Aristides Capital may be the first hedge fund to open an office in Canada under the new administration — and not because of Trump’s tariff policy, even though CEO Claire Brown thinks those don’t make any sense at all.
“Sometimes, the decisions we make to reduce tail risk are not purely financial,” Brown wrote in her April letter to investors. And when it comes to finances, Aristides has been on a roll this year, gaining around 8 percent in its two funds during the first quarter at a time when the S&P 500 was down 4.3 percent.
The tail risk she wrote about is a personal one. Brown, who recently came out as trans and is in the midst of a divorce, currently lives in Ohio and planned to join the rest of the crew in Kentucky, where the firm is headquartered. But she has nixed those plans.
“Certain events of the past few months have left me wanting to vomit,” said Brown. “Unfortunately, the basic protections of law for transgender people have become very tenuous nationally, particularly so in any but the bluest of states,” she explained. “Even if a law on the books hypothetically protects you, in theory, it’s ultimately up to people and institutions to sustain that law, and people infected with the fervor of fascism are not up to the task.”
As a result, Brown said the firm is exploring plans to open a second office in Toronto, Canada later this year or in early 2026 that she would head.
As for Trump’s policies on tariffs and everything else, “What is there to say?” she said, then proceeded to repeat a litany of complaints from the prior month’s letter. “The policy of this administration is utterly incoherent other than fairly consistent in its awfulness. It’s a mix of Project 2025, white nationalism, Christian theocracy, Curtis Yarvin, aggrieved Silicon Valley sociopathy, Trump’s unpredictable narcissistic ego wounds, and the most brazen corruption ever seen in the United States.”
She added that “There’s no point even writing an outlook for the year or the month because it’s hard to know what cruel idiocy will happen next. My expectations for the second Trump administration were incredibly low, and Trump has delivered well beneath them.”
Stating that “nothing about this administration is normal,” she predicted that “The decline of our country that I thought might take years to materialize is being delivered in mere weeks.”
Brown’s letter was written before the final tariffs took effect, only to be followed by a 90-day pause that boosted the stock market, but she noted that the so-called reciprocal tariffs were anything but reciprocal. “In reality the calculation was the bilateral trade deficit of goods (not services) with each nation, divided by our total trade of goods with that nation, divided by two. Does this make sense? Hell no. “
Quoting economists’ arguments that the tariffs would subtract about 1.5 percentage points from real GDP growth and add about 1.5 percentage points to CPI inflation, Brown said “this is not ‘short term pain for long term gain.’ It’s more like a doctor meeting a relatively healthy 45‐year‐old patient in a normal heart rhythm, telling the patient how terrible his last doctor was, and then shocking his heart for no reason.“ (Brown is also a doctor.)
Brown said that that U.S. businesses can’t plan given the level of policy uncertainty right now, which by some measures is the largest in American history and more than during the Global Financial Crisis or the Covid‐19 pandemic. When policy changes daily and weekly, “You can’t break ground on a factory that is going to take two to four years to build, with a rate‐of‐return calculated over the next 15 or 20 years.”
For an investor, especially one known for adept short selling, she said that “it is an exhilarating and demanding environment to be trading through.” But in both the global financial crisis and the pandemic, the fix “was a line of sight toward something resembling financial normalcy. Although that could change tomorrow, we don’t seem to be anywhere close to that at the moment.”
