Ravi Chopra

Basis Points is taught by Ravi Chopra, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Azora Capital — someone who has spent a twenty-five-year career studying, from the inside, exactly how financial institutions make their money.

The career

Twenty-five years inside the machine.

Ravi has spent more than two decades as a portfolio manager, dedicating his career to understanding the structure, behavior, and evolution of financial institutions. He began in the Financial Institutions Group at Goldman Sachs, sharpened his sector approach at Sigma Capital, and went on to serve as Partner and Sector Head of U.S. Financial Services at Samlyn Capital, where he led the firm’s investments across banks, insurers, exchanges, and financial technology.

In 2016 he founded Azora Capital, where he serves as Chief Investment Officer. With offices in Miami and New York, Azora runs a fundamental long/short equity strategy focused on the U.S. financial services sector, managing over a billion dollars for high-net-worth individuals, family offices, and institutions. The discipline is the same one that runs through this course: deep research, total clarity on incentives, and a refusal to mistake noise for signal.

The education

Trained to read the numbers.

Ravi graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Dartmouth College in 2001 with a degree in Economics, and is a CFA Charterholder. He serves as a trustee of the Morristown-Beard School in New Jersey. His market perspectives have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Institutional Investor.

Why he teaches it

The lesson he wished everyone had.

The idea for Basis Points is simple: the same fundamentals professionals use to evaluate a bank, a loan book, or an insurance product are the ones an ordinary person needs to buy a car, choose a mortgage, or pay down a card — and almost no one is ever taught them. Ravi built this series, with co-host Allison Chopra, to close that gap in plain language, for free.