October 2023
UPDATES (cont.) MILLENNIUM LOOKS TO DIVERSIFY BUSINESS
There has been a significant development in the multimanager sphere as Millennium Management and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors look at partnership options. According to the Financial Times, these two parties are at an ‘advanced stage’ of discussion.
The partnership will allow systematic trading manager Schonfeld to manage a portion of Millennium’s assets. This move is not a first for Millennium, which has a similar arrangement in place with WorldQuant, dating back to 2015.
BUILDING AN ASIAN CITADEL
Bloomberg reports on Kurt Baker prepping a large new multimanager fund, 30th Century Partners. If he achieves his target raise of $3 billion, this will become one of the biggest fund launches of the past few years. Baker, the former head of Morgan Stanley's Asia Prime Brokerage business and ex-Millennium Management, is aiming for a launch date of June 2024. His goal is to emulate Citadel, with almost a dozen investment teams trading in Southeast Asia and Australia. Given the high costs and extensive structures involved in setting up a multimanager fund, these launches are rare, so we will watch this one with great interest to see how he gets on.
JJJ SPINS OUT OF MOORE
JJJ Capital has recently announced one of the biggest launches of the year. This is a $3 billion inflation-focused hedge fund, set up by Joeri Jacobs and other ex Moore Capital traders. It is clearly not a bitter parting with Bloomberg reporting $1 billion of seed capital coming from Moore Capital.
SECONDARY GROWTH
As well as seeing plenty of new private credit funds, secondaries funds continue to trend. Most recently, Goldman Sachs has successfully raised $14.2 billion for its flagship secondaries fund, Vintage IX, which is above their target. Beyond Vintage IX, Goldman also successfully added a further $1 billion to their Vintage Infrastructure Partners fund, which takes their total secondaries business assets to over $45 billion. Another way to gain exposure to the space is to buy into a secondaries fund manager, which is exactly what Carmignac and General Atlantic have done, having both taken ‘strategic’ stakes in Clipway as well as backing its first $4 billion fund.
DOING IT THE RENAISSANCE WAY
There is an excellent podcast with Peter Brown, the legendary CEO of Renaissance Technologies, speaking on Goldman Sachs Exchanges: Great Investors (link). Brown has proved himself time and again to be exceptional, not only as a mathematician and the inspiration behind the Deep Blue® IBM project but, more importantly, maintaining the incredible Jim Simons legacy. In 2021, Brown was named sole chair of the firm. Given the firm's mathematical/ statistical focus, Renaissance rarely looks for employees with financial backgrounds (Brown joined from IBM); instead, Renaissance’s interest is data analysis, computer and programming
backgrounds, and picking out those individuals with the highest work ethics. On the pod, he outlined five core pillars that define the firm: 1) The scientific approach to investing. 2) The importance of collaboration - science works best through collaborative teamwork and mixing teams. 3) Having the best infrastructure money can buy. 4) No interference (or very limited) on trading systems. 5) Leaning on the firm's experience. Looking at Renaissance's future, Brown added, the firm will continue to improve its systems and "stick to its knitting."
This newsletter is a selection of the previous month’s sector news, trends, regulatory developments and best practices. Any opinions expressed are those of the author only and the newsletter does not constitute personal advise or a personal recommendation. We always seek to maintain tight editorial standards. If you have any comments on this content, please do not hesitate to get in touch with the team.
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