• Big-name managers mostly performed well in 2024, but some under-the-radar players soared.
• Managers like Glen Kacher's Light Street and David Rogers' Castle Hook returned 60% last year.
• Jason Mudrick's firm returned more than 31%, a person close to the manager said.

The biggest hedge funds in the world — names like Citadel, D. E. Shaw, and Millennium — had good years in 2024, as Business Insider has reported.

While most of these funds failed to match the S&P 500's 23% gain, their investors love their consistency and risk management.

But allocators also need managers who can make big bets and rip past peers and the market in a good year, as seen in the growth and interest in Chris Rokos' eponymous fund.

BI identified a few hedge funds that have been around but are not as recognizable as their industry subsector peers — though that might change after their impressive performance.

Big-name macro funds, for example, had strong years thanks to geopolitical events like the US election, which many were able to capitalize on. Rokos, PointState, and Rob Citrone's Discovery Capital Management all recorded large gains — but none of these bigger names matched the 60% gain by David Rogers' Castle Hook.

Rogers, a former investor in George Soros' family office, launched Castle Hook in 2016 with his fellow Soros alum Joshua Donfeld with capital from the billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller. The manager now runs $4.4 billion, a person close to the firm said.

Light Street Capital, a Tiger Cub run out of California by Glen Kacher, is smaller and less well known than other firms linked to Tiger Management's late Julian Robertson, such as Tiger Global, Coatue, and Viking Global. But Light Street's 59.4% gain last year and Kacher's focus on artificial intelligence are sure to draw attention.

Kacher said on X that his "AI5 basket" outperformed the Magnificent Seven last year. There's some overlap between the two groups of stocks, specifically Nvidia and Microsoft, but the other holdings in his basket are semiconductor and AI-infrastructure companies such as Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom.

Meanwhile, when stocks are soaring, there's often a lack of interest in credit managers, especially those playing in the distressed space. But Jason Mudrick's $4 billion firm managed to pull out a market-beating year, a person close to the firm told BI.

The person said Mudrick Capital made 31.7% for the year and ended 2024 by investing up to $50 million in the flailing British flying-taxi startup Vertical Aerospace to bail the company out.

By comparison, the average credit fund, according to Hedge Fund Research, returned less than 10% through November.

• Among the multimanagers, $12 billion Schonfeld led the way in 2024.
• The firm bounced back from a tumultuous 2023 to return close to 20% last year.
• Its multistrategy peers ended with double-digit returns but didn't match the S&P 500's 23% gain.

What a difference a year makes.

When 2023 came to a close, Schonfeld Strategic Advisors was trailing its peers and shedding staff. A year later, the $12 billion New York-based manager is atop the league table with a 19.7% gain in 2024, people close to the firm told Business Insider.

Schonfeld was positive every month in 2024 and added 19 portfolio managers across different strategies, one person close to the manager said. The firm was one of many in the industry that expanded their international footprint, with an office in Dubai, and 40% of the firm's risk is now managed by portfolio managers operating outside the US, the person said.

For the most part, the massive multimanager firms that dominated industry news for the past few years performed as expected.

While these managers didn't match the S&P 500's 23% gain last year, nearly all finished 2024 with double-digit net returns.

D.E. Shaw, the $65 billion giant based in New York, returned 18% in its multistrategy Composite fund and more than 36% in its macro-focused Oculus fund, a person familiar confirmed. Bloomberg reported that the firm was planning to return billions of profits to investors.

Ken Griffin's Citadel, which about two years ago was named the most profitable hedge fund of all time, returned 15.1% in 2024 in its flagship Wellington fund, three people familiar with the firm's performance told BI. One person close to the firm said the Miami-based firm returned more than 22% in its Tactical Trading fund, which comprises the firm's fundamental equities and quant teams.

Izzy Englander's Millennium, meanwhile, finished the year up 15% after a 2.5% gain in December.

One of the year's most interesting managers, Walleye Capital, capped its big 2024 with a 1.8% gain in December, bringing the firm's 2024 returns to 17.7%, a person close to the firm said.

For more returns, see the table below. Managers declined to comment or did not immediately return requests for comment. Firms will be added as their performances are learned.

• Each year, Business Insider highlights Wall Street's rising stars.
• These are up-and-comers in investment banking, trading, and investing.
• All are 35 or younger. Check out our lists over the years.

