing. I get to constantly learn new things. At the same time, there’s a scoreboard, which really appeals to my competitive side.

After college, I worked as an investment banking analyst in San Francisco. From there, I joined a private equity group in Dan Gilbert’s family of companies in Detroit, my hometown. After a couple of years there, I wanted to get a more formal investment education and spend time in the New York investment community. I went to Columbia Business School and worked at a long-short equity fund in New York for several years.

After that, you ended up back at Rock Ventures, the family office for Dan Gilbert of Rocket Mortgage (NYSE: RKT). What was the approach at Rock and what types of investments did you look at? 

My role at Rock had three components: I worked on direct investments, very similar to what I’m doing now. I also helped with the overall asset allocation of the family office including things like fixed income and external fund managers. And then third, I had an advisory role with the operating business, Rocket Companies, where I advised on things like the IPO in 2020 and the acquisition of Redfin, which closed last year, shortly after I left Rock.

How often did you get to spend time with Mr. Gilbert?  What did you learn from him?

Dan was very hands-on with investment decisions and portfolio companies, especially in the early days. Having exposure to someone like Dan early in my career had a big impact on me. Dan’s approach to business can be unconventional at times – he doesn’t like spreadsheets, for example, and prefers to walk through the math step-by-step on a whiteboard. But it’s a very common sense approach and Dan is an excellent teacher. I hadn’t absorbed any other, more conventional ways of doing business at that point. And Dan’s style was clearly working! It was easy to buy in and learn from.

Two things really stand out to me about Dan and Rocket: One, Dan has an incredible ability to see a very long-term vision and, at the same time, focus intensely on the details that really matter. As an example, Dan can picture the city of Detroit 10 or 15 years in the future and see these big opportunities for growth and development. At the same time, he’s known to notice these really small details at his buildings – things like outlet covers and paper towel dispensers. It’s really unusual to see both the big picture and the small details like that.

And it’s embedded in the culture. Rocket is constantly making big, long-term bets. There’s also a real culture of ownership over the details and pride in doing everything well, even the seemingly small things. Because of that, I have a view as an investor that competitive advantages are often thousands of “inches” rather than one big thing.

Communication is the other big thing that stands out to me. Dan realized in the very early days that communication was critical to maintaining a strong culture as the company grew. He couldn’t personally speak with every team member all the time, especially as the numbers got bigger. So, Rocket developed a culture of really well-done, highly-produced, but plain-spoken communication.

The quality of the messaging and branding, both internally and externally, played a huge part in the consistency and success of the organization as it added thousands of new people. I learned a lot from that and try to bring a similar culture of transparency and clear communication to my own firm, Aptera Capital.

Something really unique about Rocket is that it was mostly the same small group of people that led the company from the late ‘90s, through the financial crisis, massive growth afterward, and ultimately an IPO in 2020. It’s rare that the same people can personally scale through that much growth. I learned an enormous amount from that group of leaders. People like Bob Walters, Todd Lunsford, and many others who helped build the business over decades, have been extremely generous in sharing their time and hard-earned wisdom with me. It’s benefitted my career tremendously.

In 2025, you launched your fund, Aptera Capital.  Tell us about Aptera’s focus and approach.

Aptera invests in public equities with a fundamental, concentrated approach. We focus on small- and mid-cap companies. We invest primarily within the financial services, housing-related, and direct-to-consumer categories. These are the sectors I know best from my experience with Rocket.

These are really large markets, nearly a third of U.S. GDP. So, if a smaller company can win in one of these sectors, it has the potential to become really big. I also think we can find some unique investments that should be diversifying for our limited partners, many of whom are overweight technology in their portfolios.

In terms of investment style, we look for two types of investments: Core Investments and Catalyst Investments. Core holdings are companies with a competitive advantage, where we think earnings can grow for a long time. With Catalyst Investments, we’re looking for situations where something will change quickly, within the next year. This includes corporate actions, like mergers or spin-offs, as well as fundamental changes like new product launches or turnarounds. Changes in industry cycles also play a big role in our Catalyst Investments.

