Lee Ainslie

Lee S. Ainslie III is the head of hedge fund Maverick Capital, which in 1993 he helped form at the invitation of billionaire Sam Wyly. Prior to joining Maverick, he worked at Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management Corp. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and an MBA from the University of North Carolina. He was profiled in the book, Hedge Hunters, by Katherine Burton.

Background

Lee Ainslie was raised in Virginia and is the son of an Episcopalian headmaster.

Education

Mr Ainslie received a B.S in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia, a Westmoreland Davis Scholar and Thomas Pinckney Bryan Jr. Scholar, and an M.B.A from the University of North Carolina.  Ainslie was recruited straight from graduate school into hedge fund management by Julian Robertson, founder of Tiger Management Corp.

Maverick Capital

Maverick has offices in both Dallas and New York and now manages over $5 billion. They are a long/short equity hedge fund and in an interview with McKinsey, Ainslie said that: “Our goal is to know more about every one of the companies in which we invest than any noninsider does.’

‘No Holds’ Investing

Ainslie is a strong believer that when investing, there are no ‘holds’. A good investor should be either willing to buy more at the current price or to redeploy the capital  to something that does deserve incremental capital.

Outside of work

Ainslie on the Board of Directors of the Robin Hood Foundation, the Board of Trustees of the Episopal High School and the Advisory Board of the University of Virginia’s Alumni Association. He is also Vice Chair of the Robin Hood Foundation.

Links

Market Folly Profile

How Lee Ainslie does it – Investment News

2009 year end letter from Maverick Capital

LinkedIn Profile

Louis Bacon

Louis Bacon was born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1956. He graduated from Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia and later attended Middlebury College where he studied literature and graduated Cum laude. He subsequently received his MBA degree from Columbia Business School.

Louis Moore Bacon is an American hedge fund manager and trader who founded and manages Moore Capital Management, a New York City-based hedge fund with offices in London and Washington, D.C. Bacon has been at the top 20 ranking of Top 100 money earners since the 1990s. He is estimated current by Forbes Magazine to have a net worth of $1.5 billion as of March 10, 2010. Bacon is ranked by Forbes as the 655th richest person in the world and was also named as London’s first self-made hedge fund billionaire.

Bacon founded Moore Capital Management LLC, named after his mother’s maiden name and his own middle name, in 1989. It’s two flagship private investment funds have been in existence for almost twenty-one years and he sent clients a letter entitled “Twenty Moore Years”.  In November 2008, a prominent Australian trader Greg Coffey joined Moore Europe Capital Management, the London-based European subsidiary of Moore Capital Management LLC. After the Global Credit Crisis, Moore Capital is now worth around $15 billion and is one of the largest hedge funds in the world. Moore Capital’s main fund has recorded an average annual return of 21% since 1990.

Links

Traders Log entry for Louis Bacon

Investor letter 2010 from Moore Capital

Louis Bacon in the Sunday Times Rich List

Bloomberg on China Stocks

Reuters on the UK’s Hedge Funds

Pierre Lagrange

Pierre Lagrange is a partner and co-founder of GLG Partners.

Background

Born in 1962 in Belgium, he now resides with his family in London and Hampshire. He owned GradeII listed Woodperry House in Oxfordshire, before moving in 2006 to a country house in Hampshire. The Sunday Times Rich List reported that in 2009 he had a wealth of £195m, a fall of £265m from the previous year

Education

Mr. LaGrange received an M.A. in Engineering at Solvay Business School in Brussels.

Early Career

Prior to 1995, Mr Lagrange worked at Goldman Sachs managing global equity portfolios and at JP Morgan in government bond trading.

Later Career: GLG Partners

Pierre Lagrange was a co-founder of the GLG Partners division of Lehman Brothers International (Europe) in 1995 alongside Noam Gottesman and Jonathan Green. Since its formation in 2000, he has been a co-founder and Senior Managing Director of GLG Partners LP. Mr Lagrange has overall responsibility for a number of global equity products, including the GLG European Equity Fund, the GLG Environment Fund, the GLG EAFE Fund and the flagship GLG European Long-Short Fund.

Personal Life

Known to be a keen supporter of London’s Tate galleries and modern art project Artangel, Mr Lagrange reflects the more creative side of Mayfair’s hedge fund set. He was also among the backers of the independently-finance, comic book-based action film ‘Kick Ass.’

Links

Forbes profile

Hedge Fund Journal – Q&A with Pierre Lagrange

 

D. E. Shaw & Co.

Chief Executive, David Shaw

D. E. Shaw & Co., L.P., was founded in 1988 and is headquartered in New York, with additional offices in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It operates as an investment and technology development company and engages in investing in companies as well as financial instruments in industrialised nations and up-and-coming markets.

