Highest earning portfolio managers

I’m in cal BC right now and I was wondering we all hear about how much top hedge fund managers make but we never hear about how much their rainmakers bring in. Saw a comment that said Grant wonders ( Viking ) brought in 30mn in a year and the Pershing square guy who thought of the CDS trade made 20mn. Jesse Cohn ( Elliot) is selling his NY penthouse for 39mn  so that probably put his nw at maybe 100mn? 
I'm really curious plus I don’t care if it’s a SM or MM fund

49 Comments
 

"investment skill is indiscernible from luck"

That's a bad take man, but given your hit rate is so high on this forum that gets a pass. Investment skill should be determined by two things: track record & process. Track record requires decades to truly be measured effectively. 10yrs is solid but 20+yrs is best. That said, some will be lucky here so how do you weed out luck from skill? Process. Figure out what process they're applying, how consistent it is, how they think about upside vs. risk, etc. This can absolutely be done if you're a fund of funds / pensio fund / etc where you get a peek under the good & can check quality of process

 

Thats more of a philosophical take than me saying no ones skilled. The analogy of take a billion monkeys and assign them stock portfolios and let them trade at random, eventually you'll get Warren Buffett. I believe investment skill exists, but if I'm being intellectually honest, performance above a benchmark could be random just as much as it could be skill

 

The highest he cleared was 8mn and he was in the 3mn-6mn range his other years. He left to launch his own fund but lockdowns made capital raising difficult and I believe he pushed back the launch date by a year/year and a half. 

Also feel like it’s important to note that he comes from an extremely wealthy and well connected family. Him launching his own fund had much less to do with outlier performance and more to do with this preexisting network and access to capital.

Not at all taking away from him, he is legit and gifted at finance. There’s just a little bit more to his story than what gets thrown around on here. 
 

 

Might not be 30 million but still nothing to sneeze at i guess.

How does vikings compensation structure for pms actually work though? Do you get paid a percent of the performance fees your ideas generate? Or is there some other formula?

989o989o99oiiooo9999kok999kk999koo9o9o
 

That’s pretty much it. 

-Base salary 

-Fund bonus, which depends on how Viking as a whole did 

-PnL bonus, which is based on how your specific ideas did 


The PnL formula is based on things like seniority, how much aum the PM has, and investment performance. Each PM is going to have their own specific contract but that’s the gist of it. 

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