The goal of the portfolio is to benefit from strong underlying earnings growth by the Core Investments, while reducing market exposure and portfolio duration through Catalyst Investments. Overall, Aptera is trying to achieve strong absolute returns, with lower market dependence and less downside volatility.

Will you short stocks?

Yes, we do short individual stocks. That was a big part of my earlier experience as an equity analyst. Shorting is a smaller portion of our portfolio than most long-short equity funds, typically ranging between 20% and 40% gross exposure. Short positions are kept small to manage risk. And Aptera only shorts with a catalyst approach, meaning we have to be able to identify a near-term negative event. This limits the universe somewhat, but further enforces risk management discipline. I do not believe in “short and hold” the way an investor would “buy and hold.” There’s too much working against you in a short – we need to have a catalyst.

From a portfolio management perspective, Aptera is trying to reduce market exposure through short positions, but also through our catalyst longs, which should have less dependence on the market and more event-specific risk. As a result, we maintain lower gross exposure than a typical long-short model, while still aiming for strong absolute returns and ideally reducing the squeeze risk of maintaining a larger short book.

How will AI impact the industries you like to focus on?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately. What’s most relevant for Aptera is trying to find companies that benefit from secular trends like AI, while maintaining some type of competitive advantage that we can get our arms around. In particular, we look for competitive winners that are “undiscovered” or not obvious to other investors. One of the ways we do that is focusing on industries that are adjacent to the tech sector itself.

If you think about the internet era, some of the biggest beneficiaries were companies like Rocket Mortgage, which I witnessed firsthand, or Progressive Insurance. These guys had a massive tailwind from internet marketing and distribution, while competing with traditional financial institutions rather than Amazon or Google. Competition in the investment community is also less extreme, so valuation tends to be more reasonable. A lot of what we’re doing at Aptera is looking for the Rocket or Progressive of the next 25 years.

At this point, the impact of AI is uncertain. I have a few hypotheses I’m working with right now:

First, I think AI is a huge tailwind to startups, but it might be a net negative for a lot of large companies. AI coding tools are most useful right now for rapid prototyping, building MVPs, etc. This is allowing startups to grow much faster than they could historically and scale to very large revenue levels with only a small team.

So, established companies may have to deal with a flood of new competitors. I also think a lot of large corporates are just not well set up to take full advantage of these tools. Incumbents don’t have the same incentive to grow. Errors and outages from vibe coding can be a big liability for larger organizations with complex IT estates.

That leads into my second idea, which is that AI will force changes to organizational structures. This is a common feature of technology revolutions in the past like industrial mass production or the PC. AI is likely to accelerate the trend of the last decade toward small, agile teams working really fast instead of a pyramid structure with a big management layer in the middle. You’re beginning to see this with moves like the recent restructuring at Block, where Jack Dorsey is trying to re-think the whole nature of the organization, not just cutting costs.

Finally, I think some business models are better suited than others to adopt AI. Company founders or technical CEOs seem to be more paranoid about moving quickly. Companies that are already low-cost providers or have flat, decentralized org structures are better positioned. Lastly, I think variable revenue models might become an advantage, as economics are tied to a successful outcome rather than users or seats.

Private credit has been a controversial topic as of late.  Do you have any views and favorite long/short ideas in this area?  You have owned Apollo in the past, what do you think of it today?

Speaking of AI, there was a chain reaction early this year as software valuations declined, leading to concerns about exposure to the sector within private credit. Concerns around software buyouts that were done at peak valuations certainly seem valid – look at the recent news of lenders taking the keys at Medallia. With that being said, the equity market reaction seems very scatter shot to me.

