The Hedge Fund Comeback: Steve Cohen, Ilana Weinstein, Dmitry Balyasny & Mike Rockefeller | #𝐒𝐀𝐋𝐓𝐍𝐘

[Music] right so this is really a a fascinating crowd and i think i have the easiest job of the whole three-day event because this is quite an illustrious panel and i know they all have a lot to discuss um when we look at the state of the hedge fund industry since the great financial crisis the performance has been a little lackluster and there have been lots of conversations about uh what's going on in the hedge fund and hedge fund world and are we ever going to see the sort of uptick uh that we saw pre-crisis and i think the past two years has brought that question to the fore uh where we've seen tremendous performance tremendous alpha and a lot of attraction of assets and and to talk about the question is the hedge fund industry back is the panel and let me introduce everybody very briefly stephen cohen is the founder of 0.72 he is a legendary hedge fund investor as well as proud new owner of the new york mets dmitry balasani runs one of the more interesting hedge funds in the world they manage about nine billion dollars returned more than 30 percent last year alana weinstein is the founder of the idw group one of the hedge fund industries leading hedge hunters hedge fu headhunters and she knows all about talent and what it takes to get on top and stay on top and at the end of our panel is mike rockefeller he's the founder of woodline which was one of 2019's biggest hedge fund launches um in less than two years has eclipsed more than five billion dollars in assets under management and so let's start with a question for everybody are hedge funds back is the industry in a in a better place than it was uh before uh the pandemic lockdown let's start with steve i mean i don't know have they ever left i mean you know hedge funds have been around for a long time i mean there are ups and downs and listen the markets obviously have been pretty good since march of last year and and um you know there's been there's been a lot of um interesting uh you know uh sp there have been specs and there have been you know new companies that have been ipo'd and and so there's a lot of stuff going on underneath the surface a lot of rotations in the markets and so lots of opportunities to create alpha and uh you know i think the performance has been good i don't think it's been extraordinary and so uh you know usually you know in up markets you know there's an opportunity to you know we all tend to look okay and um you know we'll see what it looks like when the world changes anyone else want to jump in i i do think we're in a better place but i think part of that is because there was a real culling of the industry from 2015 to 2018 as much as we've seen these fantastic headlines tooting the resurgence of hedge funds in the past year and change there were all these headlines if you remember also predicting their demise back then and doomsayers about the industry and we saw a lot of funds go out of business big funds that once upon a time were brand name funds like eaton park in blue ridge and convexity and pine river and blue mountain and the list is is honestly too long to recount these were not two-bit players these were real funds that just couldn't make it and i do think where we are now is in a better place because like any industry that matures and we are maturing we're still young but we're maturing there is a weeding out of weaker players and i think a healthier set of funds remain and yes covid like steve suggested that the opportunity set was great for funds there was a lot of volatility fundamentals came to the fore great sector themes were accelerated but there's also also a path dependency to investing and you can take more risk when you're up and um and buy at the bottom with both arms and i think the fact that we do have now and this is continuing to evolve we'll see more funds go out of business and new ones thrive um but the fact that there is a a stronger set of funds today i do think has helped in lifting returns dimitri what are your thoughts what's the state of the industry today yeah i agree with that i think it's i think it's stronger um i i also agree like some capacity came out of the industry which was helpful um i mean there is a little bit of cyclicality uh to the str to the strategies so if you look at just overall long short returns uh in equities from like 16 17 18 they weren't that great right so we got a little bit of a bounce back from that same thing with macro that pretty slow period with very low volatility we're getting a little bit of a bounce back from that and i think in general hedge funds do well when there's some sort of significant change in the markets that then lead to more durable flows for some period of time which we definitely got last year we've gotten kind of bits and pieces of that this year so there's you know there's a decent amount to do and mike you come from a very different perspective your fund launched much sooner than much much later than these gentlemen you're 2019 your west coast base most of us are east coast based how do you see the the world of of hedge funds today what does it look like from from your perspective you know there's no question 2019 and 2020 were strong years for for hedge funds and and long short equity funds um but i'm going to give you a headline barry that that you haven't heard and that is for equity long short 2021 is shaping up to be one of the worst years for the industry and so you say how can that be on an absolute basis hedge funds and equity long short are up eight percent that that is true but from an alpha perspective when you look at the prime broker data from morgan stanley and others alpha generated