Hedge Funds Faced Choppy Waters in 2015, but Chiefs Cashed In - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Those riches came during a year of tremendous market volatility that was so bad for some Wall Street investors that the billionaire manager Daniel S. Loeb called it a “hedge fund killing field.”
- ...13 more annotations...
-
Their firms do more business in some corners of the financial world than many banks, including lending to low-income homeowners and small businesses. They lobby members of Congress. And they have put large sums of money behind presidential candidates, at times pumping tens of millions of dollars into super PACs.
-
The hedge fund industry has now ballooned in size, to $2.9 trillion, from $539 billion in 2001. So, too, has the pay of the industry’s leaders.
-
When Institutional Investor first started ranking hedge fund pay 15 years ago, George Soros topped the Alpha list, earning $700 million. In 2015, Mr. Griffin, who started trading as a Harvard sophomore out of his dorm room, and James H. Simons, a former math professor, each took home $1.7 billion
-
Mr. Griffin’s firm, Citadel, has grown from a hedge fund that managed family and pension fund money into a $25 billion firm
-
He recently made headlines when he paid $500 million for two pieces of art. In September, Mr. Griffin, 47, reportedly paid $200 million to buy several floors in a new luxury condo tower that is being built at 220 Central Park South, in Manhattan.
-
He was the biggest donor to the successful re-election campaign of Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago. More recently he has poured more than $3.1 million into the failed presidential campaigns of Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, as well as the Republican National Committee
-
Mr. Simons, 78, has been a major political donor of the Democrats, donating $9.2 million in 2016, including $7 million to Priorities USA Action, a super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton.
-
Among 2015’s top hedge fund earners are five men who actually lost money for some investors last year but still made handsome profits because their firms are so big
-
For many managers, collecting large pay, even when performance was not tops, has become a side effect of growing bigger. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “Once a hedge fund gets to be large enough to produce incredibly outsized remuneration, the hardest part of due diligence is determining whether the investment process is affected,
-
“Is the goal to continue to make money in a risky environment or is the goal to preserve assets on which you collect fees?”
-
Michael Platt, the founder of BlueCrest Capital Management, took home $260 million, according to Alpha. It was a difficult year for his firm, once one of the biggest hedge funds in Europe with $37 billion in investor money. He lost investors in his flagship fund 0.63 percent over the year and then told them he was throwing in the towel.