• Jennifer Cohen, Schonfeld's onetime top HR executive, is joining the $38 billion hedge fund Point72.
• Cohen is set to start in January as the 2,900-person firm's chief human resources officer.
• She previously worked for the private equity firm Global Atlantic and Goldman Sachs.

The talent war between the industry's biggest hedge funds is not just over investing professionals — even if they're the ones being lured in with nine-figure pay packages.

Firms are also raiding each other for operations, human capital, and technology leaders. The latest big move is Jennifer Cohen's decision to join the $38 billion hedge fund Point72 from Schonfeld Strategic Advisors.

Cohen has been the head of human capital management for Steve Schonfeld's eponymous fund since 2022. An internal Point72 memo seen by Business Insider said she'd join Steve Cohen's fund in January as the firm's chief human resources officer.

"Jenn will play a pivotal role in advancing our human resources strategy, focusing on enhancing talent management, supporting organizational growth, and reinforcing our culture of excellence," Gavin O'Connor, Point72's chief operating officer, wrote in the memo.

"She is uniquely positioned to lead these efforts, bringing a data-centric and process-oriented approach honed over 25 years of experience across business operations and human capital," he added.

Cohen worked at the private equity firm Global Atlantic and Goldman Sachs before joining Schonfeld. At the multistrategy fund, she was a part of the leadership group that guided the manager through an unsteady 2023, which included rumors of a takeover by its rival Millennium and culminated in the layoff of 15% of the firm's total workforce.

The manager has since rebounded, with strong performance in 2024 and so far in 2025. Schonfeld did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Point72 has a larger head count than Schonfeld, with more than 2,900 employees, according to the Stamford, Connecticut-based manager's website. Schonfeld had 872 employees as of May 12, according to a regulatory filing.

• Investors like David Einhorn and Rob Citrone highlighted international stocks at Sohn on Wednesday.
• There has been a renewed interest from hedge funds to invest abroad and hedge exposure to the US.
• Bridgewater exec Karen Karniol-Tambour is telling investors to "treat diversification seriously."

Despite all the market turmoil of the first stretch of President Donald Trump's second term, US investors have ended up more or less where they started the year.

But there are lasting effects of the administration's tariff policies, such as a renewed vigor from asset managers to look outside the world's largest stock market for investment opportunities.

At the Sohn Investment Conference in Manhattan's Lincoln Center on Wednesday, big-name investors like billionaire David Einhorn and Tiger Cub Rob Citrone talked up a German chemical company and Mexican telecom stock, respectively.

Bridgewater's co-chief investment officer, Karen Karniol-Tambour, who spoke with Citrone on Wednesday, said that for the last few decades, the S&P 500 was "the best you could have done."

"But where that leaves us is that today it's hard not to feel that we're fundamentally in a different place than that," she said.

The main thing she is relaying to investors is "treat diversification seriously," echoing comments that she made at the recent Milken conference in Beverly Hills, where she said that allocators should "have some of your assets in Asia or even China, if you can."

Einhorn started his presentation on Wednesday with a critical joke about Trump's tariffs — implying that the US is shooting itself in the foot — though his firm, Greenlight Capital, profited off the first quarter's market turbulence with large positions in gold. He's a believer in the fundamentals of Bayer spinoff Lanxess, saying, "We think we have a butterfly," even though the market sees it as "a moth."

Einhorn said the company, which develops and sells a range of chemicals, including consumer protection products like disinfectants, could benefit from tariffs as it has production sites in the US and is a Chinese competitor.

Citrone, meanwhile, named América Móvil, the telecom giant founded by Mexico's richest man, Carlos Slim, as his favorite stock because of its exposure to many countries in Latin America. "We trust Carlos — so that's an amazing stock," he said.

Citrone, who made 52% in 2024, said that opportunities are ripe in Latin America, which investors have "left for dead for the last 25 years." Beyond equities, he also likes rates and currencies in the region. He said his fund has 75% of its risk outside the US, with a certain amount in emerging markets.

Karnoil-Tambour said that, of course, money won't leave US capital markets overnight, especially as it remains the deepest equities market for investors.

Citrone drove home how undercapitalized other markets are, saying that when Nvidia's stock fell after investors' discovery of DeepSeek in January, "it was like two Mexicos."

• Brevan Howard Group hired Carlos Hernandez, a longtime JPMorgan dealmaker, as its first executive chair.
• The new executive role is focused on strategy and clients, a person close to the firm said.
• The addition, this person said, does not change founder Alan Howard's role at the $34 billion firm.

The latest step in $34 billion Brevan Howard's evolution is a big-name hire sliding into a new role.

Former JPMorgan investment banking leader Carlos Hernandez is joining Brevan Howard Group as its first-ever executive chair. Hernandez spent close to four decades at JPMorgan, eventually rising to be the executive chair of the investment and corporate bank and serving as a member of CEO Jamie Dimon's operating committee.

A person close to the manager told Business Insider that the internal role is mostly focused on high-level corporate strategy and client development. He joined the firm earlier this month.

In a statement to Business Insider, Brevan Howard CEO Aron Landy wrote that Hernandez is a "longtime friend of our firm" with "unparalleled relationships with global institutions."

"We look forward to benefiting from his expertise and guidance as we continue to develop and strengthen our investment platform," Landy said.

Dimon, Hernandez's former boss, told BI in a statement that he "is an exceptional leader and human being, and will bring tremendous experience and value to his new role."

Brevan has expanded significantly from its macro roots, becoming a more diversified investment platform that has a stand-alone crypto unit and offices in locations such as Abu Dhabi. The firm now has more than 145 portfolio managers, compared to 35 in 2019.

As such, Brevan is no longer dependent on the trading brilliance of its billionaire founder, Alan Howard. Howard no longer manages money for the firm but is still the majority owner. In 2020, he turned the CEO role over to Landy, the one-time chief risk officer.

Howard's current role, which is also focused on client relationships and long-term strategy, will not change, the person close to the firm said.

Hernandez retired from JPMorgan in 2023 after 37 years at the firm.

In a statement, Hernandez said he looked forward to working with Landy and the firm's leadership team on "strategy and key relationships to help accelerate its future success and expand its impact on the global investment landscape."

The manager's longest-running strategy, the Master fund, had a strong April, returning 4.5% in the turbulent month. This gain trimmed the fund's 2025 losses to 1.5% through the year's first four months.

• Big-name US investors like BlackRock's Larry Fink and Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman spoke Tuesday in Riyadh.
• The managers talked up Saudi Arabia's local economy while acknowledging market volatility globally.
• The panel took place at the Saudi-US Investment Forum, held in conjunction with President Donald Trump's visit.

On a panel of billionaires and high-powered CEOs in Riyadh, the competition was not about who has the most assets under management, the best returns, or the swankiest private jet.

Instead, the friendly back-and-forth was focused on who had visited Saudi Arabia the most and the date of their first visit to the Middle East country.

BlackRock's Larry Fink boasted of coming more than 65 times over several decades. Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman said he first came to the country in 1991 when most of the roads were unpaved. Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson admitted she was late to the party — her first visit was in 2020 — but said she has made up time by coming on 15 different occasions since.

"It's always a wonderful time to be back in the Kingdom," fellow panelist Jane Fraser, the CEO of Citi, said.

