Balyasny turmoil
What the heck is wrong with this place? They hire and fire heads of their business units like clockwork every couple of years. Have run through multiple heads of equities, macro, quant in the last 5 years. This is despite promoting the “BAMily” super friendly, supposedly unique culture. Also posting some of the worst returns within the peer group. Who has more color? Is senior management that incompetent?
following.
Ha great question. Wonder who will replace JR (think Dmitry overseeing equities atm?)
Yeah not quite sure what their problem is, but I’ve heard some pretty insane guarantee #s for PMs there (L/S).
they seem to give everyone high starting numbers. Giving out ugrads 300-400k offers too. Why is everyone leaving then.
If I were an allocator invested in them this would be a huge red flag. Seems there's some kind of one-sided dick measuring contest between Dmitry and Ken Griffin..
Is this for L/S or quant?
Duh? When the company is paying top dollar, they expect to get something in return. Some people are pushed out cause they aren't meeting expectations, and some people quit cause they're burned out from the pressure.
Think they just hired Peter Goodwin from P72
Anyone have details on this guy? Can only imagine the guarantee he got
what guarantee numbers have you heard?
bump. also any insight into Corbets relative to the rest of BAM? looks like a lot of recent hires there
Buddy of mine is PM there he’s very sharp. It has potential
I feel like the firms that make a big deal about how great their culture are and pay for Bloomberg/BI articles, Glassdoor reviews, etc. are often pretty toxic places. I have seen many cases of this. Maybe the management knows it and has hired HR to repair their reputation, so it happens after the fact.
This is just true. Any firm that rambles nonstop about how great their culture is...never has great culture. Places with good culture don't need to yammer on about their culture all the time, if at all.
Could it be that it's just damn hard to win in this business? Amused at the comments taking cheap shots... it's just hard and extremely competitive. You find and nurture a great PM, KG and Izzy come and start throwing tens of millions at him to jump ship. XP same deal with subpar returns, it's just extraordinary the returns Citadel is posting. Literally out of the ordinary.
From what HHs have said they try to avoid overlapping in strategies and products. While at the same time they have a very laid back culture as you mentioned. This results in hiring multiple business heads, which to your point makes no sense, certain businesses even when are looking to expand have 2 business heads which again minimal sense. That said seems this stuff is all more at high level. MLP would say is other way minimal business heads, tons of pods overlapping pods. MLP fires entire pods and start new ones way faster.
Citadel is whole other culture as we all know and they do a lot of more unique. To your other point this is prolly where Baly gets into trouble trying to duplicate Ken’s aggressive growth in certain businesses, be it quant equities, commodities, or RV fixed income.
What happened in 2023 is that BAM got caught being overweight equity long/short in not a great year for that strategy AND their ELS biz underperformed the rest. They are going to try to catch up in the other spaces (commodities, quant in particular) but it ain't easy. In equity long short they will throw money at people to get better teams in the door, but again so is everyone else, so not sure how they gain ground.
Problem is it takes at least 1 year to get a team in the door with non-competes, and then it takes at year to fully ramp up. So they’re at least 2 years behind, and that’s not factoring in how long they’ve already been behind in this space without realizing it. The real challenge is trying to figure out which asset class/strategy will be hot in 3 years from now and start developing that business now.
Isn’t their equity L/S business supposed to be their flagship? You don’t hear about Citadel’s L/S product having a terrible year (or MLPs or P72s for that matter). Bottom line is that at all the major platforms most of the risk is deployed in L/S so to blame a 10% underperformance versus peers seems a little bit of a cop out.
On the point of building out new businesses - also a little misleading. From what I understand they tried to build a quant business around 5-6 years ago and fired everyone. They have had at least 2-3 macro heads that they’ve fired in the same time period (Colin Lancaster and Tim Wilkinson) and they also had tried to build a commodity business years ago and fired everyone.
They are in the process of building a commodity business right now. Dmitry’s strategy is to go to top schools and beg quant majors with 400k starting offers, instead of taking people from industry. He personally goes to target schools.