is actually down seven percent so i think it's important to see okay where are those returns coming from is it driven by the major equity markets being up double digits s p almost 20 percent uh is there anything beyond what's going on uh besides the beta and factors in the market the data would suggest no that being said i i'm optimistic for the industry those are averages and there are funds that are generating alpha and i think lps are as smart as ever in being able to understand what's driving returns and so i think this will be a great year uh when it's over to see who's who those funds actually are so so let's stay with that concept of alpha and i have to ask the question why are so few funds persistently successful why does it seem that alpha is so fleeting and such a small group of outlier funds have consistently come up with a process for managing a business generating above average returns and doing so persistently over long periods of time for for anyone who wants to jump on that well listen i think um i think there are a number of reasons you know i mean i think i think you know a lot of funds tend to be very focused on particular sectors and they and sectors go in and out of favor right um and sometimes it's hard to generate alpha when things aren't going well in sectors um and uh you know in multi-manager platforms that iran dimitri runs you know we can sort of move money around and and uh take advantage of where the action is um you know we at .72 you know we're providing our portfolio managers and our analysts with tons of resources you know tons of new tools and and so you know our people have advantages as far as you know what they can use and and what they're offered as opposed to a smaller fund that just doesn't have the resources that they that they need or you know would want you know could or could afford to you know compete against the bigger funds um you know we're we're very talent oriented and so you know we're we're constantly uh you know regenerating our talent and and always trying to hire the best and brightest and so you know it's sort of uh you know i mean you know with smaller funds you know they lose one important person it's hard to recreate that that person again so so let's stay with the concept of talent and go to alana who runs a talent recruitment firm how do you identify the best talents in the hedge fund space how do you recruit them and more importantly how do you retain them once you get these people in the door we need like a whole panel on that topic at least um you can take the next 35 minutes all right i think everyone's here more to hear with you i'd rather hear you so um if you remember nothing else talent is everything it is everything and this industry is as much about human capital as it is about managing capital you cannot you can forget about alpha if you cannot attract and retain a winning team and i think part of it is all is comes down to first defining what excellence is people bandy about the term analyst and pm and head of business and founder but they often mean different things depending on the fund that we're talking about so i think it's useful to focus on the skill set with an analyst we're really looking for somebody who is fantastic at identifying and systematizing opportunities acquiring information looking for patterns to figure out what's important and what's not and velocity of ideas with the pm we're looking for more of a risk gene and somebody who can commit capital and knows when to lean in and when to lean out can be flexible has the ability to construct a portfolio with diversification and has a sense of how to um really pull the levers of sizing and uh uh and positioning and i think ahead of a business depending again on what we're talking about if it's somebody who sits at point 72 or bali azny at a top multi manager then we're talking about somebody who's almost like the coach of a all-star basketball team or maybe owner of a baseball team who has a has a group of all-star players and really understands how to bring the best out of them without micromanaging them too much and uh can really press on the nexus of uh ambition uh youth and potential and and ultimately once you've identified what you're after it's you have to provide something that the person isn't getting where they are today and our industry i don't think structurally lends itself for the most part to evolution because most funds most of these 12 000 funds are small funds there is a founder at the top who is the committer of capital and when you get to a point or even if they're big funds it may or may not surprise you you could be a 30 billion dollar single manager um fund and when you peel back the curtain the investing team is maybe 10 is 10 individuals who matter so if you want to move into running a business and committing capital you have to leave by its very nature you have to leave and either start your own thing or go to a multi-manager which will give you the autonomy and the tools to be successful um but ultimately this industry is about wanting to be treated fairly having agency and being empowered and the things that lend themselves to that are a funds approach to compensation how much autonomy people are given and the skills that they're learning i think in today's environment which has become more and more complex uh whether it's because of reddit and melting ice cube shorts or just the um amount of data that everyone has access to in the industry you you need an infrastructure that's going to help you pair great um ideas with superior risk management and there are only so many funds that can teach you to do that so that's also a big selling point for why people would leave so let me follow up that question and it's