Its activities range from the deployment of investment strategies based on statistical models or human expertise for the acquirement of active companies, and the financing or development of new ones. The company searches for new investment prospects, which form the basis for a number of funds and other investment vehicles, as well as for the firm’s management of assets on behalf of institutional clients. It also offers debt and equity financing to healthy and financially distressed companies; makes venture capital investments in early and later-stage ventures; and organises and develops new technology-oriented projects.

Links

Crains New Influentials – David Shaw

Crunchbase Profile

James Altucher

James Altucher is one of the most influential and outspoken bloggers and traders of our generation and his opinions often stand oposed to conventional wisdom. He holds a BS in computer science from Cornell University and a master’s degree in the same subject from Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Altucher is the founder of Stockpickr.com, a social network for finance that had millions of unique visitors per month when it was sold to TheStreet.com in 2007. He also was the founder of Reset, a developer of websites for entertainment companies (HBO, Miramax, New Line, BMG, Sony, etc), which was sold in 1998.
He was a weekly columnist from 2004-2009 for The Financial Times, and wrote article for The Street.com, Seeking Alpha, Daily Finance, appeared on CNBC, and has written several books on investing. Altucher is a frequent guest contributor to the Tech Ticker feature on Yahoo! Finance. He is also a nationally ranked chess master.

Financial Times

James Altucher has written over 200 columns for the Financial Times, specialising in bringing the technical strategies used by hedge fund managers to the general public. His columns broadly range into investment topics, comments on the state of the economy and of the wealth management industry.

Hedge Fund Manager

Founder of Formula Capital, James Altucher now manages both hedge funds and funds of hedge funds.

Ideas and Theories

Altucher admits that whilst very wealthy people like to focus on the intrigue of their love lives or to play with their new toys, he is a runound worrier. On the other hand he is a proponent of the idea of “Global Cooling” in opposition to the overwhelming opinion of the scientific community and its assertions that the world is heating artificially due to the emission of global warming.
He also advocates legalizing insider trading in opposition to most of the financial world. He also is a believe that one shouldn’t send their kids to college and one should never own a home.

Links

James Altucher’s Top Stocks for 2010

James Altucher on the Huffington Post

Man Group PLC

Man Group plc was founded in 1783 and is based in London. Through its subsidiaries, it engages in the structuring, sale, and allocation of alternative investment products and solutions as well as functioning as a futures broker.

Man Investments, the Asset Management division, is a major provider in the alternative investment industry. It offers original products and tailor-made solutions to private and institutional investors. Man has been successful in developing leadership in hedge funds and has interests in other asset classes. In its core hedge fund asset class, Man offers funds of hedge funds, structured, style and solitary manager products. Man Investments’ mainstay investment managers form the foundation of the asset management business. They provide the investment content for portfolios and are responsible for portfolio construction, asset allocation decisions and risk management.

Man Global Strategies constructs and manages hedge style and multi-strategy portfolios, including the portfolios for Man Investments’ structured products. It also creates personalised portfolios in conjunction with institutional partners operating in local markets around the globe. It has a team that specifically identifies managers with complementary performance characteristics, and attempts to establish close associations with the managers it chooses.

Links

Man Group website

Man Group stock price on Yahoo

News from the Evening Standard

Kipley J. Lytel

Kipley J. Lytel is the founder of money management firm Montecito Capital Management and a partner in private funds. He principally resides in Montecito California.

Career

With over twenty years of investment finance experience, Mr Lytel has expertise in portfolio management, stocks, bonds, alternative assets, equity valuation, taking companies public and buy/sell recommendations. Mr Lytel served as a lead securities analyst for M.L Stern & Company for over three years. Prior to this he performed management and analyst coverage with two hedge funds, Pacific Strategic Fund Group and DD Capital Management. His background has been marked by his experience as a Generalist, with analyst coverage spanning numerous industries, including; telecommunications and wireless, health care, retail, consumer products, technology, gaming and energy (E&P). In 2008 he was selected by Goldline Research as one of The Most Dependable Wealth Managers of Southern California. Mr. Lytel is ranked as a Five Star investment expert by Paladin Registry, a ranking reserved for the top 3% of investment advisors. He also is a partner with private money funds with different business offices in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and New York City.

Montecito Capital Management

Montecito Capital Management is a financial advisory firm that specialises in portfolio management, modern portfolio strategies, alternative asset classes, financial plans and retirement planning.

Education

Lytel attended the Clermont Colleges with a BA in Economics and an MBA. He holds a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation. He served as a grader/senior grader in the CFA Examination Grading Program for CFA Institute and has been a Regional Expert for CFA Institute’s advisory panel on investment management.

