We at Epic Funds have been very fortunate as we’ve worked to build our firm. We’re indebted to many people and organizations, but for now, I want to recognize one in particular: The UCLA Economics Department.

UCLA’s Econ Department, in my opinion, is among the top ranked in the world, and I’m proud to have earned my undergraduate degree there. The experience prepared me well for the work I’m doing today and introduced me to valued friends and connections I hope to have all my life. Since graduation, my history with UCLA has put me in a position to help and support those who are students there today—to teach them, to advise them, to introduce them to professional opportunities, and to offer them the all-important moral support that faculty and staff offered me when I was a student.

But it’s important to note too what UCLA Econ continues to do for me (as well as the rest of the team at Epic Funds). It’s a lot, and it’s powerful.

There’s much to like about Epic Funds: We work hard. We’re innovative. We’re committed. But, we’re in the early days of our journey, and we don’t have anywhere near the inhouse resources that our biggest and best-established competitors do. Inhouse research capabilities, for example.

Enter UCLA and its top-notch Econ Department.

In the summer of 2023, I was invited to join the board of the UCLA Master of Quantitative Economics program. That fall, I taught a mini course for the program. In the winter of 2023, I was given the opportunity to work closely with four exceptionally talented students in the program. Our months-long capstone project was a quantitative analysis of macroeconomic influences and private investment allocations.

The students' findings demonstrated the value of investments in private markets - but the project meant much more to us at Epic Funds. It meant that our four-year-old firm staffed by six professionals had been gifted access to research power on a par with that of firms many times our size. UCLA’s Econ graduate students provided us with evidence that strengthens our story, insights that support our theories, and confidence that fuels our drive. (And, before any of that manifested, I had the pleasure of being their instructor and coach.)

Experienced investors will have a pretty good idea of what the limitations are for a firm the size of Epic Funds. On the important matter of research capability, they will be wrong. It turns out that we’ve got that, and it’s quite good.

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I look forward to working with more UCLA Econ students on more projects that serve both them and Epic Funds so well. I hope we’ll be doing it for years to come and that my relationship _— and my firm’s relationship — with UCLA Econ will grow. In the meantime, congratulations and many thanks to the students in UCLA’s Master of Quantitative Economics program and the co-authors of the report “Decoding Private Investment Markets: A Quantitative Analysis of Macroeconomic Influences & Private Investment Allocations.”

Thanks, too, to the entire Econ Department at UCLA. Someday someone should try to quantify the impact that you have in the world. I’m sure the results would be astounding. 

To those of you out there who might be working to build a firm or a business of your own, I hope you find your version of my UCLA Econ Department. You couldn’t have much better luck than that.

‍- Michael Fitzpatrick

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 Epic Funds is an asset management firm specializing in niche and capacity-constrained strategies within private equity and private credit. Michael Fitzpatrick is Partner and Co-founder. Epic Funds is not affiliated with UCLA and Epic Funds nor Michael Fitzpatrick were compensated for this content.

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