Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 49)

Julian Robertson Jr. in 1990 right out of business school at the University of North Carolina, Robertson’s alma mater. Three years later Ainslie left to co-found Maverick Capital in Dallas; he runs the now New York–based ﬁrm much like Robertson ran his. Six separate sector executives, each overseeing ﬁve to seven analysts, funnel their ideas to Ainslie, who vets the suggestions with limited partner Steven Galbraith, a former chief investment ofﬁcer and chief U.S. investment strategist at Morgan Stanley. Last year the $11 billion Maverick generated a roughly 28 percent return on its ﬂagship Maverick Fund and 53 percent on Maverick Levered. Galbraith said at a recent gathering that half the gains were from shorting ﬁnancial stocks. Maverick portfolios include a long-only fund and a 130/30 fund. Since 2006, Lasry, who founded the New York–based ﬁrm in 1995 with his sister Sonia Gardner, has quadrupled assets to take advantage of distressed-debt opportunities and other special situations. Avenue has $16.5 billion in assets under management, including $10 billion in U.S. funds, $4.5 billion in Asia (including a $2 billion fund for institutional investors) and $2 billion in Europe. 47 Michael Platt BlueCrest Capital Management $220 MILLION 44 David Harding Winton Capital Management $225 MILLION David Harding’s second go-round with hedge funds seems to have worked out even better than his ﬁrst. In 2007 his $5.1 billion ﬂagship Winton Futures Fund was up 18 percent, despite having been down a combined 10 percent in February and March. The 46-year-old futures trader made money in currencies, bonds and agricultural commodities. In 1987 he co-founded London-based Adam, Harding and Lueck, where he was in charge of the quantitative research team. In 1994, Man Group bought AHL, and three years later, Harding started Winton Capital. The ﬁrm now manages $13.4 billion. Michael Platt and William Reeves have built BlueCrest Capital Management into one of London’s biggest hedge fund ﬁrms since opening it in 2000 with $117 million in assets. In previous lives they were both managing directors and senior proprietary traders at JPMorgan. By the end of 2007, the ﬁrm had about $14.6 billion in assets under management, and its largest fund — the $5.2 billion BlueTrend Fund, which uses a systematic trading strategy — had an annualized return of 16.4 percent, including 27.8 percent last year. BlueCrest Capital International, the ﬁrm’s initial fund, specializes in ﬁxedincome and currency markets and has compounded at about 12 percent annually. BlueCrest also manages an emerging-markets fund and a macro fund. Reeves is mostly retired from the business. ﬁrm into the ranks of the elite. The London-based shop had yet another outstanding year in 2007 by religiously adhering to its tried-and-true strategy of bottom-up stock picking, making long-short equity investments in widely overlooked companies its managers deemed mispriced. Sloane Robinson selectively targets Europe, Asia and certain emerging markets, and names many of its funds after the regions in which they invest. Last year the SR Phoenicia (Class A) Fund generated a 42 percent return, beating its 36 percent annualized return since inception in 2001. SR Phoenicia (Class B) Carthaginian was up 35 percent in 2007 and nearly 30 percent since inception in 2005. The 14-year-old SR Global Fund (Class B) Asia rose 30 percent and is up roughly 21 percent since it was founded. Robinson is responsible for risk management at the ﬁrm; Sloane manages the international portfolios. 50 David Shaw D.E. Shaw & Co. $210 MILLION 47 George Robinson Sloane Robinson Investment Services $220 MILLION 44 Marc Lasry Avenue Capital Group $225 MILLION 47 Hugh Sloane Sloane Robinson Investment Services $220 MILLION For the past two years, Marc Lasry, 48, has been gearing up for something he clearly saw coming: a huge boom for distressed investors. Avenue Capital had returns of 7 to 10 percent in 2007, making money on energy company Calpine Corp., which recently emerged from bankruptcy, and glass-container maker Owens-Illinois. Sloane Robinson Investment Services is well known in the U.K. Not so in the U.S., where it has managed to stay well below the ﬁnancial-press radar since its founding in 1993 by Hugh Sloane and George Robinson. A recent string of above-average returns has catapulted the $15 billion Onetime Columbia University computer science professor David Shaw has built one of the biggest hedge fund operations in the world. It’s taken a while — 20 years — but New York– based D.E. Shaw & Co. today has some $35 billion in assets and 1,300 employees. D.E. Shaw’s strategy largely draws on complicated mathematical, computer-driven models, but the ﬁrm also pursues various qualitative investments that include private equity. Shaw, 56, who hasn’t been involved in the day-to-day investing for several years, just makes it on our list based on his cut of the ﬁrm’s fees and returns on his own invested capital. (We don’t include what Shaw pocketed from the estimated $1.2 billion sale of 20 percent of the company to Lehman Brothers last year.) As chief scientist of D.E. Shaw Research, Shaw devotes much of his time nowadays to computational biochemistry, an arcane discipline that seeks to apply computer algorithms to biology. APRIL 2008 • INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR’S ALPHA • 49

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - April 2008

Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - April 2008 Contents Letter from the Editor Longs & Shorts Pension Corner: Here to Eternity The Good Guys: Voice of Hope Cover Story: The Kings of Cash Where the Money Is Into the Light Interview: Proceeding with Caution Strategies: A Convenient Truth Alpha Bytes: Village Voice Unhedged: Commentary: No Time for Complacency

Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - April 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.