The Team
Charles Biderman
Founder and CEO
Charles Biderman is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of TrimTabs Investment Research. After earning his MBA from Harvard Business School, he began his career as Alan Abelson’s assistant at Barron’s from 1971 to 1973. There he predicted the collapse of real estate investment trusts (REITs). After Barron’s, he worked in the Wall Street short selling community and recommended shorting REITs on their way to perdition.
After much of the REIT industry went bust, Mr. Biderman became a successful real estate entrepreneur, putting together various deals in Tennessee and New Jersey. His first deals in the mid-1970s were the purchases of 1,000 apartments, six shopping centers, and two office buildings from REITs and banks. Although he predicted the real estate market would collapse in 1988, he did not anticipate that no liquidity would be available for development. This miscalculation forced him into personal bankruptcy and taught him the distinction between value and price: value is the intrinsic worth of an asset, while price is the amount of money that a buyer agrees to pay a seller for an asset. This simple distinction was the foundation not only for Mr. Biderman’s next move but for a new investment paradigm: liquidity theory.
In 1990, Mr. Biderman founded Market TrimTabs in Santa Rosa, California. He named the firm after the image of a trim tab first used by R. Buckminster Fuller to describe how change occurs. A trim tab is the small rudder on the rudder of a capital ship. Although the trim tab’s mass is a tiny fraction of the ship’s mass, movement of the trim tab determines the ship’s course.
Market TrimTabs originally specialized in short selling, but Mr. Biderman began tracking mutual fund flows twice each week in 1994. He realized that short selling was not working well because of the sheer volume of cash flooding into the U.S. stock market. He began tracking other factors that determine stock market liquidity in 1995. As the firm developed into the only independent research service that publishes detailed daily coverage of U.S. stock market liquidity, it became known as TrimTabs Investment Research. The premise of TrimTabs’ approach is that stock prices are a function of liquidity rather than fundamental value.
Mr. Biderman is interviewed regularly on CNBC and Bloomberg and is quoted frequently in the financial media, including Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Investor’s Business Daily. He is the author of TrimTabs Investing: Using Liquidity Theory to Beat the Stock Market (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). He holds a BA from Brooklyn College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Conrad Gann
Chief Operating Officer
Conrad Gann is President, Chief Operating Officer, of TrimTabs Investment Research and the Managing Partner of TrimTabs Asset Management. He authors TrimTabs’ Sector Liquidity Report.
Conrad Gann began his career at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco where he developed time series models to forecast economic indicators such as GNP, inflation, and interest rates. These forecasts contributed to the Federal Open Market Committee's briefings.
After receiving an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1993, Mr. Gann joined Corporate Strategy and Development for Bank of America Corporation. In a group that reported to the Office of the Chairman, he led negotiating teams charged with executing mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures in the asset management, capital markets, brokerage, payments, and retail banking sectors. After a merger with NationsBank in 1998, he was promoted to Senior Vice President of the Asset Management Group where he advised senior management on various large-scale acquisitions and joint ventures. He also coordinated the integration of various investment management subsidiaries when NationsBank and BankAmerica merged to form Bank of America.
In 2001, Gann founded the BACAP Alternative Investments Group, raising $65 million in managed client assets. As Managing Director of this group, he supervised a team responsible for hedge fund due diligence and selection, administrative operations, and marketing.
In 2002, Mr. Gann left Bank of America to become Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Development at Citadel Investment Group, one of the largest multi-strategy hedge funds. After Citadel he founded C. K. Gann & Company, which provides strategic advisory services to financial services companies.
Madeline Schnapp
Macro Research Director
Madeline Schnapp is Editor of "TrimTabs Weekly Macro Analysis" and "TrimTabs Employment NewsFlash". She is an economist who specializes in identifying emerging trends that significantly impact the financial markets. Ms. Schnapp tracks the “cash” side of the liquidity equation using dozens of unique and proprietary real-time and near real-time economic indicators. She is a frequent speaker in the financial industry; her most recent keynote presentations were at the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) and the American Association of Independent Investors (AAII).
Before joining TrimTabs Investment Research, Ms. Schnapp was the Director of Market Research at O'Reilly & Associates, a leading publisher of technical books. At O'Reilly, Ms. Schnapp began gathering data on a variety of economic indicators using web spiders to automate the data gathering process. Using these web spiders to monitor the frequency of certain technical terms in USENET discussion groups, she correctly forecast the rising popularity of the Linux operating system. She also used web spiders to predict the softening of the technical book publishing business and the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000.
Prior to her position at O'Reilly, Ms. Schnapp was a geophysicist working in the field of earthquake prediction at the U.S. Geological Survey and Woodward Clyde Consultants. There she analyzed a variety of indicators such as anomolous earthquake patterns, changes in the earth's magnetic field, tilt of the earth's surface, and animal behavior, to predict earthquakes. She now uses the same mathematical and analytical techniques to analyze and predict market-shaking events rather than earth-shaking events.
Ms. Schnapp has a Bachelor's Degree in Physics/Geophysics from Stanford University, a Master's Degree in Geophysics from the University of Colorado, and a Master's Degree in Engineering from the University of California (Berkeley).
David Santschi
Managing Editor
David Santschi is the Managing Editor of TrimTabs Investment Research. He writes TrimTabs Weekly Liquidity Review, TrimTabs Overnight Liquidity Update, and TrimTabs Sector Liquidity. He also edits TrimTabs Weekly Macro Analysis and TrimTabs Weekly Global Liquidity Review. Mr. Santschi is the co-author of TrimTabs Investing: Using Liquidity Theory to Beat the Stock Market (John Wiley & Sons, 2005).
Mr. Santschi holds an AB magna cum laude with high honors from Davidson College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Vincent Deluard
Global Equities Strategist
Vincent Deluard is the Global Equity Strategist of TrimTabs Investment Research. He is the author of TrimTabs Weekly Global Liquidity Review and provides the contents for global equities analysis in TrimTabs Weekly Liquidity Review.
Born in Dijon, France, Vincent Deluard holds a MA Cum Laude in Public Administration from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. He then completed a Master’s in International Finance at Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs. Prior to joining TrimTabs, Vincent Deluard worked as a research consultant with the United Nations Development Program and American International Group (AIG). Vincent Deluard speaks French, English, Italian and Indonesian and is a candidate for the level II of the CFA examination.
Jerry Vigil
Equity Analytics Developer
Jerry Vigil is the Equity Analytics Developer and Database Architect at TrimTabs Investment Research. He designs, develops, and manages the hardware, software, and databases that are essential to probing and assembling TrimTabs’ unique and comprehensive set of market data.
Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Jerry earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Physics at Cornell University in 2004 and his Master’s Degree in Physics at the University of California, Davis in 2006. His prior experience includes research in Experimental Particle Physics and Computational Biophysics at several national laboratories and leading universities.