Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - December 2008 / January 2009 - (Page 20)

Proﬁle Chicago Funds of Funds Interview Stanley Fink Despite the chaos in the hedge fund industry, former Man Group CEO Stanley Fink came out of a short-lived retirement to take the helm at a small but innovative commodities trading firm. Back into the S By Loch Adamson Fray the third quarter and a global staff of 1,800 (the ﬁrm ran just $4.7 billion when Fink became CEO in 2000). ISAM, with a comparatively paltry $200 million in assets and 17 employees, seemed a perfect match. Founded in 2003 by Roy Sher, a proprietary trader who had worked for Merrill Lynch & Co. and hedge fund outﬁt GLG Partners, the ﬁrm, then called International Standard Cayman Management, initially prospered by trading gold futures. Then, about 18 months ago, Sher and his business partner, Alan Amler, moved to capitalize on dislocations in the global markets by designing a new fund, the International Standard Macro Fund, to trade in the largest futures markets: foreign exchange, equities and commodities. Although ISAM’s funds have done well — its gold fund has delivered annualized returns of 17 percent over the past ﬁve years, for instance, and its macro fund was up 7 percent this year through November — the ﬁrm is still largely unknown in the institutional market. This summer, Sher and Amler sought some heavyweight assistance to gain a wider audience and recruited Lord Levy, a former Labour Party fundraiser, as the ﬁrm’s chairman. Levy phoned Fink, a close friend, to solicit his opinion of the ﬁrm and its partners. Fink gave Levy an enthusiastic review. Not long afterward, Sher and Amler recruited Fink to run the company. Fink says he couldn’t resist the challenge of ﬂexing his entrepreneurial skills at a moment when the ﬁnance in- tanley Fink remains a hot commodity. Although the former deputy chairman and CEO of Londonbased alternative-investment ﬁrm Man Group — the biggest publicly traded fund of hedge funds — made a determined effort to retire this summer, his friends wouldn’t let him. Barraged with job offers from hedge fund ﬁrms large and small, Fink, 51, abruptly abandoned his plans to become a full-time philanthropist and threw himself back into the corporate fray just as the ﬁnancial crisis took a turn for the worse. In mid-September, Fink resurfaced as the newly minted CEO of London-based International Standard Asset Management, a commodities trading ﬁrm that specializes in gold and global macro strategies. CEO is a familiar title for Fink, who wore it for seven of his 21 years at Man, but the scale of ISAM’s business is a far cry from that of the global operation he left behind. That suits the soft-spoken, avuncular chief executive. Fink, who survived treatment for a brain tumor four years ago, was intrigued by the opportunity to help a small, highly successful ﬁrm develop its business strategy, and he wasn’t interested in running another huge company — Man had $67.6 billion in assets under management at the end of 20 • INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR’S ALPHA • DECEMBER 2008/JANUARY 2009

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

Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - December 2008 Contents Letter from the Editor Longs & Shorts Inside the Trade Pension Corner The Good Guys Interview: Stanley Fink Cover Story: The New Regulatory Reality United States: The Usual Suspects Europe: Flirting with Unity Asia-Pacific: What Asian Contagion? In Theory In Focus Strategies Research Center Alpha Bytes Unhedged Commentary

Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - December 2008

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