Our Origins
Bastiat’s founders met while graduate students at Oxford University. Development of the Bastiat Divergence Program’s core strategy began a year later in the midst of the dot-com crash. Many of the blueprints were sketched in the café beneath the Ashmolean, the world’s oldest university museum.
The strategy incorporates the founders’ original research into the heart of extreme market behavior. Key insights have come from flooding patterns in the Nile river basin, the seismic nature of financial market bubbles and crashes, the elegant operations research techniques that contributed to both the Allied victory of WWII and the Japanese industrial miracle, and an ancient Roman philosophy of perseverance under stress and uncertainty.
Amanda Howard and Sebastian Pritchard named the firm in honor of Frederic Bastiat, a French economist and philosopher often associated with the pro-free-market Austrian School of Economics.
“The world has a way of undermining complex plans. This is particularly true in fast moving environments. A fast moving environment can evolve more quickly than a complex plan can be adapted to it. By the time you have adapted, the target has changed.”