open for everybody if you have a repeatable process and you have a team in place that you have confidence confidence in do the changes in markets like wall street bets and reddit and things like that do they make any difference or can your team just adapt and adjust to whatever comes his way let's i think it depends on what your what your strategy is um i think like the reddit situation makes it tougher to run a concentrated portfolio particularly on the short side and so if you have a fund with a significant amount of aum and a small number of uh relatively small number of short positions like you really have to adapt your strategy for diversified platforms i don't really think it makes much of a much of a difference you know we have thousands and thousands of short positions and you know pretty tight concentration limits particularly on anything with high short interest um but if i could also step step back and just on your previous question of like why you know there's so few firms that are persistently successful i think in addition to resources which i totally agree with i i think the basic issue is markets are pretty efficient and the amount of alpha spread that you can make consistently on an unlevered basis it's pretty small right like a good long short team they can make you know three four five percent a year like over five years on gmv you know unlevered that's pretty good right like one year they might make 10 next year they might be zero but over time if they're hitting four or five percent that's pretty good right if you're neutralizing factors so if you have a fund where you got you know a couple groups of these guys like it's just not enough return you really need to lever it and in order to lever it you need to have a lot of people otherwise you have a lot of risk with a few positions or a few people getting cold so now you're in a completely different business instead of just managing investments you're managing a lot of people and people management's not easy right no people are no problem yeah so if you have people you have problems it's pure and simple so so you better off with with a smaller startup firm where it's the manager a small team and their portfolio do you feel like you have an advantage mike against these guys because you're not managing 600 employees i think certainly uh being smaller is is an advantage uh but um i think scale is also an advantage and in order to attract and retain the talent uh you you need you do need scale uh because uh if you think about uh what people want and you know there's a lot there's a lot written on this there's a book by uh daniel pink called drive and and he he talks about what motivates people what what what do they really want they they need all of the tools and resources to be the best at what they do and that's the scale part because you can't offer them that unless you have a larger firm they want autonomy they want they want to be able to live and die by the decisions that they make i think the multi-manager multi-pm model lends itself to that the last piece is kind of soft but it's i believe in it 100 is is purpose people want purpose and you know there's a lot of money in this industry and you know of course uh people want to make money but we have real evidence at woodline and i think you know i've heard alana speak on this as well money isn't the only thing at a certain point people want more than that they want partnership they want to work with great people they they want they're willing to sacrifice short-term compensation for long-term wealth creation and so if you can offer that to to people those three elements i think those are what's going to drive retention and ultimately what we were talking about you know sustain sustainable returns for for lps it's really not about the number anyth you and i joke about this whether it's about the number but it's about the approach to compensation which i alluded to earlier it people want to be treated fairly they don't want to be netted they don't want to feel they're fine not to get paid if they didn't perform but if they did they don't want their compensation going to subsidize the rest of the team that didn't do particularly well and i think this goes back to your question before about why so few funds are persistently successful um you in recruiting talent you can't be that transactional and what i mean by that is even though this is a transactional industry right we raise money we charge fees we do well we succeed we don't we eventually go out of business it's very clear when you hire people there are always pivot points i don't care if it's the same role they're going to a new fund there are nuances that they're going to have to learn be it the nets the the approach to risk management concentration diversification they may need to understand how to now build and hire a team if they have a more expansive remit and they need more infrastructure underneath them um and you need to give people room to fail and to learn otherwise you're not really collecting any roi on all of the effort that you went through to get these great people and talent is scarce through the door in the first place and then the flip side of that is there does come a point where you have to pull the plug and founders can't be afraid to do that because the the number one corrupting thing at a fund is a lot of dead wood because then people again they can't get paid the way that they would want to and at the end of the day um if you are continually and again this may come as a surprise it may not that 30 billion dollar fund with a team of 10 that matters they're not all a pluses you peel back the curtain it tends to be the same one or two people driving returns year after year and