The event was one of many at the Saudi-US Investment Forum in Riyadh on Tuesday; the forum is being held in conjuction with President Donald Trump's state visit to the Kingdom, which said at the start of the president's second stint in the White House that it would invest hundreds of billions in the US.

American investors, meanwhile, are looking to put capital to work in the Middle East.

Fink, who runs the world's largest asset manager and is increasingly focused on private market investments in areas like infrastructure, said Saudi Arabia has become a capital "destination" instead of just a capital provider for foreign investors.

"The emphasis on 2030 was really a statement to the world that we're going to do it ourselves," Fink said about the country's sovereign wealth fund's plan to diversify and grow different parts of the economy.

Fraser said the next step for the country's capital markets would be to build a treasury function. Johnson boasted about her firm's new local private credit offering.

"We could see the Kingdom being a top 10 economy in the world," Fink said of a country that produced $1.1 trillion in GDP last year — less than half of what Canada, the world's tenth-largest economy, generated in 2024.

The optimism for the country's future did not take away from the general uncertainty many finance leaders have expressed about the immediate future, thanks to the Trump administration's tariff policies, though the recent agreement with China has provided hope that the new global trade landscape will be clearer soon.

The bigger fear expressed by Fink is not short-term volatility — "I don't really care about the next 90 days," he said — but instead a continued reliance on public funding for long-term projects.

The "vitality" of any economy, he said, is measured by the amount of private capital flowing to investments that will take years to complete.

So far, those who have invested in public-private partnerships in Saudi Arabia are pleased. Schwarzman said his firm's $20 billion in 2018 from the Kingdom's Public Investment Fund has generated annual returns of 17.5%.

"We have a lot of happy friends," the billionaire said with a wry smile.

• Saratoga Spring Water, in its distinct blue glass bottle, was everywhere at the Milken conference.
• The brand went viral earlier this year because of influencer Ashton Hall.
• The CEO of the brand's holding company spoke at the power-player-packed conference.

Last spring, billionaire Michael Arougheti had two light beers in hand and a good reason to celebrate — he had just become the co-owner of the Baltimore Orioles.

Arougheti, the CEO of investment manager Ares, was in Pickles Pub, a popular bar for fans near the team's iconic stadium, offering to buy everyone a beer.

The short video of a joyous Arougheti in Pickles was played Tuesday to the amusement of his fellow panelists, Todd Boehly and Michael Milken, at the latter's namesake global conference. Milken, a big healthcare donor who George Washington University's public health school is named after, had one critique.

"We're going to try and give you more healthy things to hold up," Milken said.

After spending three days traipsing around the ritzy Beverly Hills hotel where the conference is held, it was pretty obvious what that drink would be: Saratoga Spring Water.

The glass blue bottles — a 24-pack of 12-ounce bottles costs more than $40 on Amazon — were omnipresent during the conference, with tables laden with them around every corner. Panelists, including Boehly and Arougheti, sipped them onstage. Hotel employees clearing trash cans in common areas sometimes needed backup to get the glass-filled utility trash bags out of their containers.

The brand, which is a part of the beverage conglomerate Primo Brands, went viral earlier this year thanks to influencer Ashton Hall, whose alleged morning routine includes dunking his face into a bowl filled with several bottles of the distilled spring water. The company's chief marketing officer previously told Business Insider that Hall's use of their product was not an ad, but they were enjoying the attention nonetheless.

Hall's TikToks didn't come up during the conference, but the conglomerate's CEO, Robbert Rietbroek, spoke on a panel at Milken. CNBC anchor Sara Eisen introduced him by noting that "we're all drinking his waters."

Rietbroek said, "Our mission is to hydrate a healthy America," and that the decrease in alcohol consumption has given Saratoga a boost, he said, sitting next to a small side table with several of his "beautiful blue bottles" on it.

"We're seeing an expansion of bottled water through the first quarter of this year," he said, despite economic worries.

He said consumers are on the hunt "for alternate drinks," but at Milken, they were the house pour.

• The annual Milken Global Conference brings bigwig CEOs, billionaires, and talking heads to LA.
• At a ritzy hotel in Beverly Hills, execs speaking on panels stressed how much uncertainty there is.
• In private chats and at late-night parties, though, big money elites showed no sign of slowing down.

If you closed your eyes and only listened to the panels at this year's Milken Global Conference, you'd think the country was on the verge of a recession.

One of the most common words spoken by executives and investors was "uncertainty." Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's speech — not talks with Peyton Manning or Tony Blair or Henry Kravis — was the hottest ticket in town, with attendees lining up an hour out for his opening remarks.

Pessimism about the US was so high that professional investors are looking to put money to work in Europe, long ignored by American firms because of the continent's slow growth relative to US companies.

"The brand is definitely tarnished now," State Street CEO Ron O'Hanley said, echoing comments made by Citadel's founder, Ken Griffin, and Apollo CEO Marc Rowan.

"The real question is whether this is permanent," O'Hanley, whose firm manages $4.7 trillion, said on a panel about the macro environment.

The "animal spirits" energy radiating off the investor class and C-suites in Davos was nowhere to be found on the Milken stages in Beverly Hills, California, thanks to President Donald Trump's tariff policies, which have upended global equity and bond markets.

"The mood was unbelievably optimistic" in Switzerland, Katie Koch, the CEO of the $195 billion credit investment manager TCW, said while sitting next to O'Hanley onstage, but it's "the opposite now."

The gloom onstage didn't affect the mood

The Beverly Hilton was packed with upward of 5,000 attendees this year, the conference's biggest showing since 2019, despite ticket prices starting at $25,000 apiece.

Lines snaked around the lobby for top speakers like Jessica Alba — even the tennis star Novak Djokovic was seen waiting to get in.

Attendees competed not only for seats but also for invitations to the most coveted after-parties, held at the members-only Bird Streets Club and restaurants such as Funke, Cipriani, and AOC. One of the hardest invitations to get was a dinner with Bessent on Sunday night.

Walking around the ritzy Beverly Hills hotel and speaking with attendees in the conference's wellness garden (featuring "puppy playtime" and "nervous system reset" chairs) or at the numerous after-parties hosted by banks and private equity giants, we found the mood was much more positive.

"This isn't the type of food you'd see at a reception during a recession," one partygoer said Monday evening as a platter of tuna tartare passed by. The person, who has been investing in private markets for decades, said he wasn't worried about the economy until after-parties put a limit on the number of drinks each person could get from the bar.

People were encouraged by Bessent's comments tying the tariffs to deregulation and tax cuts. While many asset managers are not deploying capital, they're still fundraising, and meetings with representatives from Middle East sovereign wealth funds were some of the toughest to get. Once he was done speaking on a panel Monday afternoon, Saudi Arabia's minister of investment, Khalid Al-Falih, was swarmed by attendees.

There's also still plenty of optimism around tech and the promise of artificial intelligence, with self-driving Waymo cars dropping off many attendees and a fridge-sized box in the lobby allowing passersby the chance to speak with a hologram of the conference's host, Michael Milken, in several languages.

Elon Musk, who was a popular headliner last year, chose to stay behind closed doors this year, giving an interview to Milken in front of an invite-only crowd Sunday, someone who attended said. Milken also interviewed Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Tuesday in front of a packed audience.

At a party held Sunday at the billionaire Nicolas Berggruen's Beverly Hills mansion to celebrate the fifth anniversary of his tech philosophy magazine, Noema, interpretive dancers performed by the pool before the journalist Kara Swisher hosted a debate on whether AI makes us more human.

