Career
The career of Peter DeCaprio
Three chapters, two cities, one practice: two Boston investment firms founded and led, and a private firm in Fort Lauderdale today.
Investment careers are usually described as a sequence of employers. Peter DeCaprio's is better described as a sequence of firms he was responsible for. Across roughly three decades of investment management he founded and led two of them in Boston, and he now works as a Member of a third in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The settings changed. The work, which is underwriting, independent research and the long holding of positions that others found too early or too uncomfortable, did not. What follows is the arc in three chapters, without dates, because the dates matter less than what each chapter added.
-
Earlier
Crow Point Partners
DeCaprio founded Crow Point Partners in Boston and led the firm. It was the chapter in which the habits of a working life were set: his own research rather than borrowed conviction, an underwriting process that mapped the downside before it sized the upside, and a willingness to hold a position through the stretch when the market had not yet agreed. Building a firm from the beginning also meant answering for every decision to the people whose capital it managed, and that accountability shaped his temperament more than any single investment did. The Wall Street Transcript interviewed him on the firm's investing strategies during those years, and the conversation remains one of the clearest public records of how he framed value and risk.
-
Then
FlowPoint Partners
He then founded FlowPoint Partners, also in Boston, and led that firm as well. A second founding is a different exercise from a first. The lessons that come with building an investment process had already been learned once, so the second firm could be shaped around a clearer idea of what mattered: independence in research, discipline in underwriting, patience in holding. It was also a further test of temperament. Positions that were early had to be held while they looked wrong, the businesses behind them had to be understood rather than merely watched, and the responsibility for other people's capital never grew lighter with experience. FlowPoint is behind him now, as Crow Point is, but the practices the two firms forced him to formalize carried forward intact.
-
Today
Emerald Coast Holdings LLC
Today DeCaprio is a Member of Emerald Coast Holdings LLC, the private investment firm he works from in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and he continues to spend time in Boston. The private structure suits the work he does now: capital for lower middle market companies, venture debt, distressed and private credit, and research in high yield, closed end funds and the telecommunications sector, with utilities as a secondary interest. He follows public equities and the broader capital markets alongside all of it. The positions are fewer and more closely held than a large allocator would tolerate, and the involvement with each is deeper. It is the chapter in which the method built in Boston is applied with the fewest constraints.
Seen together, the three chapters describe one practice rather than three jobs. The founder who did his own reading in Boston is the same investor who reads the documents himself in Fort Lauderdale, and the underwriting discipline that answered to the people behind Crow Point and FlowPoint is the discipline that sizes a venture debt position today. Roughly three decades in, the through-line is a refusal to outsource judgment.
A description of the current work, sector by sector, is kept at peterdecaprioinvestments.com. The reasoning behind it is on the Philosophy page.