it's fun to be the smartest guy in the room up to a point but after a while you start questioning whether you're in the right room so so let's bring in the lps into this conversation i used to think that lps were looking at performance and not a whole lot more than that but you guys are confirming what i've sort of evolved into noticing which is lps are looking at a whole lot more than just past performance they're they're looking for the ability to manage a team they're looking for process tell us a little bit about how you perceive what limited partners look for when they interview a hedge fund as a possible investment well i mean i think they're looking at the odds of persistent alpha generation right so in order to just the same way that we interview a pm and try to figure out is this person persistently going to generate alpha for us they're looking at the overall fund asking the same question right so and then that goes back to you know what's your edge in various areas whether it's recruiting you know developing people it's just as important as recruiting right like the vast majority of rpms you know they weren't super senior pms when they started right with us and you know helping to develop them helping to develop their analysts you know people look at that they look at your risk management it's like all the things that you evaluate to see like okay how conf like in order to get in the door uh your past returns have to be pretty decent otherwise like nobody's interested but to figure out if somebody wants to invest like you're trying to figure out what are the odds that those returns are going to sustain right and then it's evaluating all these different pieces you know the lead to that steve you want to jump in on that you know i don't know i mean i think lps are looking for stability returns they're looking for they're not looking for any surprises they want an infrastructure operations where they can depend on you know you're not going to find out something you know something wasn't handled correctly or you know something financially was was wrong as far as accounting-wise or anything of that nature um you know they want they want sustainability they want to they they're thinking long-term they want to be involved and have fun not just for the next year you know they want to be involved in the fund for five to ten years and you know they want to believe that a fund has sustainability they're developing talent they're thinking about the world not just the way it is today but the way it is going forward that the firm's adaptable um you know as far as i'm concerned i'm always thinking about new businesses new ideas and and you know the world's constantly changing right so what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow and if i i'm an lp i want to hear that i want to hear that somebody is engaged thinking about the world thinking about where it's going mike you don't have the same track record length of track record that some of the other funds have how do you deal with lps and what they're looking for as a relatively new fund is there any advantage to having a been around a little less well i think there's certainly an advantage uh to be able uh to learn from uh dimitri and steve and and uh my partner carl craker and i came from citadel so you know we see what it what it takes to actually create a business and um it was interesting you know before we actually launched woodline carl and i we went out and interviewed a lot of top fund managers and lps and asked okay what do we need what do we need to do first and the the answer was you know somewhat surprising it was go and hire yourself a rock star chief operating officer and so you know we went out and did that and you know couldn't have gotten anyone better than matt hooker but why is that well it's to steve's point these are businesses and you know carl and myself and our and our team we know about investing but we don't know how to run a business and the complexities in today's world of managing a hedge fund you know are are pretty immense you know between the technology the risk management legal compliance cyber security is a big issue you need a fully built out operations team uh to ensure that this business is going to be sustainable for a long period of time and how did you deal with that during the pandemic and lockdown and work from home i think that caught a lot of places um unprepared what was your experience like well fortunately you know a lot of our systems were cloud-based so so 10 years ago would have been a a different story uh but uh you know we had we because we were a newer launch we already had a lot of the systems in place and uh we're able to transition to work from home uh you know like a lot of funds that you know um thrive through through the pandemic you know people underestimate the transition from analyst to pm to head of business to founder and what mike is talking about in terms of having to they think they're just going to kind of like go out hopefully raise money and the other stuff will fall into place because they have capital there's so much complexity that goes into running a business we have a guy in play now as a candidate who [Music] is at almost 2 billion and he raised it relatively quickly in during covid in the last you know two years and the reason he's a candidate is because his operating team his non-business team is a disaster and he basically had he's spending so much time on non-investing issues and he either has to sort of restructure his whole fund or what he's learning is about himself he doesn't want that headache he'd rather sit someplace that's going to give him resources and give him capital he's not going to have to also you have it's not like