Why “Boring” Markets Win: Inside Yaniv Bertele’s Playbook for Finding Unloved Alpha

In an era when capital chases headlines, AI darlings, crypto surges, the next “platform” story, Yaniv Bertele has built a career by looking the other way. “I have an unpopular belief: the best opportunities often hide in markets people find boring, or even taboo,” he says. “If you can translate complexity into investor‑grade clarity and do the work others won’t, you tend to find durable edges.”

That contrarian stance is the spine of EverOak Innovations, his latest venture focused on life settlements, the secondary market where seniors can sell unwanted life insurance policies to institutional buyers. It is hardly a cocktail‑party topic, yet it is exactly the kind of overlooked, actuarially driven market Bertele favors: “Unsexy doesn’t mean unsound. In longevity finance, the return engine is actuarial math and medical evidence, not the latest macro headline.” Peer‑reviewed research has long documented the asset class’s low correlation to traditional markets and mid‑single to high‑single‑digit long‑run return potential (with manager dispersion), which is why allocators use it to complement equity‑rate beta.

The appeal is not just theoretical. For policyholders, the option can be materially better than surrendering: industry and academic sources consistently show life settlement proceeds exceed cash surrender value by multiples, a core reason seniors explore the market when premiums become a burden or needs change. “Most people don’t realize the policy they’re about to lapse might have real market value,” Bertele notes. FINRA’s consumer guidance echoes that buyers should be licensed and that sellers should shop multiple bids, signals of a maturing, regulated marketplace.

The contrarian pattern: go where the crowd won’t

Bertele’s path, from physics and mathematics to venture, industrial tech, and insurtech, reinforced a simple pattern: enter early, standardize complexity, and let evidence replace mystique. At Consumer Physics, he helped commercialize the SCiO pocket molecular sensor, later recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer, proof that deeply technical work can be made legible to markets with the right translation layer. At Mekorot’s CVC program, he backed overlooked water‑tech plays and saw exits emerge out of the portfolio he created. “Outperformance often starts with a problem that looks too messy, or too dull, for most investors,” he says.

Life settlements fit the template. The legal foundation is over a century old, Grigsby v. Russell (1911) established that a life policy is assignable property, allowing a policyholder to sell it for value. Yet the market still sits outside most investors’ comfort zones, in part because underwriting and valuation have historically been proprietary and inconsistent. “The perception problem is that it’s morbid or opaque; the reality is that it’s actuarial. Our job is to make it transparent, reproducible, and governed,” Bertele says.

“Boring” creates barriers, and moats

Unfashionable markets resist easy entry for structural reasons, which is precisely why alpha can persist. Regulation is fragmented but mature: 43 states plus Puerto Rico regulate life settlements (≈90% of the U.S. population). Michigan and New Mexico regulate viaticals only; five states plus Washington, D.C. have no specific statutes. “The licensing and disclosure spine is there, if you embrace it, not evade it, you build trust and a competitive moat,” Bertele argues.

Scale is growing but still small against the addressable pool. LISA’s 2024 survey shows 2,699 transactions, $3.4B of face value purchased, and $601M+ paid to consumers, while more than 11 million policies, worth $754B+ in face, still lapse or are surrendered each year. “That delta, small flow versus huge potential, is exactly where disciplined operators compound advantage,” he says.

Replace mystique with method

The historical black‑box in life settlements has been life‑expectancy (LE) estimation, the core input that drives valuation. Studies document systematic differences among underwriters; the actuarial community’s response emphasizes Actual‑to‑Expected (A/E) studies, calibration, and disclosure. “We don’t sell a ‘perfect model.’ We ship a process: version‑controlled models, out‑of‑sample testing, challenger models, drift monitoring, and A/E reporting. If we can’t explain why an LE moved, we don’t use it,” Bertele says.

That process lives inside modern AI governance. “Trust is a product feature,” he adds. EverOak Innovations’ workflow aligns with the NAIC AI Model Bulletin (explainability, documentation, accountability) and the NIST AI RMF (transparency, monitoring). On data, HIPAA requires consented access and de‑identification (Safe Harbor/Expert Determination) when training models on medical history. “You can translate PHI to IRR responsibly, if you build controls first and models second,” he says.

The translation layer is the edge

“Insurance speaks in impairments, meds, labs, survival curves; capital markets speak in IRR, duration, volatility, correlation,” Bertele says. “Our job is to map one to the other so CIOs can size positions on a risk‑budget basis.” That translation does more than tidy up reporting; it enables portfolios. Academic work has found ~8% average annual policy‑level returns (1993–2009) with low/negative correlation to stocks and bonds (again: manager dispersion matters). When underwriting becomes reproducible, bid‑ask spreads compress, secondary liquidity improves, and the asset class becomes easier to underwrite in size.

He is candid about valuation. “Call assets what they are,” he says. Many longevity exposures are Level 3 fair‑value holdings under IFRS 13/ASC 820, model‑priced with unobservable inputs. That’s not a flaw; it signals the need to match liquidity terms, disclosure, and sensitivity reporting to the asset’s physics. “You don’t force daily liquidity on something that isn’t daily‑liquid, use interval or listed closed‑end structures until secondary‑market plumbing is robust,” he notes.

How “boring” compounds

Boring markets demand patient capital and execution. That combination, plus regulatory fluency and technology, creates a timeline advantage. “In fashionable sectors, a dozen well‑funded competitors show up in a quarter. In complex, unfashionable markets, it can take years to build the rails, legal, tax, underwriting, servicing, governance,” Bertele says. “That’s a feature, not a bug.”

The social narrative follows, slowly. Grigsby confirmed the right to sell a policy more than a century ago; FINRA encourages consumers to work with licensed intermediaries and seek multiple bids; state statutes codify licensing and disclosures. As transparency improves, more seniors receive better prices than surrender, and allocators gain a genuinely independent source of return. “Everyone wins when the knowledge barrier falls,” he says.

The takeaway for contrarian investors

Bertele’s heuristics are simple, and hard to imitate:

• Complexity is a moat (if you can standardize it).
• Regulation is an asset (if you lean into it).
• Governed AI beats gut feel (if it’s explainable and monitored).
• Structure beats story (match wrappers and liquidity to Level‑3 reality).

“If you want non‑consensus, you don’t just pick a quirky theme, you build the translation layer, the governance, and the marketplace rails. Do that, and the ‘boring’ markets stop being boring, and start being dependable,” Bertele says.