Totally fair, but again we trying to explain why it's not exactly the worst place on earth to work. Remember Citadel is basically closed to new investors, MLP same. So maybe their peer group has changed overtime and many of the issues discussed exist at other places like some larger multi-strat or SM types. Yup they folded both quant and commodities in the least 5-10 years and now trying to build out both strategies and early results so far looks better. Quant and Commodities did well in 2023 as mentioned ELS was what sunk them. Further to your point about ELS being their flagship, well they sort of fired all the other divisions and missed the initial macro/quant move in 2018+.
Idk - I think that ballyasny has run into the problem of under investing in the business
Why don’t they have a quant platform like the other guys - because they never put the dollars upfront int tech and infrastructure
I think they have missed out on scaling in the non equity l/s strategies - like credit / macro / quant / commods
I don’t understand why multistrats are bloated short term LS equity vehicles. I understand there is a familiarity bias, but the entire purpose is to combine as many uncorrelated return streams with positive expected value. Millennium seems to be the most agnostic (as long as one is RV focused).
BAM has grown wildly fast and now is hyper focused on PMs that can scale huge rather than PMs that are truly additive.
That’s what happens in the no man’s land of not paying up as much as Citadel and MLP but being huge enough that you can’t hire the PMs who are more capacity constrained at a few hundred million dollar books and have them make a meaningful difference.
They were a development system for the most talented people that I know in the industry. Get developed at BAM then get poached by one of the bigger pod shops because BAM wouldn’t promote them the same way or pay them the same way as the bigger pods offered.
On the macro side, it’s a lot of ex Citadel alumni and sellside folks. Some of whom haven’t made money in a few years from what I understand. But like all multi strat biz - the distribution of returns is very bifurcated. I do think funds are starting to realize it’s better to allocate 750m-1BN to a star trader rather than 200m to 5 traders who might crowd themselves on liquidity and run very correlated to each other.
Corbets was an expansionary strategy they launched when times were good. Now times are bad and a lot of restructuring/leaving Corbets. Not a lot of experienced PMs hired to begin with and analysts are being cut
Bump — any recent insights on how things are going? Know the Peter Goodwin hire was intended to be an important shift
Also Alberto Mann
Lot of disinformation on this thread. For one, building a systematic platform probably takes 3+ years at minimum, and that's prob 2 years too light. Very different than L/S equity.
Citadel L/S equity has medicore years all the time. The returns you see are for Wellington, which has benefit of diversification into other strats + an extra 3-4x of leverage from that vol enhancement.
Corbets is BAM with different name, sames as Surveyor/Ashler vs GE at Citadel. Only reason to start it is so mgmt teams get 5 meetings from Corbets and 5 from Baly (because they wouldnt have said to 10 with Baly).
Alberto + Peter are both excellent and some of the best in business at what they do. Will be very interesting to see how Longaeva does since it's so different than everything else in MM world. I'm definitely rooting for them
haha "so different". they're all the same more or less.
As corporate IR I can tell you that we know the sub-firm names and pods, so we're not taking 10 meetings from BAM bc we consolidate it and maybe take one, whether you're Corbets or something else. Same with Ashler/Citadel etc. Depends on the IR team and their strategy.
Would disagree. Corbets is the exact same (similar to ashler / surveyor), but longaeva at least being pitched as (very) different.
Risk is netted at top. Higher vol target and lower gross. No pass through to sector PM’s, but no overlap in coverage and get economics in total fund not just your sleeve.
Completely different model / incentives / return stream / scaling requirements/ investment philosophy
So is it a completely different fund/vehicle from the rest of firm? From the LP/allocator perspective, I mean. My guess is that it is part of the master fund (Atlas) but also available as a separate vehicle? But I'm not sure how the economics and netting would work if it is part of the master fund, so I'm probably wrong I guess. Baly is also raising for VC/privates fund so they've gotta have more separate vehicles than just a few variations of the master; so in that vein I guess it's believable longaeva would be separate as well.
From Atlas vantage point, it’s as if it were one giant pod. No different than a PM who has analysts running carves under them, those carves don’t get direct pass through it’s still aggregated at the pod level
so basically a mkt neutral SM?
in fairness they are up ytd while C/M are down. altho with the current vol that can change very quickly tbf
How much are c/m down? Or more like flat?
cit -0.85
mlp -2
nishant kumar (bbg) on linkedin is my go to for hfstats
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