One of the biggest stock price impacts has been the alternative asset managers themselves. These are very large, diversified, fee-generating, and mostly asset-light business models. It seems odd to me for these stocks to be down 20-30% on credit risk fears, when regional banks are up year-to-date. There is a lot of leveraged on-balance sheet credit risk in many of these regional banks.

Similarly, public BDCs are not down that much. Some of these BDCs have 20%+ exposure to software buyouts directly on balance sheet, with leverage at the BDC level. The stock price moves seem disconnected to me and probably reflect differences in investor positioning and valuation as much as anything.

Apollo is a unique case. I consider Marc Rowan to be one of the best CEOs in corporate America. Under Marc’s leadership, Apollo has transformed from an asset manager into a vertically integrated financial institution by combining with its insurance affiliate, Athene. Before becoming CEO, Marc helped launch and grow Athene into the industry leader in fixed annuities. Apollo and Athene are deeply integrated with reinforcing competitive advantages.

Periodically, Apollo’s structure creates concern or confusion around what kind of risks are on the Athene balance sheet. Apollo provides a lot of transparency on the balance sheet, though. And one thing Athene does not have a lot of is software loans – less than 1% of assets. It did not make a lot of sense for Apollo to trade down to a single-digit forward P/E multiple in March. I expect Marc and the Apollo team will continue to do extremely well.

There has been significant innovation in consumer fintech.  Do you have a view on the SOFI’s or HOOD’s of the world?

Over the course of my career, I’ve now seen several cycles where fintech attracts a lot of generalist growth investors. But explosive growth in financial services is not always a good thing. The big questions you have to ask are: Is growth coming from some kind of sustainable customer activity or from extending credit? And is this a valuable customer segment to go after? It can be easy to generate growth if you are extending credit to risky borrowers or focusing on a customer segment where there’s not much profit potential.

On the positive side, I am really impressed by Wise (LON: WISE) and Revolut, which is private. Both companies started with currency transfers, particularly for international students and young professionals, an acute pain point for a valuable customer demographic. Both Wise and Revolut have grown dramatically and expanded to become broader financial services providers offering traditional banking and credit card products. The growth is extraordinary: Revolut was founded in 2015 and its payment volume is already three quarters the size of American Express’s. Amex was founded in 1850!

Where I’m more concerned is the growth of personal loans and other lending products. Most of the public fintech lenders have increased origination volume several-fold in recent years. SoFi, for example, has increased personal loan originations more than 5x from $5 billion in 2021 to $27 billion in 2025. Growing that fast in a benign credit environment can create a host of future risks, including a high concentration in a few vintages. Most of these platforms have not experienced a deep downturn in their operating history. Some of the stocks are also popular with retail investors who may not appreciate all of the risks involved. There’s a lot to be cautious about!

Residential real estate, homebuilding and mortgages have been out of favor due to higher interest rates in recent years.  Do you have any investments in this area and how do you think things play out?

The U.S. housing market is in a protracted downturn. We’re now in the fourth year of what I think of as a “volume recession.” Existing home sales have been stuck at financial crisis levels since 2022. When people move, it drives a lot of economic activity, including things like home improvement projects and furniture sales. All of these downstream areas have been depressed for several years. Homebuilding and building products have also been squeezed with rising competition, incentives, and lot costs, while homebuyer affordability is challenged.

Aptera has had limited long exposure to housing and real estate since we launched last year. I was starting to turn more optimistic in early 2026 when it looked like 30-year mortgage rates were headed below 6%. Now, with interest rates moving higher right at the beginning of the spring homebuying season, the housing market recovery is likely pushed out at least another year.

I don’t think housing activity can stay depressed forever, though. Mobility has been historically low since the pandemic. A weaker labor market might actually help somewhat by encouraging people to move for new job opportunities. As time goes on, people will also need to move for non-financial reasons like growing families. Some softening in home prices, which is starting to play out in many markets, will help with buyer affordability.

