Special situations investing focuses on opportunities created by extraordinary corporate events — distress, restructuring, litigation, spinoffs — that create mispricings conventional managers cannot evaluate.
At CRAGSI, we define special situations investing as a discipline focused on opportunities created by extraordinary corporate events that conventional investment managers lack the expertise, mandate, or patience to evaluate. These events include financial distress, bankruptcy, restructuring, litigation, regulatory change, spinoffs, carve-outs, and other situations in which normal valuation frameworks break down — creating dislocations between price and intrinsic value that patient, expert investors can exploit.
What unites special situations strategies is the requirement for deep, multidisciplinary expertise: legal analysis (to understand creditor rights and priorities), financial modeling (to value complex capital structures), operational judgment (to assess whether a business can survive), and market knowledge (to understand liquidity and demand for different instrument types).
CRAGSI's team has managed special situations assets across multiple market cycles and asset classes — from PBGC's distressed portfolio of VC, PE, private credit, and real estate assets to airline restructurings to startup turnarounds. We define special situations not as a narrow asset class but as a mindset: the willingness to go where conventional capital cannot, and the expertise to get paid for doing so.
Related CRAGSI services: Turnarounds & Restructurings · Workouts · Valuations