Perhaps one of the best metaphors for the mixed signals at the elite gathering is the bougie boxed lunches given out each day to the thousands of attendees: a seemingly austere offering that contained more luxurious options inside, such as salmon with tabbouleh and chocolate mousse.

The US, it seems, is still a hard habit for many investors to kick.

In the same breath that deep-pocketed panelists would criticize trade policies or talk up international opportunities, they'd mention the overwhelming size of the country's capital markets or innovative culture.

Johnson & Johnson CEO Joaquin Duato, a dual citizen of the US and Spain, paraphrased a Winston Churchill quote to describe businesses' thinking on the future of the world's largest economy: "Americans always do the right thing, after trying everything else."

• Executives from Citadel, WorldQuant, and Freestone Grove spoke at the Milken conference about AI.
• Umesh Subramanian, Citadel's chief technology officer, said AI helps them leverage humans.
• They warned that funds need to ensure that people are using their tools for their intended purposes.

Hedge funds have always been quick to adapt to the latest technology.

Given the industry's ultracompetitive nature and large budgets of the biggest managers, big-name hedge funds have built out machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities for years.

The jump in AI's applications in recent years, though, still has them excited.

Umesh Subramanian, the chief technology officer of $65 billion Citadel, told a Milken conference panel that applying AI to discretionary investing is where it's getting interesting, as investors and analysts are bombarded with documents, news, filings, and data to digest.

"The surface area of the amount of information that you really want to consume is very large," for the average investment professional at his firm, Subramanian said, and AI gives them leverage to do more.

"We fine-tune our investment workflow," he said, and mentioned that Citadel's billionaire founder, Ken Griffin, uses ChatGPT.

To speed up decision-making, Subramanian said that building intuitive tools like chatbots that can be talked to are important because people generally prefer asking questions naturally. The firm is also hiring data scientists and AI professionals to embed them in the fund's various groups to optimize various investment workflows.

Andreas Kreuz, WorldQuant's deputy CIO, said the firm was using AI to expand the data it can bring into its models since it can restructure data from images and audio.

"What excites us is beyond the low-hanging fruit," Kreuz said.

Still, Subramanian, Kreuz, and Freestone Grove Cofounder Daniel Morillo warned that the tech can be misused.

"You need to teach your people to still pay attention," Morillo said, adding that his firm does more work on thinking about how people use a tool than on building out new AI capabilities.

Freestone Grove, the fundamental equity firm he launched with former Citadel executive Todd Barker in 2024, also wants to make sure it retains its own views, Morillo said. This means the firm is being intentional about not "killing off" any edge its investors get from doing the grunt work themselves.

"It's super important to be highly intentional about how you're using the tools," he said.

Kreuz said "we don't think AI is replacing human judgment" and wants employees to question the "black box."

"It can produce a tremendous amount of noise instead of signal," he said.

Investors' judgment will still be the ultimate differentiator, Subramanian said.

"While I think there's going to be a lot of leverage in the system with AI as a tool in the toolbox, I don't think it changes what is making the decision."

• EY CEO Janet Truncale spoke Monday at the Milken conference in Los Angeles.
• She was asked if artificial intelligence advances would lead to job cuts at her 400,000-person firm.
• Instead of job cuts, Truncale said, her employees will be more productive.

If artificial intelligence advances mean the average employee can do twice the amount of work they do today, then EY CEO Janet Truncale could see the consulting giant grow without cutting her head count.

Speaking Monday at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, Truncale said, "We're not going to decrease the size of our workforce" because AI increases productivity, and employees perform at a higher level earlier in their careers.

Her 400,000-person firm works with the biggest companies in the world, but the data-heavy work required of auditors and accountants has led many to predict that firms like EY can do the same amount of work with fewer people, thanks to AI.

Truncale believes AI "is going to transform the work our people are doing," but not make humans obsolete or eliminate thousands of jobs.

"There's always going to be a human component," she said.

"You have to invest in all of the soft skills," she added.

Naturally, the firm is talking with companies in various sectors about AI tools they can incorporate into their firms. EY is able to connect with these executive teams because the firm is "client zero" and tests many tools on its own workforce and "disrupting ourselves" before recommending them to clients, Truncale said.

There's a healthy respect for these tools given teams across the firm are constantly tinkering with them — of both the tools' abilities and faults. Data, Truncale said, and data security need to be top of mind for executives who want to harness AI.

"You've got to be really careful with this technology," she said.

While generative AI has disrupted professional services, many in the industry have echoed Truncale and said they do not think it can replace humans entirely but instead serve as a supplement to their work.

EY and the other Big Four firms have invested heavily in AI for years and recently in agentic AI, which involves several AI "agents" operating independently and making decisions without the direct assistance or input of humans.

In March, EY launched its EY.ai Agentic Platform in March, providing 80,000 of its tax employees with 150 tax agents that can help them with data collection, document analysis and review, and income and indirect tax compliance.

Other firms and consultants have also said they view AI as a way to free up staff from monotonous tasks and give them additional time to spend on more advanced or complicated work. AI has been a boon to consulting firms' business as clients look for guidance on how to incorporate the technology.

• George Roberts and Henry Kravis, the billionaire cofounders of KKR, spoke Monday at the Milken conference.
• The pair said "softer skills" are important for young investors.
• "Go out and meet people," Roberts said.

When they started KKR nearly 50 years ago, George Roberts and Henry Kravis loved taking meetings, even if their ideas didn't land a majority of the time.

Now, the private equity billionaires don't see young people putting themselves out there as they once did, the pair said in a conversation at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles.

"Try to develop some emotional intelligence," Roberts said, when the pair were asked to give advice to young investors.

"Go out and meet people."

Younger investors, Roberts said, often have great analytical skills, but "it's really the softer skills I try to encourage young people to do."

"Nobody likes to be rejected, so nobody likes to pick up the phone and make a phone call anymore," Roberts said, joking that young people "break up over text."

Kravis said that when the pair started the firm in 1976 along with Jerome Kohlberg,"we just dove in" without any real agenda because the PE industry was still so new.

"What we learned over time is just go out and build relationships," Kravis said.

"You've got to be willing to take risks," Kravis added, saying some younger investors struggle to pull the trigger.

The firm's 1988 buyout of Nabisco was immortalized in the book "Barbarians at the Gate" by journalists Bryan Burrough and John Helyar— which lowered expectations of them and made it "easy to get over the bar," Roberts joked.

Kravis added that people who call them barbarians are ones who have never met the pair.

"That myth is out there, and I guess it'll always be there," Kravis said.

The $660 billion firm came from the pair's long-standing relationship; cousins Kravis and Roberts met when they were two and have been close ever since.

"We help each other and root for each other," Roberts said, when asked about how to maintain a partnership over decades.

"This relationship is so much more important than anything else."

• Citadel, Millennium, Point72, and more made money in April.
• Markets were rattled at the start of last month by President Donald Trump's tariff policies.
• Stocks eventually settled, though the S&P 500 was still down in April.

Ken Griffin advised investors navigating last month's markets to "tread water and not drown."

The legions of portfolio managers who work for his $65 billion firm and its rivals managed to do better than that.

Griffin's flagship fund at Citadel, Wellington, was up 1.3% last month, bringing its 2025 returns to 0.5%, a person close to the Miami-based firm said. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the fund's returns.