you raise it and you're done you're constantly out there speaking to lps he doesn't really enjoy that aspect of it um and i i do think that that people underestimate how difficult that is not even just raising the money but actually manning the ship um on on the point of new funds it it uh my great you know mike launched with what two billion two and a half billion something like that it's so unusual and i think it speaks to you ask what do lps want for a new fund what's really important to them is the dna of where the person's coming from so it's you being you it's the success you had at citadel and it's the fact that you came from citadel and the the um and that's a bet that lps are willing to make there's more predictive success a higher degree rather of predictive success around mike than somebody who comes from a fund that's you know kind of had a meg track record um and the idea that this person's going to do something different than the fund did is um you know that's like that's more of a that's that's a big risk to take i had my team pull the um the biggest launches in the last two years right so defined as let's call it a billion or greater or got to a billion quickly and almost and there's only about for all the hundreds of funds that have quote launched they're only about 10 to 12 in that category for each year and almost every single one of them came from either a top multi manager or a fund with great pedigree like viking viking alone has had five launches including this year in the last in the last 24 months so so is there an inherent tension with a firm like viking between um scalability and persistence of returns are are people launching because at a certain point you begin to top out what what's the tension you know listen you hire great people and there's going to be a percentage of people that eventually going to want to be me or be you know mike worked for ken and he wanted to go out on his own right i worked for somebody at some point and i went out on my own and if you know if someone's got a bug to do that you can't stop it okay they have to go out and do it now they may succeed they may fail and so when someone comes you know my firm they want to start their own firm i say thank you you know thanks for you know let me know relationships don't have to end they can evolve and change um but you know if someone's got a bug to start their own firm there's nothing you can do about it if you smell someone has got a foot out the door but you think they're talented do you want to stake them do you want to push them out and say hey let's continue this relationship but well it's a go out on your own it's case by case you know one of the problems with staking people outside your firm is you really can't control what they do outside your firm and sometimes they start doing things and you they start drifting and so it's possible i might do it and if possible i won't interesting we i want to shift gears a little bit because uh time is tight we we mentioned work from home and all you have to do is pick up the wall street journal goldman sachs wants people back in the office jamie dimon is pounding the table to have people back in the office but there's a sense of a hybrid model as being a little more flexible and a little more attractive to very top talent what what are your thoughts on this space uh is everyone going to end up back in the office or are we going to end up with some different model i mean my view is i'm open to a hybrid model um i mean i i like working at home i mean i i actually like it i don't feel i have to be in the office five days a week i can run my firm from wherever i am i mean demetri you were in jackson hole yeah i mean i it's like in chicago like thinking um how many pms we had in the office there i think we have like three or four pms in chicago you know pre-covet like most of our pms are in you know new york and london and so everybody's spread out anyway so uh you know we got like 10 offices around the world so wherever you are like you're seeing you know some portion of your people but it's usually a small portion anyhow so yeah we're definitely doing hybrid um i think uh you know the uh sort of pillars uh that we're trying to go to there like one is you have to be with your team you know some percentage of the time on a regular basis right like that's going to vary team to team but it can't be like oh you know we never see each other it's going to be great right so you have to get you have to get together on a regular basis whether that's in the office office some combination of the two um and outside of your team you have to like show up once and once in a while even if it works well with your team you have to show up in the office on a regular basis whether it's you know whatever it is two days a week or four days a week that depends on the person but you need that to just have some connectivity with people who you're not going to just normally talk to because you know you're not going to talk to the guy if you know you're trading healthcare and the guy's trading industrials you're not necessarily going to talk to him but you run into him in the office and it might be a very interesting conversation it leads to a thought you know you wouldn't have had right but dimitri the reality is we have offices all yeah and you do too everywhere like okay i'm in new york right twice um a month right i mean i have hundreds of people there right that i don't see anyway and they don't see me so you really what you got to do is you got to set up communication and there's so many different ways to communicate today you know zoom or you know i am or you know chats or whatever the case may be that you can be very effective in communicating and it