Aptera has a long shopping list of housing-related stocks. Right now, we’re focused on high quality businesses where sentiment is bombed out and optionality on a recovery looks cheap.

Any ideas worth noting?

I was really impressed with Zillow’s (NASDAQ: ZG) recent AI Day. The company has had some false starts in the past, including a move into home flipping that it later reversed. Jeremy Wacksman, who became CEO in 2024, has a product background and is executing very well. Zillow is the rare housing-related business that has grown revenue materially through the down market, in part by dramatically growing its rentals business.

The stock is trading near multi-year lows partially due to concerns about disintermediation from LLMs. Real estate is a very unique category and LLMs will have the same challenge that Google did aggregating the constantly changing data and rich media experience. In the meantime, Zillow is aggressively leveraging AI to get better.

Zillow is trying to create the holy grail of the real estate industry: a unified view of the customer journey. AI is potentially transformative here as Zillow’s user behavior data can be translated to human-readable signals for real estate agents, like “Activity spike – great time to check in.” Zillow is also inserting itself deeper into the transaction through its ownership of a leading real estate agent CRM and other vertical software tools.

Profitability and earnings quality are improving through the down market. Zillow announced a target of over $1 billion in net income in a normalized real estate market. So the company is doing well and has significant upside when the market recovers. That does not seem priced in at a valuation of around $9 billion, net of cash.

The insurance cycle has turned more mixed.  Do you have any views on the insurance cycle and investments in this year?

Property and casualty insurance lines are at different points in the industry cycle. Property lines re-priced for inflation quickly and had a major hard market cycle post-pandemic. That cycle is clearly cooling off now. Casualty lines like General Liability have taken longer to re-price for higher costs because it can take years to move through the court system and establish the ultimate cost of a claim. Loss costs have also been higher than expected due to increasing legal verdicts, referred to as social inflation. So casualty lines are actually earlier in the hard market cycle and seeing meaningful price increases as insurers try to improve their profitability.

This is a great setup for a long-short investor. We have been short certain property-focused insurance businesses where results are slowing down after years of strong growth. At the same time, we own some idiosyncratic investments with exposure to improving casualty lines.

One company I like is Selective Insurance (NASDAQ: SIGI), a $5 billion market cap commercial insurance carrier based in New Jersey. SIGI has an excellent long-term track record of growth and profitability. Earnings have been pressured the last couple of years as SIGI took major reserving actions to account for rising loss costs in its casualty-focused portfolio. The company is now in a very conservative reserving position and has been increasing prices meaningfully, both of which should improve underwriting profitability going forward.

Because of the tough results, SIGI is trading near multi-year lows. In fact, its $5 billion market cap is less than half the value of its $11 billion investment portfolio, which yields close to 5%. So, we can make an adequate return even if the company never makes money from insurance operations. That seems like a very conservative assumption considering the company’s multi-decade history of profitability and its improving fundamentals.

You also spend time looking at exchanges and brokers.  Do you have any favorite ideas in this area?

I’m a big fan of Marex (NASDAQ: MRX), both the company and the stock. I’ve followed the stock since shortly after its IPO in 2024 and Aptera is a client of Marex’s excellent prime brokerage group. MRX is a futures commission merchant (FCM) – a trading business focused on client activity, mostly in commodity derivatives. Its market cap is just under $4 billion.

Industry volume is growing at a high single digit rate, but competition has declined significantly over time. Large banks pulled bank after the financial crisis and smaller, specialist firms are often subscale. So Marex has been aggregating market share organically and through a very effective M&A model, primarily smaller tuck-ins.

MRX has compounded pre-tax earnings at a CAGR of 30%+ for more than a decade. Yet, the stock has traded at a modest single-digit P/E multiple since going public. It had a limited following as a small cap financial services IPO. There was also a short report last summer. The stock is up meaningfully this year as MRX benefits from commodity price volatility, but valuation is still undemanding at around 10x this year’s earnings. Most of the share price appreciation to date simply reflects earnings growth.