Big-name funds like Millennium, Point72, Balyasny, and ExodusPoint also logged solid gains in April, people close to the managers said. ExodusPoint, the New York-based manager run by Michael Gelband, is atop the leaderboard among the large multistrategy funds for the month with a 2.8% return.

Citadel's other funds, which focus on specific asset classes, were also up last month, the person said, led by the manager's equities strategy, which made 2.2% in April. That strategy is now up 0.5% for the year.

Meanwhile, the firm's global fixed income fund has generated returns of 4.6% through April after a 1.2% gain last month, the person said. The firm's tactical trading fund, which combines the firm's fundamental equity and quant strategies, is up 3.2% in 2025 after a 1.9% gain in April.

The strong performance was a reversal from March and February, when Citadel and Millennium uncharacteristically lost money in back-to-back months.

Still, last month was another rocky one in markets, as Griffin's comments at a Semafor conference in Washington, DC, made clear. President Donald Trump's tariff policies, revealed early in April on "Liberation Day," upended global trade.

His administration has paused some of the tariffs, and stocks rebounded, though the S&P 500 still finished the month down 0.8%. For the year, the index is down more than 5%, shedding trillions in value.

Multistrategy funds, known for their ability to generate returns in all market environments, have largely handled the volatility well, though some of the biggest names in the sector have trailed smaller rivals so far this year.

The firms mentioned declined to comment. The table below will be updated as more performance figures are learned.

• Balyasny executive Steve Schurr was poached by Millennium for a pay package of $100 million.
• Schurr, a journalist and short-seller before joining Balyasny, was one of the firm's top stockpickers.
• Schurr's presentation at the University of Alabama in March outlined his investment process.

The latest eye-popping headline in the hedge fund industry's talent war is Steve Schurr's move from Balyasny to Millennium and the $100 million pay package it took to poach him.

Schurr, a former financial journalist at the Financial Times and short-seller who worked with legendary investor Jim Chanos, was a key part of the equities rebuild that $23 billion Balyasny has undergone. He worked alongside the firm's founder and executives, like Archana Parekh, head of Asian equities.

Speaking with Business Insider at the end of 2024 about the firm's thinking about equities investing, Schurr said Balyasny tapped him to build a centralized research function for stockpicking teams that focused on primary research in addition to managing a large portfolio.

Now, he'll be taking his talents to Izzy Englander's $73 billion manager after he sits out a year to comply with the non-compete clause in his contract. His pay package includes incentives that will take years to pay out, according to a person familiar with the matter. Schurr's hire was first reported by Bloomberg.

Unlike other multistrategy portfolio managers, Schurr didn't want to use alternative data like credit-card receipts to focus on "triangulating and calling quarters" by estimating a company's earnings before they're released, calling the popular investing process "a strategy of diminished expected returns" when he spoke to BI last year.

In a presentation at a conference at the University of Alabama's Culverhouse College of Business this March, Schurr went into greater detail about how he finds opportunities and researches potential investments.

Looking past the narrative

In a recording of his presentation viewed by BI, Schurr described how he applies a short-seller's lens to long bets in his book.

"You turn a situation upside down," he said, noting that "Wall Street is a perpetual optimism machine" that forces investors to dig deep to find the real valuation of a stock, not just the "narrative."

He also used his experience as a short-seller to identify three buckets of stocks with "certain types of things we should never short."

Those buckets are:

• Compounders, such as Nvidia, Tesla, and one of his holdings, Reddit.
• Companies with a competitive moat, such as holdings of his like Brink's and Walmart-connected gas station chain Murphy USA.
• Bad businesses with a recent positive change, such as Abercrombie & Fitch, which has had a multi-year turnaround under a new CEO.

"I thought of the research process as an extension of the work I did as a journalist," he said, noting that "there's not a secret trove of information that no one else has access."

"The best thing you can do is doing the research yourself," he said, recommending industry conferences and expert networks over sell-side-organized events and meetings with company executives and investor relations teams. He recommended data providers such as 280first, Zion Research, and BamSEC to augment the process.

"Wall Street is an echo chamber," he said, and good investors look outside of the normal channels. He pointed to YouTube reviews of consumer products and Reddit forums dedicated to a specific company as places where investors could glean insights from.

On a slide titled "How We Maintain Performance," Schurr outlined that his teams "thrive in obscurity" and look for stocks with less than three teams covering the name. Companies with market caps between $1 billion and $5 billion market cap have been a sweet spot for them.

But duration is also critical. The ability to hold a stock through volatile markets is important, Schurr said, telling the students in attendance that "all the money to be made" is going to come from yearslong positions, not quarterly wins.

"The market is going to change constantly over the next 20 years," he said, and tools like alternative data and artificial intelligence are "commoditized very quickly."

"What is durable is deep fundamental equity research," he said.

• $2.8 billion Electron Capital is fundraising less than two years after its founder, Jos Shaver, stepped down.
• The energy-focused asset manager runs long-short equity and long-only strategies.
• The firm is bullish about the long-term outlook of its sectors, including clean energy, despite political headwinds.

After tackling succession, one of the biggest hurdles in the $4.5 trillion hedge fund industry, Electron Capital is on to its next challenge: raising money in the current, chaotic environment.

Electron, which invests in infrastructure, utilities, and companies powering the "energy transition," believes its strategy will succeed regardless of who is in the White House, according to current CIO and managing partner Ran Zhou, who noted it began managing money when George W. Bush was president.

The firm declined to specify a specific figure it hopes to raise, but the manager believes it has a strong pipeline of potential backers even as the industry has moved away from single-manager funds and toward multistrategy behemoths.

Zhou, speaking with Business Insider during a recent interview in New York, stressed that the firm's long-term focus, in particular on companies' rising energy demands and the need to provide this power cheaply and sustainably, is still viable.

For example, infrastructure for artificial intelligence's power needs has become a hot topic for big-name investors to talk about, but Electron has been thinking about the burgeoning field's energy needs for years. Regulatory filings show the manager first invested in Quanta Services, an electricity infrastructure company, in 2019 when the stock, now trading at nearly $300 a share, could be bought for less than $50.

"The power thesis is not changing," said Zhou, who joined Electron in 2005 from a Columbia grad program and never left.

Even clean energy, which is "facing a lot of headwinds," Zhou said, could be attractive soon as capital leaves the sector and valuations drop. The Trump adminstration has pledged to support the oil-and-gas industry and cut support to cleaner intiatives.

The firm is "like hunters waiting in the bush, waiting for the right moment," Zhou said.

One of those moments may be happening now: An investor document states that the firm is up more than 3% in its long-short strategy in April through the 25th, cutting losses this year to 1.8%. The S&P 500 is down more than 6% on the year as of press time. Last year, the manager made more than 21%.

Shaver departs, but capital stays

The $2.8 billion asset manager was started by Jos Shaver, who first ran the strategy as a standalone fund from 2005 to 2008 before joining Steve Cohen's now-shuttered hedge fund, SAC Advisors. Shaver then relaunched the manager in 2013.

He passed the reins to his longtime lieutenant Zhou in October 2023, although he remains a senior advisor to the firm and has a majority of his net worth still invested in the manager.

Unlike many single-manager funds, which are often molded by and marketed around their founders, Electron was able to successfully transition to the next generation, in part thanks to a global roadshow Shaver and Zhou embarked on in 2023 to explain the change to existing LPs.

