Zoe Goldstein/Vail Daily
Banks Biffle and Zach Meltz are not typical high school juniors.
Yes, they are full-time students at Vail Ski and Snowboard Academy and spend much of their time outside of school training and racing as competitive ski racers. But at age 17, they also started running a hedge fund called BZE Capital Management.
Biffle was born in Miami, Florida, and moved to Eagle County to focus on ski racing.
“I have a passion for the stock market,” he said.
That may be an understatement.
Support Local Journalism
“He’s always thinking about it,” Meltz said.
Meltz grew up in Eagle County, and, at 9, became the youngest person to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
“I’ve always loved finances and, most importantly, talking to people,” Meltz said. “When (Biffle) first brought me in, my role was to talk to people and get them excited about our hedge fund.”
Their third partner, Euan Walker, is a student at Fairview High School in Boulder.
“He’s very smart — he taught himself calculus off of YouTube because he wanted to be able to develop better mathematical models for the stock market,” Biffle said.
Why a hedge fund?
Biffle started investing in 2021 through his Mastercard Greenlight, a debit card for minors. Rather than spending the money he earned doing chores or received as gifts, “I’d save up to go buy that stock or that share,” he said. By 2022, he realized, “Maybe I could make real money with this.”
In mid-2024, Biffle had the idea to start a hedge fund. “How fun would this be?” he recalled thinking. “You get to invest, but with more money.”
He asked Meltz and Walker to join him in the venture. Meltz said it was an easy yes.
A hedge fund has “all the goods,” Meltz said. “It’s got the raising money, talking to people; it’s got the pure talent of reading the market and looking at how things work.”
“We’re both also highly competitive people, and hedge funds are pretty competitive,” Biffle said. “You have to be quick thinking, and you also have to be passionate about it.”
The three students have created a division of labor that capitalizes on their skills. Biffle is the fund’s chief investment officer. “I formulate the ideas around the positions, I’m reading the news,” he said. Meltz leads pitches with new investors and helps Biffle process news and market information.
On Friday nights, “we don’t party, we dig through the most recent SEC filings,” Biffle said.
Walker is the fund’s risk officer. “He views the fund almost from a separate angle, of ‘what are we exposed at,’ rather than ‘what is the profit behind this’?” Biffle said.
Time is one of their biggest challenges. They are constantly in communication with each other, even when they are at different ski races in different time zones and, sometimes, different countries.
Biffle and Meltz estimated they spend more than 20 hours per week working on the hedge fund on top of school and ski racing.
“Other kids might spend their leisure time playing video games or whatever. We’re doing this,” Meltz said. “Also, I hate to admit it, but sometimes I do skip out on my homework.”
Where does the money come from, and what do they do with the earnings?
As minors, the three students cannot yet obtain the combination of licenses they need to legally manage others’ money. “Legally, we can only go through close friends or family, people that we know,” Meltz said.
“When you manage other people’s money, it becomes a little bit more high stakes,” Biffle said.
Biffle and Meltz are studying for the brokerage licenses they need to be able to sell securities, make investments and manage others’ money.
“So when we turn 18 at the end of this year, we can be a full-fledged hedge fund before we even get into college,” Meltz said.
Without the licenses, they also cannot legally take a personal profit from the hedge fund. Instead, they will donate profits to charity. They do not anticipate taking a profit for themselves from the fund until they graduate from college.
BZE Capital Management’s investment strategy
All three founders are self-taught in their investing knowledge.
“You learn that it’s a lot easier than adults make it seem,” Biffle said.
“The great thing about investing is you can kind of do it any way you want,” Biffle said. “You don’t have to follow a book or the laws of investing, you can figure out how to do it and what you want to do with it and how to interpret information. Because that’s all it is, eventually, is how are you interpreting information and how do you react?”
The students’ strategy is to calculate their position sizes based on event-driven market reactions and analysis of companies’ financial filings.
“I boil it down to three things: Do I use the product? If I don’t, do I understand the business, and can I understand where that business is going?” Biffle said.
Following the Delta Airlines systems crash in July, the software company Crowdstrike was blamed.
“But we looked at every one of their other clients, and we were like, they have excellent cybersecurity, it was just a fluke with Delta,” Meltz said.
When Crowdstrike’s stock prices tanked following the crash, BZE bought in, and then when the prices went back up, the fund made money.
BZE Capital Investment has had some “really big wins” with the money they have managed so far, Meltz said.
What’s next for the students, and the hedge fund?
Biffle and Meltz both plan to study business and continue to ski race in college. They also have a year-by-year goal sheet for the hedge fund that goes through 2038.
Their goal is to reach $300,000 raised by the end of this year. Then, they plan to run the fund through college without raising much more capital.
In the year after they graduate from college — 2030 or 2031 — they will shift to managing the hedge fund full-time and kickstart a new capital campaign, with plans to raise $8 million in a year.
“The dream would be to run a huge hedge fund,” Biffle said. “But you make so much money when you’ve raised even just $250 million, and you’re a small capital fund at that point. Where it goes is where it goes.”
