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Dan McMurtrie

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Dan McMurtrie named his hedge fund Tyro Partners because "tyro" means novice in Latin — and in 2015, that's exactly what he and his Notre Dame investing club buddy Alex Draime were. Two recent graduates with $3 million scraped together from family, friends, and their own pockets, launching a value-oriented long-short equity fund into a market that had declared value investing dead. The name was honest. The results were not what you'd expect from novices. Tyro Partners has not had a single down year since its inception. Through bull markets, COVID crashes, growth-stock manias, and rate hiking cycles, McMurtrie's fundamental approach to identifying secular trends and supply chain inefficiencies in tech, healthcare, industrial, and consumer sectors has generated consistent alpha. By 2020, the track record caught the attention of David Einhorn, whose Greenlight Masters fund of funds provided seed capital — a stamp of approval from one of the greatest value investors of his generation. Tyro has since grown to over $300 million in assets and recently secured its first institutional investor. McMurtrie grew up in Richmond, Virginia, surrounded by entrepreneurial energy — his father built a fast-food chain, his uncles started gas stations and small businesses. "They were what we would now call founders," he says. "At the time, I interpreted it as guys who had schemes." Reading Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett as a teenager transformed those observations into a framework. By the time he arrived at Notre Dame, the investing bug had fully taken hold. The SuperMugatu persona on Twitter (60K+ followers) — equal parts market commentary, cultural observation, and irreverent humor — has made McMurtrie a cult figure in FinTwit. His viral thesis on the millennial dating market demonstrated the same pattern-recognition skills he applies to equities: identifying structural shifts before they become consensus. What makes McMurtrie a standout on this list isn't just the track record — it's the combination of bootstrapped origins, decade-long consistency, and the willingness to start a fund when every rational voice in the industry said don't. He embodies the emerging manager ethos: skill exists everywhere, but capital access is bottlenecked by outdated allocation models that reward size over alpha. Tyro Partners is proof that the bottleneck can be broken with enough persistence, performance, and a healthy disregard for conventional wisdom.

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