Orlando Bravo Increasingly Looks to Retail Investors for Ideas

(Bloomberg) -- Managing several billion dollars gains you access to many of the corporate world’s most sought after advisers. But for Orlando Bravo, founder and managing partner of buyout giant Thoma Bravo, the best skinny is coming from elsewhere.

“I follow some of these retail investors. For fun, first, but now I have been getting some great insights from them,” Bravo said during the Bloomberg Invest Global conference on Thursday. 

He said retail investors have been innovators in many ways and their strategies are ahead of some big money managers. 

While Thoma Bravo is mostly buying and selling technology companies, it also makes some public investments and takes companies public, so Bravo said it’s helpful to see how retail investors are thinking about valuations and growth rates. 

Bravo, who has built Thoma Bravo into one of the world’s largest private equity firms, said regulators were slow to wake up to retail investors as an increasingly important -- and well organized -- force in the markets. 

Regulators aren’t giving retail investors credit for their sophistication, he said, adding that when he started out in 1992 they had to be wary of Wolf of Wall Street types peddling penny stocks.

“This is a totally different set of information, a totally different set of people and they want in the game,” Bravo said. 

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