He's 26. He runs an $85 million hedge fund. And he's going viral for skewering Trump
Spencer Hakimian runs Tolou Capital. But he has become better known for his provocative macroeconomic takes, often shared in real time on social media
Spencer Hakimian, the founder of Tolou Capital.
The most surreal moment of Spencer Hakimian’s career may have come in May, when he flagged an inconsistency in President Donald Trump’s trade threats.
In a widely shared tweet, the hedge fund manager pointed out that Trump’s proposed 25% tariff on iPhones not assembled in the U.S. would actually benefit Samsung — a South Korean company whose phones are made entirely overseas — while penalizing Apple, an American company, for doing some of its production in the U.S. “So we’re giving a 15% price advantage to foreign companies?” Hakimian wrote. “And this is to Make America Great Again?”
Within hours of the tweet, Trump pivoted, issuing a similar threat to Samsung. Stocks rebounded, and the “crisis” ended not with a deal, but with the president backing off his own threat.
“What a world we live in,” Hakimian said in an interview this month, still sounding a little stunned.
It’s a long way from where he started. The son of Iranian political refugees, Hakimian was raised in a family with no ties to Wall Street. His father didn’t go to college. Yet he found his way to finance after winning a middle school investing contest he casually entered, which saw his stock picks turn a fictional $100,000 into $220,000 by the end of the year.
“I was convinced I was a genius,” he recalled with a laugh.
A deeper fascination took hold later – except unlike many of his Wall Street peers, Hakimian was more drawn to history, psychology, and social studies than technical subjects. Studying human conflicts over centuries led him to the belief that the same patterns occur and recur through history because, as he puts it, “our hardware and software hasn’t changed in 100,000 years.”
“I found that these patterns keep playing out constantly, and there’s a lot of money to be made in these patterns,” he said. “And it really doesn't get priced into the markets. Whereas, let's say, the difference between Coke and Pepsi or Facebook and Snapchat, those company-wide differences? Everyone’s focusing on that. But there are few people focusing on, say, the 65-year trajectory of a country’s fiat currency versus gold.”
And that’s where his investing edge comes from.
Now all of 26 years old, Hakimian runs New York-based Tolou Capital, a hedge fund with $85 million under management and cumulative returns since inception of almost 300%. That’s an impressive rate, all the more considering he began the fund in October of 2019, less than six years ago. The S&P 500 has returned about 100% over the same period. And Hakimian’s returns have been less volatile.
But lately, Hakimian has become even better known for his provocative macroeconomic takes, often shared in real time on X, where he’s racked up almost 150,000 followers — gaining serious steam since Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in early April.
Not only did Hakimian’s responses to Liberation Day posts go viral. Some have seemed presciently ahead of sudden pivots in White House policy, the Apple-Samsung example chief among them. Most high-finance types avoid the bullhorn, if not the spotlight. But Hakimian is not afraid to come out swinging.
“I don’t care if I lose clients. I don’t care if I get backlash. This is dangerous,” Hakimian said, explaining the rationale behind his rapid-fire posts. He highlighted the way Amazon quickly denied a reported plan to show the cost of tariffs following White House attacks. “It’s actually dangerous when companies are too afraid to just conduct normal business because of their president. I know where this goes. My family knows where this ends up 10, 15 years down the line. And these things happen in the blink of an eye. It’s like frogs in a boiling pot. You don’t realize it until it's too late.”
“I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. I’m independent,” he said. He sees his role on X as part analyst, part dissident. He frequently invites disagreement and tries to respond to followers with opposing views. “If we don’t talk, we're going to end up fighting,” he said. Dialogue's messy, but the alternative is swords in the streets.”
And so, despite his growing popularity, Hakimian isn’t afraid to voice unpopular opinions. His biggest contrarian take of 2025 so far? That extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts would actually be austerity, not stimulus. “You're not making anyone wealthier relative to last year,” he said. “You're just extending the status quo.”
Worse, he added, if the extension is paired with Medicaid cuts, the poorest Americans will be forced to reduce spending elsewhere, dragging on consumer demand. Similarly, he sees the return of student loan collections as an obvious demand-dampening force: “You were giving people a tax holiday. Now you’re restarting payments. How is that not contractionary?”
Hakimian is also one of the few investors loudly warning that changes to what’s known as Section 174 of the tax code — which now force companies to amortize, or spread out, U.S. research and development deductions over five years instead of taking them all at once — have quietly turned innovation into a tax burden, kneecapping the tech sector.
“Our economy is a high-service, high-technology, high-finance economy,” he said. “So R&D is the biggest thing we should always be focusing on. That’s where our advantages come from.” After lawmakers quietly changed how R&D is treated under the signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of Trump’s first term, Hakimian said, the slowdown in tax relief created serious headwinds for even the most cutting-edge companies.
Looking further out, Hakimian said he’s paying the most attention to U.S. government debt and the prospect of the dollar falling out of favor as the world’s reserve currency. He also sees significant risk in insurance companies exposed to climate change, with all but inevitable natural disasters potentially making some of those companies insolvent overnight and the damage rippling out to the global financial system. And he believes the U.S. and China are already in a Cold War, with the possibility for a more direct confrontation on the horizon.
While Tolou Capital’s returns speak for themselves, Hakimian remains much more animated by the why behind them. Even if the numbers are indisputably quantitative, his views are qualitative. As he sees it, today’s market dynamics aren’t all that different from those of the 1970s, or even the 1870s. The specifics change, but the incentives, anxieties, and ambitions driving investors stay eerily the same.
So there’s upside to thinking in decades, not weeks or months. He admits it’s a lonely stance sometimes, but that’s also where opportunity lives. Even his fund’s name — Tolou, the Farsi word for sunrise — speaks to a longer arc.
Still, speaking with Quartz, he struck a humble note: “I’m just trying to earn the sacrifice of everybody that got me here.”
Work keeps him out till 8 o’clock some nights, and when he gets home to their place on the Upper East Side, he and his wife like to put away their phones and play with their 18-month-old daughter. That, he noted, is another thing humans have been doing for thousands of years.