Weiss Asset Management
Looking to get some color on these guys, been a while since there has been a thread on them. Seems like they are multi-strat but where are they best/biggest? Prestige, comp, exits?
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Also curious. Heard they have had very consistent returns (never a down year).
This is true
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From what I have heard lots of smart people are working there but its a relatively small shop (maybe 50-70 people). Quant focused MM HF. Roughly 50% of staff are Harvard/MIT/UChicago PhDs. Prestige in Boston area, not so much anywhere else.
They are an extremely smart group, but the majority do not have PhDs. They are a blend of quant/fundamental but mostly quant. They have an extremely good track record (never in their history have they had a down calendar year). They also have a very open culture - they are the opposite of a pod structure.
i highly recommend them if you get the chance
How does their fundamental l/s strategy compare to smaller $1-2b SM hedge funds?
curious as well
Do they even have a L/S strategy?? It's really hard to know what strategies they are running now. At one point, they were doing a lot of quantitative arbitrage stuff in Asia.
Any comp numbers?
Also interest in WLB and comp
Curious as well. Hard to see how anyone gets paid when they’re running $3b and have 50 employees.
Think entry level pay is pretty good (above street) but I agree, tough to see how that would ever be able to progress… They do seem to be decently levered (8b form ADV)
Have a friend there and interviewed with them back in college.
Track record of returns was marketed by the firm (never a down year). Friend said new analyst comp is high (350-400 TC) and WLB depends on PM but generally good.
The strategies sounded relatively esoteric.
extremely hard to believe given their AUM/head...
They manage $8 BN and have ~80 total employees (so probably around 35 people on their investment team). That's not a bad ratio. Why are you surprised that pay is that high?
Which is their AUM 3b on its HP or 8b on ADV?
I think their AUM is $3B but they lever up to $8B. can someone confirm?
This is correct - aum is 3B. Form ADV will always be regulatory assets (so will include leverage).
comp number is around 350 for first year out of undergrad. They don’t really hire out of IB. Their AUM is low but the fees they charge are astronomically high. something like 2 and 25 plus a very substantial pass through which makes the management fee substantially more than 2 in practice.
Do you know what their returns have been that allows them to charge such high fees? Citadel/MLP charge similar fees but they offer a very differentiated product.
after fees historically it has averaged around 10% and they have never had a down calendar year.
They are also extremely selective in who they let invest. They don’t increase AUM often, but when they do, they only select who they feel are the most worthy charitable / university endowments. Starting at the top, there is a strong culture at the firm surrounding ethics and charitable giving.
Damn after fees 10%. Pretty impressive, is that over their 30+ years or short time frame?Wondering if they’re taking new capital now, I heard they were expanding their main Boston office.
30 year average. I am not sure if they are raising capital or not. It is a wildly successful fund that nobody seems to talk about
Do you know how big their l/s equity strategy is?
it’s maybe one out of 10-12 groups they have there, but all groups are expected to work together and you’d want to contribute to other things too
Do you know what comp progression is once you’ve been there for a few years? The economics don’t make sense for the AUM per head
interested as well, seems hard to see the path upwards if this 350-400k number is right… anyone know if that is fundamental or quant?
The fees are enormous. A large fraction of everyone’s base pay and all technology/data costs/office costs are charged to investors on top of the 25% performance fee and the management fee. So a 3B fund generating 10% (historically they avg 10% after fees so this is a “low” year) leads to 75m in performance fees. I believe 10% of all this first goes to the WAM charitable fund (not sure on this though), and 68m would be available for bonuses. There are maybe 30-35 investment employees and 100 total employees?
From what i’ve heard, comp scales well. In the last decade, they have never had a single investment employee who was there longer than 2 years get poached to a competitor.
Let’s assume management takes 1/3 (optimistic since there’s quite a few execs), and the ~12 PMs take home 2-3mm each on average. 68-22-30=16. That leaves 500k on average for the ~30 analysts. Nothing to dismiss but much lower than other elite funds.
Weiss has pass-through economics that are similar to multi-managers so stated returns are after those substantial fees (which do cover compensation among other expenses), management fees and performance fees. This means gross returns need to be quite a bit higher than 10% to hit 10% net. I don't really want to get into the exact details of firm economics.
What I can say is that at the end of the day, the compensation structure for teams is based on pnl of each team. However, the firm tries to incentivize collaboration and contributions to that firm rather than giving the PM a formulaic payout and sole discretion how to split the payout. For new analysts, the compensation starts in the ranges cited in the thread and generally has more moderate growth in the first couple of years, and the more significant growth occurs as they make more significant individual contributions to profits (this can happen 0-2 years in, but when that happens really depends on the analyst). Also worth pointing out that the majority of PMs started as new analysts rather than experienced laterals so that is a big opportunity for career growth.
If the specific question is "can you make 1-2M+ as an analyst?", the answer is yes but that would require very clear significant contribution to team pnl. Most people seem to feel the comp is generally fair, the culture is excellent and end up staying long term.
For some reason, everyone on here seems to think that if you don't have 500M-1B AUM per investment team member then the fund can't have reasonable compensation. It might be true that your only chances of hitting $10M in year 4 as an analyst is having a great year at a Tiger/Viking/Pershing-size fund, but plenty of firms (especially multi-strat) where people are paid well have much lower aum/head.
- Citadel: 60B, 2500 employees
- Millenium: 60B, 5000 employees
- DE Shaw: 55B, 2000 employees
Disclaimer: Numbers taken from wikipedia
Does anyone know how comp scales after the first few years?
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Interested as well
For undergrad roles my understanding is that the internship is their primary recruiting tool. Very selective and weighted towards Harvard/MIT (like half the class). Believe they do closed-end fund arbitrage and some interesting SPAC strategies. Pretty esoteric.
They are a cross between an alpha factory like 2s and a traditional fundamental MMHF. They are a blend of quant and fundamental. They have teams and individual team comp is somewhat tied to performance, although there's still a lot of cross subsidies between teams. There is a strong culture of collaboration between employees, and an investment committee is ultimately in charge of deciding the allocation of the "big trades" rather than individual PMs deciding on their own. Also, it didn't seem like they were willing to offer solid contracts concerning bonus guarantees or payout percentage, so most likely very few senior PMs get to keep the upside of their trades. FWIW they were willing to offer me $1-2M for a hybrid senior analyst/junior PM role, but most people below MD are probably earning much less than $1M.
A lot of people on this forum would probably consider this their dream company with the high pay, low risk, collaborative culture, and prestigious peers. However, I personally didn't like their culture: the socialism, forgone upside potential, snobbery, and general sense of risk aversion from most of the employees. Personally I'd rather commit suicide than screen all my major trades thru an investment committee. Imagine a bunch of Harvard/MIT/Princeton/Stanford grads who really believed they were the smartest guys in the room, probably were in fact the smartest guys in the room their whole lives, and didn't think guys from T2 schools like Brown had anything useful to contribute. Anyway that's not to diss their actual investment results which are absolutely fantastic.
The info about closed fund arbitrage is very old news which reflects their founding. Their current suite of strategies is comparable to what you would find at any big MMHF like millenium. However I would guess they're much better at "blending" the substrategies together since there's a top down investment committee deciding allocation quite rigorously rather than being a giant free for all between PMs.
if they weren't willing to offer bonus guarantees or payout percentage, meaning it's discretionary, then how are you surmising they offered you $1-2M?
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