I think very highly of MRX’s leadership team and CEO, Ian Lowitt. There is risk in the business model from client losses, but I like Ian’s alignment with shareholders through a large ownership position in the stock.

This is exactly the type of company we look for at Aptera. We can understand what drives Marex’s success and see a long runway for earnings growth ahead. Yet, not every investor will look at an industry or business model like this, so valuation is reasonable. We think Marex can do quite well going forward.

Thank you and good luck!

Ted Bealin / Aptera Disclaimer:

For additional information on Aptera Capital, please reach out to info@apteracapital.com

This interview is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy interests and/or shares in a fund managed by Aptera Capital LLC (“Aptera”). An offering will be made only by means of a confidential private placement memorandum and related subscription materials and only to qualified investors in jurisdictions where permitted by law. Aptera’s investment program involves substantial risks, which are described in detail in the fund’s confidential private placement memorandum.

The views and opinions expressed in this interview are subject to change at any time without notice. Aptera and its affiliates may have positions (long or short) in securities mentioned in this interview and may change, exit, or reverse such positions at any time. Nothing in this interview should be taken as investment advice or a recommendation to enter into any transaction.

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Favorite Books & Media

Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks in Honor of the 250th Anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence

This is a tour de force speech that should be required listening for any American high school student.  With great eloquence, Justice Thomas talks about his upbringing in a poor community in Georgia, noting that while the “governance” was not good, his family had faith in God and the inalienable rights that God gave them.  Thomas discusses many important topics, such as personal responsibility, limits on centralized government power, and individual liberties.  He also argues that modern progressivism is a departure from the founding ideals of the Country.  A very important speech from an important justice.

https://www.c-span.org/program/public-affairs-event/justice-thomas-speaks-in-honor-of-250th-anniversary-of-us/677395

 

Harris Kupperman (Praetorian Capital): Brazil, Commodities and Strategy

Harris Kupperman is a hedge fund manager and prominent Twitter poster (@hkuppy). This podcast was released in late March but appears to have been recorded in November 2025. Still, I found it incredibly interesting and chock-full of out-of-the-box ideas and ways of thinking. In particular, “Kuppy” is bullish on Brazil and potential favorable political change there and is buying the B3 Exchange and beef companies JBS and Minerva. He also likes investments in Dubai (this is pre-Iran), noting they have solid growth yet trade at single-digit P/Es.

Kuppy also thinks China now understands the benefit of using the Hong Kong dollar peg as effectively a “stablecoin,” allowing it to raise money and gain capital market influence via Hong Kong. Thus, he is buying Hong Kong real estate and financial exchange assets. Finally, I like how he argues that austerity is everywhere: in Europe, it is austerity to benefit the climate; in Japan, it is austerity to benefit older people; and in China, it is austerity to subsidize unprofitable factories.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/value-hive-podcast/id1492171651?i=1000757687069

 

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z & Netscape, with David Senra

I’m a sucker for Marc Andreessen podcasts, and this one does not disappoint, covering a wide range of topics, including the founding of Netscape, stories about Jim Clark, the history of the venture capital industry and how a16z fits in, how Elon Musk is reinventing corporate management with his unique hands-on approach, and much more.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marc-andreessen-co-founder-of-a16z-netscape/id1836497887?i=1000755371069

 

Jeff Gundlach on Private Credit, Dollar Debasement & More

Gundlach is always a prescient and opinionated thinker, sharing blunt views on the risks associated with private credit (and why near-term redemptions are likely to soar), America’s unsustainable fiscal path, why investors should be heavily diversified outside the U.S., and why USD debasement and/or debt restructuring are ultimately likely.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/352-jeffrey-gundlach-private-credit-is-an/id1636372365?i=1000757687787

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A Selection of Recent Tweets from @RagingVentures:

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“I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.” – Abraham Lincoln

 

 

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