The result: Net inflows in 2023 despite the leadership change. The manager has enjoyed long-lasting relationships with many backers — more than half of Electron's top 10 investors have been with the manager for more than a decade.

Zhou said the firm's message during the roadshow was that there was no star at Electron but instead an investing team that "hunts as a pack," which resonated with LPs. The connection with its backers has allowed Electron think beyond the next quarter or year, and the manager has built out its team to handle more capital and more work.

The field since Electron's strategy started trading nearly 20 years ago has grown significantly, and Zhou said there are now 700 stocks in the firm's investible universe. Given the expansion, the manager has slowly built out its investing team over recent years, hiring five analysts since 2019 to support Zhou, utilities-focused portfolio manager Neil Choi, and Shaver.

"The majority of gains come from long-term holdings and identifying the structural changes coming early," Zhou said, and the firm plans to keep to that script.

• Joon Park, a cofounder of Kodai Capital, is joining Dmitry Balyasny's $23 billion firm.
• Kodai Capital is returning capital after launching with money from Millennium in 2020.
• Kodai was run by Park and former Citadel portfolio manager Neville Shah.

Joon Park, a cofounder of Kodai Capital, is rejoining the multistrategy fray in a new role at Balyasny.

Park, who started Kodai Capital with former Citadel portfolio manager Neville Shah in 2020 with money from Millennium, will be the chief operating officer of equities at $23 billion Balyasny, two people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.

In the new role, Park will report directly to Dmitry Balyasny, the firm's founder, who runs the equities unit and has remade the group alongside executives such as Steve Schurr and Archana Parekh.

Balyasny declined to comment. Bloomberg earlier reported Park's move and the shuttering of Kodai.

Park's impending departure contributed to Kodai's decision to return capital to its investors, three people with knowledge of the decision said. The firm's poor performance was another factor in the decision, these people said. Kodai had lost money last year and through 2025's tumultuous first quarter, though the exact amount is unclear.

Kodai, Park, and Shah did not immediately return requests for comment.

The Kodai founding team was among the most notable examples to take a check from Millennium to start their firm, a structure that billionaire Izzy Englander's firm has increasingly turned to to lure top talent to manage the behemoth's ever-growing assets.

Kodai had managed to raise capital from backers other than Millennium, people close to the manager said, and built a sizable team in four years. A recent regulatory filing said the manager had 21 investment professionals on staff.

Park is not an investor, working in operations at several managers, including Alyeska and Citadel, before starting Kodai with Shah and serving as the firm's president and COO. Park and Shah worked together at Citadel in the Miami-based firm's Global Equities unit.

• Dan Loeb criticized Trump's tariffs for causing foreign capital to flee the US.
• Speaking at the Economic Club of New York, he suggested trade deals with India, Japan, and Europe.
• Loeb is focusing on event-driven bets to protect his portfolio amid market volatility.

The billionaire investor Dan Loeb is among some of the deep-pocketed supporters of President Donald Trump who've been taken aback by his administration's tariff policies.

The tariffs, which have roiled global equity and bond markets, were not done in a "conventional way," leading foreign capital to flee the US, Loeb said Tuesday at the Economic Club of New York.

The result: "This giant whooshing sound of capital going back to their original sources," the Third Point founder said.

Loeb believes the administration needs to get "some points on the board" and make some trade deals with key trading partners to help stem the outflow of money. He identified India, Japan, and Europe as potential targets for administration dealmakers.

But even if that happens, he doubts everything would return to normal or that this is even the market bottom.

"I think there'll be some residual concern about some of the capriciousness" of the tariffs, he said.

"All these things come with a cost," he continued.

He said a friend who runs a private equity company lost an allocation from a Chinese sovereign wealth fund, something the country threatened in light of the tariffs Trump's administration has levied on imports from China.

He's not the only big Wall Street name hoping Trump cuts some deals soon. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Tuesday that a deal or two could help "create a road map" for other countries and help put some confidence back into the markets.

Loeb's fund is down nearly 5% this year, roughly half of what the S&P 500 has shed in value in 2025. He's protecting his portfolio by focusing mostly on event-driven bets, such as merger arbitrage opportunities and activism plays, he said. Third Point recently agreed to a new board arrangement with CoStar, a commercial real-estate data company.

In the meantime, he hopes Trump will focus on making deals and "walking away from the idea of taking over the Fed." Trump has repeatedly threatened Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for cutting interest rates too slowly and warned he could remove him from his post, moves that have rattled markets and hurt the US in the eyes of global investors.

"You have a lot of capital going out," Loeb reiterated.

It should be a good time to work for the biggest hedge funds in the world.

Firms like Millennium, Citadel, Point72, and Balyasny are experiencing rapid growth and offering eye-popping pay packages, which can reach tens of millions of dollars for the most sought-after risk-takers.

Investors in hedge funds came into the year the most optimistic they'd ever been, thanks to strong performance in 2024, Goldman Sachs says.

Market wild cards like the new US administration, artificial intelligence advances, and shifting global interest rates should give savvy hedge fund traders plenty of opportunities to stand out.

The biggest managers have the latest technology, advanced risk systems, reams of market data, and significant budgets to hire a team of top analysts. The downside? They offer nearly zero job security.

Millennium, Point72, Citadel, and Balyasny are the Big Four of the hedge fund conglomerates known as multistrategy firms, or sometimes "pod shops," that blend a variety of investment strategies within a single fund. As those four firms have grown their head counts, assets, and brands, their recruiting purview has expanded as well. Firms once content to poach young talent from private equity's ranks or business school graduating classes are now competing with banks and top tech firms for undergraduate interns.

At a time when the idea of a career of big trades and even bigger paychecks might seem more appealing than ever, Business Insider is taking a closer look at what it's like to work at an elite hedge fund. This is the second story in a series exploring how finance career pathways are changing and the impact on young people.

In a world where these firms are being compared against investment banks, the biggest hedge funds are a throwback to a time when Wall Street pros ate what they killed — and went hungry if they didn't succeed.

These firms can be quick to cut people who aren't adding to the bottom line. The annual churn of people who manage money at the Big Four was roughly 20% last year, according to the alternative data provider Revelio Labs.

The selling point for these investing conglomerates to external investors is not an individual money manager or a specific strategy but the sum of the firm's components, especially the risk management systems. One investor in hedge funds described these firms as "skill factories" that could overcome the loss of any individual team.

Churn is driven by firms poaching rivals' star performers and culling internal underperformers. The shuffling of people in and out of these coveted seats is a feature of the model, not a bug.

"These aren't places to build a career usually," said one former portfolio manager who has worked at several of the biggest multistrategy hedge fund firms.

"It's a place to survive and get paid while you can," they added, "because you don't know when things will turn against you."

Butterflies, good and bad

To play in the "majors," aka the Big Four, which employ roughly seven out of every 10 investment professionals among all multistrategy hedge funds, you need plenty of technical and interpersonal skills to even be considered. But an iron stomach might be the most critical.

When markets turn against you — and they always do, at some point — even the best people managing money get "butterflies, and not the good kind," one portfolio manager told BI. It's why top funds employ performance coaches. Zyn pouches and receding hairlines are omnipresent on hedge fund trading floors, too.

Losses as little as 5% of an investment portfolio in a week can result in a pink slip, and the scale of the biggest firms gives them a close to unlimited budget to recruit external talent to replace those who lose money.

