King Street Capital - Any insight?
Dear WSO community,
I have been looking but couldn’t find anything on King Street Capital Management on this forum, although they are one of the biggest hedge funds in the world with ~$20B AUM.
I understand they are a special situations / event-driven hedge fund and can invest across the capital structure. Also they have been recently involved in an activist fight with Toshiba but that’s about all I know and can find about them.
Does anyone have an insight in their culture, comp and work on a day-to-day basis? Also, how are they regarded vs other top-tier HFs?
"stellar distressed shop"
Ridiculous that people who have no idea what they’re talking about comment on this thread.
They built a CLO platform a few years ago and it’s a completely separate team from their core flagship strategies. Performance at KS recently has sucked like many other funds, they are replacing the high fee money with either renegotiated LP contracts or moving LPs into locked up, hurdle-rate drawdown funds of which they’ve raised upwards of 5-6 funds so far.
If you are joining the CLO platform don’t expect your experience to be in anyway comparable to a typical distressed HF experience.
Returns below (offshore flagship): 1997 12.2 1998 7.1 1999 14.7 2000 12.8 2001 15.1 2002 4.0 2003 22.5 2004 9.7 2005 9.6 2006 16.4 2007 16.5 2008 3.7 2009 19.7 2010 5.4 2011 -1.6 2012 12.5 2013 11.6 2014 4.6 2015 -2.2 2016 5.5 2017 5.8 2018 -0.7 2019 1.6
I'm challenging the statement that the CLO team is completely siloed-off from the distressed team. I know its probably verbatim, but I just dug up their pitchbook from 1/2019. While rockford tower (CLO platform) is a separate entity, both platforms use the same analyst bench. 51 researchers, 24 traders, and 12 cap markets guys. The deck goes on to say that all staff/services are provided by KS. They're marketing that they use their senior analysts on both platforms, don't think its fair to say that those analysts would barely interact (and considering there's a decent amount of distressed loans out there sitting in their CLOs anyways (mallinkrodt, pier1, commercial barge, unity)
Again - you have literally no idea what you're talking about. If my pitchbook told you I promise to protect your downside but then I also owned the pier 1 loan, would your response be "oh they must have an angle it's super distressed I'm sure it will go back to par which must be their thesis"?
There's certainly many many firms out there that utilize a single research team across all strategies including par credit which their pitchbooks emphasize. King Street is not one of them.