feels like you're there and but you're not there so you know it works you know like that was the big surprise of work from home that we all thought it would be like what would be like being out of the office yeah you know uh the amount of time we were out of the office and it the big surprise and the big learning was we can do this regardless of where we are i mean this has been like a huge experiment let's all work from home for a year and see what happens and in fact the industry has had some of its best returns long short equity alpha notwithstanding it's also a full market too it was a bull market but it was also a market for which we had never had a playbook we'd never experienced cove you know we never experienced anything like this before i don't think steve and dimitri necessarily need to be in the office 24 7. but i do think it is important for analysts in particular um to be close to their pms they can't be trained otherwise as effectively you need this for collaboration you need this for creativity you need this first pre-decor i will tell you and maybe i shouldn't say this but i'll say it in some ways my job has become a lot easier in the last couple years but you're charging the same amount and you're still getting great candidates um so what i mean by that is people have a step back perspective there they can say to themselves that they were sort of on the fence of should i leave or shouldn't i um now they're working from home they can more clearly see what their value ad is versus other people who are maybe just benefiting from being in the room with other smart people and the stickiness to some extent i think gets eroded when you're just not there i'm all for flexibility but i think as a founder you do want your people there enough of the time where you know people have good days they have bad days but if they're there there's sort of almost psychological smoothing effect i think goes on they just sort of get used to it it's for better or worse the devil known and they start risk waiting all the things that could go wrong if they left versus staying put i call it economic you know it's economic loss aversion theory at play with with with talent but when you're working remotely that's not as much of a barrier to entry and i think and this year we have had which i've never had before people that we have gone after for years calling us telling us they're ready to leave and maybe it's coincidence but i'm not sure what what about the flip side of this from the employee side hey it's convenient i don't have to leave my house two three days a week what about what jamie dimon talks about with building a corporate culture making sure all the members of the team are pulling in the same direction how challenging is it to manage when everybody is in far-flung locations well you've definitely got to work at it but i think you had to work at it before like to steve's point like if you've got offices all over the place anyway you have the same problem right like how do you get connectivity with your guys in europe or asia jamie's sitting in new york he's got offices everywhere right he's got the same issue okay so the real prop the real issue is how do you communicate in a way with he's got millions he's got a million people work for him we have a thousand or whatever 1500 or whatever the case may be you know they're still the same issues how do you how can you be effective as a leader uh communicating what you need to communicate across your platform and can you get your message across in an effective way and i think you can you know and i think it has to be some combination listen people want to be together they want to feel like they're part of the firm and and and you know that's why i think a few days a week makes sense listen people want to be in five days they can be in five days i'm not saying they can't be in five days but i do think we have to be flexible and if people want to do it differently and as long as they're doing what they're supposed to do and they're you know being part of the firm and communicating and um you know why i'm okay with that you know like yeah i think it's flexible it's also a bit of a recruiting advantage if you can give people flexibility right like it's a competitive talent market out there so like our two fastest growing offices are in austin and miami yeah you can't not be flexible it's just the stigma of saying i want to work from home on a friday or a monday i don't think exists anymore and wanting to work in other cities is something that founders have absolutely accommodated but you know the issue this is not really a work from home issue the issue of developing and managing people it's not just about being in the same office i don't think this industry as a whole we have a bigger issue which is this industry as a whole does not do a great job of it now speak for yourself there are exceptions to pardon me every rule but as a general rule um the uh hedge fund managers are great investors they're not great managers of people and i think that day in and day out pms are drinking from or founders are drinking from a fire hose of information they're making a ton of risk decisions simultaneously they may be overseeing hundreds of positions and you layer on top of that having to motivate empower and engage your people it's really it's tough but we as an industry have to get better at this because and the analysts are coming and telling us that their founders and pms are giving them minimal attention and they have to pitch and pound the table to get their ideas in the in a book in the portfolio and they don't have a lot of clarity as to why some ideas make it and some don't and so it really speaks to needing to drive mentorship and learning