"Not losing money in volatility events is a really important part of investing at a pod shop," said Brett Caughran, a former portfolio manager for Citadel, Schonfeld, D.E. Shaw, and Maverick, who founded the multistrategy-focused training firm Fundamental Edge.

Caughran tries to stress to those signing up for his training that working at a multistrategy firm means "there's a moment-by-moment paranoia about the systematic risks in my portfolio."

Compared with firms with longer investment time horizons, where he said people could ride out short-term volatility, a hypothetical Millennium portfolio manager is playing a "batting average game" focused on diversified, smaller bets. Concentrated firms, such as Bill Ackman's Pershing Square, are looking for a few home runs, but a Millennium PM wants to hit singles more often than not.

"Some people are more temperamentally aligned with that, and if you can nail that type of investing, there are great rewards for it," he said.

Smart people with plenty of career options might have underlying motives for being attracted to such a high-stress environment, but the universal draw is the paycheck.

Despite the proliferation of portfolio managers in the past decade thanks to the growth of multistrategy hedge funds, these jobs are still rare and come with serious pay packages, such as a bonus that can be up to 25% of your portfolio's gains for yourself and your team.

If you make 20% in a $1 billion portfolio in a year, for example, that could mean a $50 million bonus to distribute between your small team of analysts and yourself, on top of a guaranteed six-figure salary.

There's also a mix of competitiveness and ego that drives people to take jobs at the biggest of firms. The industry has been glamorized in shows like "Billions," which is loosely based on one of the Big Four founders, Point72's Steve Cohen, and attracts type A personalities who thrive on constant competition.

As one multistrategy executive told BI, when the calendar flips to a new year, "everyone's at zero again — and no one cares what you did last year, last month, or last week."

"It's a what-have-you-done-for-me-today-type industry," he said.

Despite the self-belief needed to play in the majors, don't expect any self-respecting portfolio manager to brag about a good run around the office. In the same manner that pitchers in the midst of a no-hitter don't acknowledge it, PMs are similarly superstitious.

"It's almost like a euphoric feeling" when reality matches with your research and strategy, another portfolio manager told BI.

"You always have to consciously suppress it," this person said, and stay even-keeled.

A shift to more stable teams?

"Ten to 20% is normal" churn for portfolio managers at a multimanager platform, said Justin Young, director of investments at Multilateral Endowment Management Company, a hedge-fund investor in Oklahoma that manages assets for Oklahoma State University's endowment and other institutions.

"You'd expect 15 to 20% of PMs to have a bad year," he said.

Several industry experts, however, said a structural shift might be underway that could result in less turnover. The biggest hedge funds are moving away from legions of PMs to broader teams that can run more capital, and turnover will likely lessen.

One business development executive at a multistrategy firm — who is tasked with recruiting investing talent to join their fund — said a recent industry focus had been on combining investing teams and scaling the amount of capital the combined entity runs. Millennium, for example, now has its portfolio managers reporting to a senior portfolio manager, who often oversees several investors in larger teams.

The more money in the portfolio and the higher the head count, the less likely a tough quarter leads to a cut, Caughran said.

"Teams are now 10, 15, 20 people — they're not cutting those teams when they're down 2%," he said.

Funds might be pushed toward such a strategy by the next generation of talent. The business development executive said young finance professionals working in banking were less interested in hedge funds than they once were.

At Yale's business school, those involved in the investment management club — students you'd think would be ideal candidates to work at a large multistrategy fund — are more interested in longer-term investing strategies run by places like venture capital firms or hedge funds like those associated with the late investor Julian Robertson, known as the Tiger Cubs, said Victor Ocampo, the club's president.

Ocampo said the constraints of working at some of the biggest names in hedge funds were often "too strict," especially given their demand for market-beating returns.

"I'm the person who they're going to fire if it doesn't work," said Ocampo, who worked previously as a portfolio manager for the Latin American investment firm Sura Asset Management

To be sure, while there might be anecdotes of young people becoming uninterested in firms modeled like the Big Four, the data show that these funds are still a big draw. Last year, Citadel and Citadel Securities, the market-making business also founded by Ken Griffin, received more than 85,000 applications for its internship slots, a more than 30% bump from 2023.

Ilana Weinstein, a longtime industry recruiter who runs The IDW Group, said she advises her clients to ask large multistrategy funds what percentage of the investing team is homegrown.

"If a firm can say the majority, that tells you what you need to know about allowing for some footfalls and giving you the chance to succeed," she said. "Not all multimanagers are created equal."

These managers, Weinstein said, do not want to cut people indiscriminately. Point72, Citadel, and Balyasny have built out internship and training programs to develop more investing and technical talent in-house. Millennium partners with UBS, where young hires spend a year learning entry-level skills at the investment bank before starting at the hedge fund.

These firms naturally have a vested interest in seeing these younger pros grow into success stories at their firms instead of rivals.

"They put so much effort into recruiting talent and then developing," Weinstein. "They want to see a return on their investment and give these people time to adjust."

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• BlackRock, now managing $11.6 trillion, has more employees outside the US than in its home country.
• On the firm's first-quarter earnings call, CEO Larry Fink stressed its global reach.
• "We are Mexican in Mexico, Canadian in Canada," Fink told analysts.

BlackRock's first client 37 years ago was Japanese. A majority of the $11. 6 trillion New York-based firm's employees are based internationally. The manager's risk platform Aladdin just signed its first Korean client.

There are even plans to open a few more offices outside the US where the world's largest asset manager has a client base, CEO Larry Fink said Friday morning.

"BlackRock is a global firm, but one that operates hyper-locally," he said.

In practice, this means "we are Mexican in Mexico, Canadian in Canada," among other countries and nationalities, Fink said.

It was a notable remark from the world's largest asset manager, which held its first-quarter earnings call Friday morning as the financial world struggles to digest the ramifications of President Donald Trump's tariff policies. Though the tariffs have been put on pause for most countries, though notably not China, Fink said that "in the short run, we have an economy at risk."

This follows his talk Monday at the Economic Club of New York when Fink said that most of the CEOs he is talking to "would say we are probably in a recession right now." In the firm's earnings release, the current market environment is compared to "large, structural shifts" that occurred during the financial crisis and COVID-19.

Despite the dire immediate backdrop, Fink said his firm leads with "optimism." The large macro trends — such as artificial intelligence and infrastructure spending that BlackRock has focused on for the next wave of its growth — "are still around," he said, and that the manager has a "growth mindset."

Over recent weeks, BlackRock has had thousands of client conversations, Fink said, and there's still a significant appetite for infrastructure investing. He said BlackRock preaches long-term solutions, not moves to address "the next tweet."

He said the public market chaos is expected to attract more assets to private markets, a shift the firm is embracing.

Still, the tariffs — which Fink said "went beyond anything I could have imagined" — cannot be ignored as simply short-term noise. BlackRock's European ETF line surpassed $1 trillion in assets for the first time last quarter, thanks to investors leaving the US. Retirement and college savings are hit by such severe dips in stock markets.

"This isn't Wall Street versus Main Street," Fink said in his prepared remarks to start the call.

His closing advice (or wish): "Have a calm second quarter."

• Former executives from Citadel, Millennium, and Point72 are in senior positions across the industry.
• The leading firms have become a pool of talent for smaller rivals to poach from.
• Managers such as Walleye, Capula, Fortress, Jain Global, and more have hired alums of the biggest funds.