Media

Kip Lytel, CFA, often contributes expert opinions on investments in magazines & media on topics ranging from hedge funds, alternative asset classes to innovations in portfolio management and strategies. His investment views and knowledge is often referenced by Forbes, Business Week, Barron’s Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Financial Planning Magazine, Bloomberg, among other publications. He is the only featured Hedge Fund Expert by CFA Society of Los Angeles and was highlighted in Forbes Magazine as one of the “Ten Most Dependable Wealth Managers of Southern California“.

Links

Montecito Capital Management website

Bullet Proof Portfolio, Lessons From An Insider – Kipley J. Lytel

Mark Kingdon

Mark E. Kingdon is a hedge fund manager and president of the 4 billion USD Kingdon Capital Management, an investment management company which he founded in 1983.

Education

By high school, Kingdon was already authoring an investment newsletter. He went on to attend Columbia University and received and M.B.A from the Harvard Business School.

Early Career

After leaving Columbia College in New York City and then HBS, Kindon began his first job at AT&T. His belief was that by working in the firm’s pension fund administration group he would experience a number of different kinds of investment outfits. In 1975 he went on to join one of those companies, New York based Century Capital Associates, he remained there for eight years.

Personal Life

Kingdon and his wife are devoted to their two children. Outside of work, Kingdon, a third-degree black belt, attends tae kwan do classes three times a week. “No matter how tough the markets are,” he laughs, “when you are out there practicing martial arts against a guy who is twenty years younger and is aiming for your head, you tend not to worry about your stocks. ”

Mark Kingdon is a member of the Columbia College Board of Visitors and also serves on the boards of the Harlem Children’s Zone, Carnegie Hall, the New York City Police Foundation and the Academy of Political Science. He further endowed the C. Lowell Harriss Professorship of Economics in 1998 in honor of his undergraduate mentor.

Quotes

“I knew I wanted to get into this business from the time I was thirteen, when I was given a couple of shares of stock. Even though the market nose-dived soon thereafter, I was taken with the idea that you could buy something that made money and then go out and do something else during the day. That seemed like a wonderful way to make a living. ”

Links

Kingdon Capital Management Site

 

 

Alan Howard

Alan Howard (born in September 1963) is the co-founder of Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP, a hedge fund with more than $26 billion under management. The group’s master fund returned 20.4 percent in 2008 and 18 percent in 2009, according to the Financial Times. According to the 2009 Sunday Times Rich List, Howard has risen to become the second wealthiest hedge fund manager. A graduate of Imperial College London, he began his financial career at Salomon Brothers.

Brevan Howard

Howard stands at the helm of Europe’s largest and arguably most successful hedge fund. With an emphasis on risk management, Howard’s business continued to perform strongly, despite the industry’s losing streak. Brevan Howard continues to make money – fee incomes more than doubled in the first four months of 2009 – and is known to have hired new talent for product launches this year.
‘An astute reading of imminent danger helped the publicity-shy City financier Alan Howard become one of Britain’s newest billionaires, as his Brevan Howard hedge fund liquidated 80% of its investments into cash at an early point in the global financial crisis.’

Geneva

Alan Howard, the third-richest hedge fund manager in the UK has relocated to Geneva. He is understood to have moved for lifestyle reasons. Howard and his family are known to have lived near the city for a number of years. Howard’s wide if French and his children are said to be fluently bilingual.
Howard’s departure is a blow to London’s standing as a hedge fund centre but Brevan Howard will keep around 250 employees in the UK. The company has embraced Geneva’s offshore regulatory status and lower taxes, two essential factors providing them a competitive advantage in managing global operations.

Quotes

“We’re a company that prefers to have a low profile. That’s just the way we are.”

Links

Brevan Howard site

Alan Howard’s traders log entry

EIM Group

The founder of EIM giving an interview

In 1992, Arpad Busson founded the EIM Group in Switzerland to specialise in the construction and management of tailor-made funds and portfolios of hedge funds. In 1999 EIM became the first fund-of-hedge-funds company to have its manager selection and monitoring, portfolio management, investment and client reporting processes certified under international ISO 9002-1994 quality management standards. The company now has offices in 8 cities around the world including London, New York, Paris, Monaco, Amsterdam and Zurich. In 2009 EIM USA was awarded “Best Fund of Hedge Funds in the category of Multi-Strategy Funds of Hedge Funds with assets between US$ 250 million and US$ 1 billion” at the 2009 HFM Week Awards.

Links

Arpad Busson’s EIM on a hiring spree – FIN Alternatives

EIM Group site