because young people have more options certainly than when i was coming out of business school right the two port holes were really investment banking and consulting and maybe also private equity now there's vc there's you could join a fintech company you can trade crypto you can go to outer space i mean literally the sky's the limit and so if we want to do a better job of getting the brain trust coming out of school into our industry we have to get better at this and i've seen the numbers coming out of hbs to hedge funds and they are going down so let me stay with you alana on on a question that you and i have talked about um in general the financial industry speaking broadly has had difficulty recruiting women and people of color and as bad as the the finance industry is hedge funds lag even that when you're talking about being a broad manager how how can the industry address that well first off this isn't just hedge funds i mean this has been pervasive when i pre-starting my firm which was 18 years ago i was in finance finance i was an analyst at a bank i went to business school when it was barely 30 percent women um i worked in consulting i you know i did a whole bunch of things and i absolutely dealt with my share of sexism misogyny and bad behavior and i am thrilled that when my son goes into the workforce and your daughters go into the workforce that kind of overt um those bad actors there's going to be a zero tolerance for right that's that is that is a big change from when i was just sort of cutting my teeth um vis-a-vis but you know we're still a young industry and it has to start at the bottom we are do there's never been more heightened awareness cedars and allocators are deploying to women and minority owned funds lps are um surveying their managers as to the diversity leadership and ownership of their workforce and heads of talent are being mandated to really focus on recruiting more women and minorities but at the end of the day these guys have to have a robust class of diversity candidates to pull from from the ranks of goldman and jp morgan and you know fill in the blank bank so that those people can then be trained properly and develop at one of the hedge funds that matter and i say it that way because to our previous discussion so few funds really control the aum in this industry it's not just about joining a hedge fund it's about joining a winning fund and being trained properly and having a chance to be one of these guys you know eventually um but we're still early on you know you look at where medical school is now it's over 50 women law schools over 50 percent women i just saw wharton's class is now 52 women so it's going to take time um from the beginning let me just say one one more thing from the beginning of when i started my firm i have always had founders stress the importance of bringing more diversity candidates to the table and you know asking can you if there's any way for the successful candidate to please be a person of color or a woman it's just we don't have where to pull from so that's what i when i talk about coming you know through the ranks and and evolving by the time we get involved which is at a very senior level we need a deep bench but the important the another important point is i do it's about a desire for racial and gender equality but it's also a desire from our the founders we work with for diversity of background and thought because having everybody think the same having everyone grew up in virginia went to princeton uva is a sure-fire way to drive down returns you want divergence in terms of points of view so we're down to our very last question the last few moments we have and i'm going to ask everybody this and i want to open this we'll start with mike all of you run successful businesses what's been the biggest surprise running your farm i'll i'll keep it uh quick here there's no question it's the compounding effect of great teams and and what you can do with lots of great people working together dimitri i think this the scale that you need to be successful like if somebody you know even not 20 years ago when we started but even 10 years ago would have told me we'd have you know a thousand people to to run you know 12 billion dollars i'd be like that's a lot right but that's kind of what you need these days go ahead yeah lana you want to go just how much i've learned from these guys i really didn't anticipate how energize how how much we would develop because of all of the information that we get from dealing with the best founders and the best people in this business we're just so much smarter for it steve i mean it's a people business and you just have to treat people really well you have to care about them if you don't care about them or you treat them like just somebody you're just going to plug in and they're going to pick up on that and they're not going to be happy well mike dimitri ilana steve thank you so much for a informative panel let's hear it for our panelists [Music]

Channel: SALT

Views: 10,060

Rating: 4.8527608 out of 5

Keywords: Steve Cohen, Ilana Weinstein, Dmitry Balyasny, Mike Rockefeller, Barry Ritholtz, Point72, SALTNY, salt conference, salt conference 2021, hedge fund, finance, financial literacy, financial education, investing, investor, value investing, investment banking, stocks, stock market, trading, day trading, business, salt talks, podcast

Id: Lumur8cJJ1E

Length: 44min 21sec (2661 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Confident-Stock-9288]

"Appear strong when weak"...Art of War

Shorts can never balance off the infinite loss that's coming 🦍💎🚀

[u/mauler1983]

She is full of shit, big ploppy kind of shit!

[u/Odinthedoge]

They talk about Reddit at about 12 mins in.