As Dmitry Balyasny thought about the next stage of his eponymous firm's evolution and the leaders to shepherd it, he wanted someone who had been there before.

Balyasny hired Millennium's one-time chief financial officer, Kevin Byrne, as its chief operating officer last summer. This move brought on one of the few people who can say they know what it's like to work in the C-suite of a large multistrategy firm. Byrne had been among the leadership of Izzy Englander's firm when it was roughly the size of $23 billion Balyasny today.

For those in charge of smaller multistrategy funds, the place to find the talent to take you to the next level is obvious: the three biggest firms in the sector, Englander's Millennium, Ken Griffin's Citadel, and Steve Cohen's Point72.

The three firms, which manage more than $180 billion combined and employ more than 10,000 people, have become the recruiting grounds for firms in need of experienced executives in the same way that Julian Robertson's Tiger Management was once the launching pad for aspiring fund founders.

It's another example of the institutional qualities of the top tier of the $4.5 trillion industry. Decades ago — when a hedge fund would have felt crowded with more than 100 people on staff — banks, consulting firms, law firms, and accounting giants served as feeders for hedge funds looking to fill out their executive ranks.

No one could say they knew what it takes to run a multistrategy firm with tens of billions in capital because it had never been done. Now that's changed, and those involved with the day-to-day management of the biggest firms in the industry have become hot commodities for those hoping to break into the top tier.

"When you sit in those circles, when you sit on those committees, you learn about how to run this kind of business," said John Pierson, an industry recruiter who founded P2 Investments.

"They want that DNA, that top .0001% DNA, from the top shops," he said, referring to the biggest multistrategy firms.

The names

The firms tapping into this talent include upstart platforms like Walleye, new launches like Jain Global, and established managers hoping to carve out their own spot in the multistrategy sector like Capula. And for those who leave Millennium, Citadel, and Point72, it's often for jobs and titles that give them more responsibility and runway, Pierson said.

"It's all about control and creation," he said.

While many of these roles are filled by people who made their name in the industry because of their investing chops — and a select few do still trade a book — the real value from these individuals comes from their managerial or business-building abilities.

And titles can be deceiving. Chief investment officers and strategy heads at most platforms do not run a portfolio themselves, but instead manage, recruit, and train legions of investors beneath them.

Below is a rundown of some names and roles that fit the bill. The story continues below the table. Those with an asterisk next to their name have worked at several different firms, often other multistrategy hedge funds, since leaving one of the three big platforms.

These three managers have also been the place where many founders of new multistrategy firms — which require more boardroom tact than market savviness from their leaders — have been groomed. Millennium spawned the industry's two biggest platform launches: Michael Gelband's ExodusPoint and Bobby Jain's Jain Global.

Englander's former executives have also started two of Asia's biggest multistrategy launches: Jonathan Xiong's Singapore-based Arrowpoint Investment Partners and Kurt Baker's Hong Kong-based 30th Century Partners.

Equity-focused multimanager funds from Citadel alumni have vaccumed up billions in capital. Managers include Holocene Advisors, founded by Brandon Haley; Candlestick Capital, founded by Jack Woodruff; Woodline Partners, cofounded by Michael Rockefeller and Karl Kroeker; Cinctive Capital, cofounded by Richard Schimel and Larry Sapanski; and, most recently, Freestone Grove Partners, founded by Todd Barker. Additionally, Dymon Asia cofounder Danny Yong was once Citadel's top Asia executive before starting his own firm.

Two former executives from Cohen's umbrella, Doug Haynes and Tom Conheeney, have each tried to launch their own multi-strategies offering, but both were ultimately unable to get them off the ground. Still, Point72 executive Angus Wai launched Asia-based Polymer Capital in 2019.

Balyasny as a case study

There's a road map for founders tapping talent from Citadel, Millennium, and Point72 in the hopes of spurring their next wave of growth: Balyasny.

While it hasn't always been smooth, the Chicago-based fund has expanded significantly in recent years. At the end of a tough 2018 that resulted in dozens of layoffs, the manager had $6 billion in assets. It now runs $23 billion and has expanded into asset classes like commodities and geographies like Denmark and Dubai.

While Balyasny and his cofounders Taylor O'Malley and Scott Schroeder still lead the firm, with Balyasny himself recently taking on more control over the fund's stockpickers, the firm's executive ranks are littered with alums of its three larger rivals, including the aforementioned Byrne. In fact, the firm's past poaching of Citadel talent — which also included Runnfeldt and Giannini — sparked a mini turf war between Griffin and Balyasny years ago.

Current Balyasny executives from Citadel, Millennium, and Point72 include:

• Alex Lurye, former chief risk officer for Citadel, who now sits in the same seat at Balyasny
• Steve Goldberg, one-time senior portfolio manager at Citadel, who coheads the fixed-income and macro investing teams at Balyasny
• Francine Fang, once the deputy head of investments for Cohen's quant unit Cubist, who currently is Balyasny's global head of systematic
• Bill Wappler, a former Point72 research executive, who is a partner and director of research at Balyasny
• Gappy Paleologo, an alum of Millennium and Citadel, who is Balyasny's new global head of quantitative research
• Peter Goodwin, a one-time star PM for Point72, who is running his own unit, Longaeva Partners, within Balyasny
• Thomas Stephens, a former PM for Millennium and Citadel, who is the senior managing director of stock-picking unit Corbets Capital
• Steve Schurr, a Point72 portfolio manager before joining Balyasny, who is a senior managing director of fundamental equities
• Joe Lanzillotti, a one-time controller at Millennium, who is Balyasny's deputy CFO
• Anita Nassar, once a partner at Citadel, who is the global head of the client relations group for Balyasny
• Joe Snodgrass, the former spokesperson for Millennium, who is the chief communications officer at Balyasny

As Citadel and Point72 return capital and Englander considers selling a stake in Millennium, Balyasny has positioned itself as not just a rival to the three biggest firms, but a legitimate peer.

One point of proof is that smaller multi-strategy funds, as well as the biggest in the industry, are hiring Balyasny alums to be leaders.

Walleye, for instance, named former Balyasny PM Anil Gondi the firm's head of long-short equity last year, and Daylamani and Runnfeldt worked in leadership roles at Balyasny before joining Engineers Gate and Fortress, respectively. Schonfeld's co-heads of its macro and fixed-income investing unit, Colin Lancaster and Mitesh Parikh, both traded for Balyasny before starting their own firm and eventually joining Schonfeld.

Jared Hade, meanwhile, will start as Point72's chief financial officer in the second half of the year after spending close to 20 years at Balyasny.

"The big three," as one industry recruiter put it, "is now the big four."

• Market volatility and trading volumes are sky-high, but the systems have so far handled the stress.
• Regulators and government officials in the US and UK say everything is working as it should.
• There are fears of knock-on effects in stock and bond markets if funds are forced to sell.

The house is on fire, but the pipes still work.

The rollout of President Donald Trump's tariffs has slammed equity and bond markets, as volatility and trading volumes have skyrocketed.

Despite this chaos, the infrastructure allowing asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, central banks, and others to trade, redeem, and liquidate assets has held steady. As one investor said, "Everything's withstood a massive stress test."

