Brownstein’s Mortgage Metaphysics Drives Gain in Top Hedge Fund

For 20 years, Don Brownstein taught philosophy at the University of Kansas. He specialized in metaphysics, which examines the character of reality itself. In a photo from his teaching days, he looks like a young Karl Marx, with a bushy black beard and unruly hair.

That photo is now a relic standing behind the curved bird’s-eye-maple desk in Brownstein’s corner office in Stamford, Connecticut. Brownstein abandoned academia in 1989 to try to make some money, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its February issue.