Joel Greenblatt
Gotham Asset Management
Profile & Investment Philosophy
Joel Greenblatt applies his "Magic Formula" through Gotham Asset Management across an extraordinarily broad book: 1,791 positions worth $43 billion in Q2 2026. The core is passive by design - the S&P 500 ETF grew 27% to nearly 20% of assets - with Apple, Nvidia and a systematic tail of hundreds of quantitatively screened names behind it. This quarter the model rotated out of memory and storage, cutting Micron (-48%) and SanDisk (-38%), and added to Airbnb (+51%) and Microsoft (+9%).
Track Record
Joel Greenblatt ran Gotham Capital from 1985 to 1994 with a reported annualized return of roughly 50% gross before returning outside capital, one of the most aggressive records in modern investing. He then continued to compound personal and partner capital privately and later launched Gotham Asset Management with Robert Goldstein, running long-short and long-only strategies based on his quantitative value framework. Gotham Asset Management today manages billions of dollars across mutual funds and separate accounts. The Magic Formula methodology described in The Little Book That Beats the Market has been replicated and stress-tested extensively in academic literature.
Signature Trades
Current Strategy (2026)
Gotham Asset Management's 2026 13F is the opposite of Pabrai or Hohn: roughly 1700 holdings spread across the US market, with SPY itself at about 17.9% as the largest single line. The portfolio is effectively a quant value tilt around a core S&P 500 exposure, generated by Gotham's earnings-yield and return-on-capital ranking models. Position sizes are small, turnover is meaningful but disciplined, and the long book is paired with short exposure in the firm's hedge-fund vehicles. This is a deliberately industrialised version of the Magic Formula: thousands of small bets aggregating into a structural factor exposure, not the single high-conviction call style of the early Gotham era.
BMI Counter-Take
Greenblatt is two managers in one biography: the 50% gross compounder running concentrated spinoffs and derivatives until 1994, and the systematic factor manager running 1700-name portfolios today. The Magic Formula remains intellectually clean and academically validated, but its real edge has narrowed as quant value has been commoditised. We respect the durability and the willingness to publish the playbook, which most managers would never do. For retail the takeaway is not to copy SPY at 17.9%, it is to internalise the framework: rank by quality and price, ignore stories, and accept that a great system can lag the index for years.
Current Portfolio
LATEST 13F 2026-06-30Latest SEC Form 13F filing. Total portfolio value: $43.0 B. Holdings: 1791 positions.
| Security | Shares | Δ vs Prev | Value ($) | Portfolio % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| State Str Spdr S&P 500 ETF T | 11.4 M | +26.5% | $8.51 B | 19.8 % |
| Apple Inc. | 2.86 M | -0.4% | $828 M | 1.93 % |
| Nvidia Corporation | 4.02 M | -2.8% | $804 M | 1.87 % |
| Tidal Trust I | 17.0 M | -0.1% | $689 M | 1.60 % |
| Ishares Tr | 445,224 | +2.3% | $333 M | 0.78 % |
| Snowflake Inc. | 1.03 M | +4.1% | $263 M | 0.61 % |
| Amazon Com Inc. | 839,512 | +6.3% | $200 M | 0.47 % |
| Alphabet Inc. | 554,564 | +1.0% | $198 M | 0.46 % |
| Vanguard Index Fds | 286,051 | +3.4% | $196 M | 0.46 % |
| Vanguard Index Fds | 875,457 | +2.0% | $191 M | 0.44 % |
SOURCE: SEC Form 13F (2026-08-14). BMI Smart Money Tracker.