6 Comments
 

Aum is not the entire story and cant be a singular reason to choose one over the other, but this varies wildly by strat. As an eq mkt neutral special sits person, anything from $500mm to just a few bn is the sweet spot. Under can be sketchy, over a few bn you lose a lot of the investable universe.

For LT secular winner/mutual fund guys, aim for higher aum. That’s stability and (hopefully) a nice cut of the bonus pool.

Ultimately, consider how stable the LPs are, whether the strat the PM is running is repeatable, and think about scalability before only considering an aum number

 

For me, $500mm. It is a bit more de-risked at that point. I'd be OK joining smaller but there would have to be something special or unique in it for me to assume that extra risk --ie, clear upward path, strong aum momentum, a fund with lots of potential. That's me, though. Lots of people join smaller funds to break into the industry and then try to use that as opportunity to move upstream to a larger fund later.

 

Agreed. On the L/S SM side, these are typically the shops with no more than 15 IPs, sometimes as low as 7 — that’s over a billion per head. With those economics, everyone can clip high 6, low 7 figures in a decent year, multiples of that in a good year. All the big tiger Cubs, pershing, soroban, eminence, Melvin, dragoneer, altimeter, whale rock are examples.

 
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