The basis trade — a hedge-fund bet used by big-name managers like Millennium, Citadel, and ExodusPoint — takes advantage of a slight mispricing in Treasury futures contracts and cash Treasurys, a nearly risk-free trade that nets a tiny profit. Hedge funds have amplified this trade with borrowed money, given the relative lack of danger, making the recent moves in Treasury markets a potentially calamitous and wide-ranging event.

In March 2020, at the height of market volatility at the onset of the pandemic, the Federal Reserve ended up buying $1 trillion worth of bonds to keep everything running. That experience has had regulators and central banks keeping a closer eye on the trade, which has only grown in assets since the pandemic.

Now, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, hedge funds currently are experiencing an "uncomfortable but normal" deleveraging of their positions, and the most important market in the world — US government debt — is sound.

There were worries that the market jitters might bring about an Archegos-like crash of a major asset manager that couldn't meet its margin calls. Morgan Stanley equity strategist Michael Wilson wrote in a note that there are indications of selling of so-called defensive stocks, which are supposed to do well in a market downturn and could be a sign of managers cashing out to meet prime broker demands.

But minutes released on Wednesday from the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee state that hedge funds have met margin calls since the tariffs were announced "without taking actions which would further amplify the market volatility."

Even equity markets haven't yet hit circuit breaker halts in trading despite the VIX — Wall Street's so-called fear gauge — being at its highest mark since March 2020.

"We don't know what we don't know, but at least it's all worked so far," said one veteran quant trader.

• President Donald Trump's tariff policies have vaporized trillions of dollars from the stock market.
• Those most affected are huge stockholders like billionaires, many of whom once supported the president.
• They are now turning on him, as stocks are down close to 10% in April already.

Maybe the animal spirits need to be leashed.

The tariffs announced by President Donald Trump last week have tanked global stock markets, hitting the world's richest the hardest.

Billionaires, including big supporters of Trump, have seen their net worths and investment portfolios plummet during the market sell-off.

Hedge fund managers such as Third Point's Dan Loeb and Pershing Square's Bill Ackman have been critical of the tariffs, with Ackman pushing for a 90-day pause on X.

Months after saying that people who are worried about the economic impacts of tariffs should "get over it," JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon wrote in his annual letter published Monday that "America First is fine, as long as it doesn't end up being America alone," and warned that tariffs will slow the economy down.

Billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller, whom Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent worked under, posted on X in November that his former employee "is innovative in a calm, thoughtful way that will be disruptive but not rattle markets." On Sunday, as recession predictions became commonplace among economists, Druckenmiller made clear he differs from his former protégé, writing that he does not "support tariffs exceeding 10%."

A pair of Republican billionaires named Ken — Langone and Griffin, founders of Home Depot and Citadel, respectively — are frustrated with the rollout.

Langone told the Financial Times that he doesn't "understand the goddamn formula" used to create the specific rates for each country, while Griffin — whose vaunted flagship fund has lost money the last two months — called them a "huge policy mistake" in a talk at the University of Miami Monday night.

The reversal of opinion of the world's wealthiest is no shock. Former President Joe Biden, for example, enjoyed the support of big names in Wall Street and Silicon Valley before the relationship soured, thanks in part to the policies and focuses of former SEC chair Gary Gensler and former FTC chair Lina Khan.

Trump himself has veered between love and hate with the elite of his hometown during his decade in politics, with the most recent lull paling in comparison to how companies and donors fled from him following the January 6 insurrection attempt four years ago.

But this feels different because, according to six different investors trying (and mostly failing) to trade these markets, they're all powerless. A company's fundamentals do not matter now, only whatever comes out of Washington, which led to one trader "getting my face ripped off" by their short bet today.

This individual's bet backfired because the market briefly spiked at a false rumor of a reprieve from the tariffs. The White House denied any pause was coming, with Trump instead threatening even higher tariffs against China, which has shown no sign of yielding.

The Chinese Communist Party's mouthpiece, the People's Daily, wrote on Sunday that "the more pressure we get, the stronger we become," and some investors are starting to bet on them over the US.

Speaking on "Liberation Day" at a conference put on by technology lobbying group Information Technology Industry Council, David McCormick, the junior senator from Pennsylvania and one-time CEO of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, said he has spoken to many in his old line of work who are "long China and short America."

Following the release of Chinese AI darling DeepSeek's models in January, McCormick, a Republican who is married to former Trump advisor and Goldman Sachs alum Dina Powell, said some of the so-called smart money is betting on the US losing the AI race — but he isn't.

"I'm long America, and I'm short China," he said, "but it depends on what we do. It's in our hands, and we can mess it up."

Emmalyse Brownstein contributed reporting.

• Hedge funds are seeking out data to understand the impact of President Donald Trump's tariff policies.
• Data exchanges say requests for import-export info and Canada-specific data have skyrocketed.
• Funds, typically focused on a specific sector or stock, are looking for country-level data to forecast fallout.

The smart money is dumbfounded.

The most sophisticated investors in the world, members of the $4.5 trillion hedge fund industry, constantly scour the globe for new data to better inform their trading decisions and improve their models. But President Donald Trump's tariff policies, which sent global markets reeling Thursday, have them scrambling to find relevant info to help them understand just how devastating the policies might be to the global economy.

Data exchanges and consultancies told Business Insider that interest in country-level data has skyrocketed. Typically, firms are interested in datasets that can tell a story about a specific stock or sector, such as credit-card data on Amazon or e-commerce, but because of the widespread impact of the tariffs, hedge funds that specialize in various strategies — macro gamblers, fundamental stockpickers, quant traders, and more — are all on the hunt for this elusive data.

Matt Ober, a former data buyer for hedge funds such as Dan Loeb's Third Point and WorldQuant, who runs data marketplace Initial Data Offering, said interest in such datasets has "doubled or tripled" over the past few weeks.

Daryl Smith, the head of research for alternative data consultancy Neudata, said demand for Canada-specific data has skyrocketed due to the trade war between the country and the US. Because the tariffs will impact consumers worldwide, not just those in the US, Smith said funds are also seeking ways to track international buyers' habits and how they might change.

"Previously, the vast majority of consumer spending questions were about the US, but now people want that high-level data on all countries," he said.

The issue, though, is this data is not something many vendors have ever sold before, mostly because there wasn't enough interest in understanding the spending habits of the average Vietnamese or Canadian consumer. It's a callback to the GameStop saga of early 2021 when funds rushed to track the tickers being mentioned by retail investors on the Wall Street Bets subreddit who banded together and bought enough GameStop shares to put a short squeeze on Gabe Plotkin's Melvin Capital.

Sixteen months, several documentaries, and a congressional investigation later, Melvin shut down.

Compared to the meme stock mania, the tariffs pose a broader challenge for data-hungry funds. One data scientist at a large fund said firms are already reworking existing data feeds from credit-card receipts to get more country-specific perspectives. Ober mentioned vendor Dun & Bradstreet as a potential winner because of the company's supply chain and manufacturing data.

But anyone rushing to the space claiming they have the perfect product for the current volatility is likely exaggerating, another data buyer at a quant fund said. Funds need datasets with years of track record to backtest and prove their legitimacy.

The unprecedented nature of the tariffs means a legitimate track record will be hard to find.

"Unless someone has data on global trade in the 1920s, there's not going to be a silver bullet," the data buyer said, referring to the last time a US administration slapped such severe tariffs on its global trading partners.