For the past eight years, Business Insider's finance reporters have tapped their contacts to put together a list of who to watch on Wall Street.

We've received recommendations from bosses, colleagues, recruiters, and financial industry experts to create our annual feature. To be eligible, nominees must be based in the US, 35 or younger, and stand out among their peers. The editors make the final decisions.

Business Insider asked these rising stars from leading firms like Goldman, Blackstone, and Citadel to reflect on their successes, challenges, and best career advice.

2024

Meet our 2024 class

Our most recent set of young professionals reflect the future of finance. A number of them are shaping the trajectory of clean energy and artificial intelligence by financing the infrastructure that will underpin it. Some have seen their focus go from niche to hot asset. Others are influencing how Wall Street interacts with Main Street, using their skills and savvy to create new products and services for ordinary investors or giving employees at portfolio companies ownership stakes.

The rising stars also shared how they unwind and stay grounded in order to stay mentally sharp.

2023

Meet the 2023 class

2023's cohort included traders setting new playbooks for deals and trades and an investor building out burgeoning private markets businesses within the world's largest bank. These influencers also financed some of the biggest deals of the past few years and provided an edge to top investors with complex and innovative products.

They shared the lessons learned from their biggest career mistakes and how their Wall Street wardrobe had evolved from their COVID work-from-home days.

2022

Meet the class of 2022

As Wall Street navigated volatile markets, fewer deals, and plummeting company valuations, we found the players rising up despite the challenges.

One invested in space ventures, and another executed multibillion-dollar trades. Some up-and-comers pushed their teams to the top of industry rankings.

From books on the science of sleep to fantasy football strategy podcasts, here's what these bright leaders were reading and listening to. And here are some of their lessons and advice.

Here are the previous editions of our Wall Street rising stars list:

• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017

• Dmitry Balyasny and Steve Schurr, a senior portfolio manager, discussed the firm's equities rebuild.
• Balyasny has been leading the unit since Jeff Runnfeldt's departure in October 2023.
• The manager wants its equities teams to focus on deep research, not short-term trading.

Throughout its 23-year history, Dmitry Balyasny's firm has been known, first and foremost, as a stock picker.

While the $20 billion multistrategy firm has added strategies like macro, commodities, and quant over the years and expanded its head count to 2,000 people, the Chicago-based manager still leads with its equities expertise.

So when the firm's equities teams were dragging the manager's performance down to the bottom of the league tables in 2023, Balyasny decided to undergo a "course correction" in its largest business unit, the founder told Business Insider in an interview at the firm's office in London's posh Mayfair neighborhood.

"People were trading too much and not investing enough," Balyasny said.

The "top-down philosophical" refocus, he said, has been on ideas, research, and longer timelines. Instead of trying to "catch every wiggle" or make money on every market twitch, portfolio managers are being pushed to find multimonth or even multiquarter investment ideas, he said. The result has been lower position turnover and less trading in PMs' books.

And performance rebounded in 2024: After a big November that had the manager up 11.6% through the first 11 months, the manager is set to land squarely in the middle of its peers for the year.

While the firm's hiring — for the equities unit as well as other strategies — got most of the headlines for the manager this year, Balyasny said it was the improvement of existing stock-picking teams that drove the returns.

DNA change

Balyasny's equities struggles coincided with multistrategy firms' growth and hedge funds' increased use of alternative data, such as credit-card transactions and email receipts, which can provide a sneak peek of a company's performance before it reports earnings.

This data, which provided an invaluable edge a decade ago but is now table stakes at firms like Balyasny, pushed investors to focus "excessively on triangulating and calling quarters," said Steve Schurr, a senior portfolio manager who was promoted to the equities leadership team in mid-2023, when the "course correction" began.

"It's become a strategy of diminished expected returns" as more firms use this type of data, he told BI.

Schurr, who started his career in investing working for the legendary short-seller Jim Chanos, performed well during the equities division's run of underperformance. Balyasny identified his focus on primary research as a winner and pushed him to spread it across the firm.

"We had to change the DNA of how we conducted research here," Schurr said.

The firm built out an internal research database called Telescope, which has an AI overlay to summarize things like podcasts, expert network calls, and sell-side research. A new 15-person internal research team with data scientists and former journalists has done 120 projects for PMs this year.

Schurr said he believed that "durable edge" for all multistrategy firms investing in equities would come through primary research, not alternative data.

"I think we are back to the anarchy of having to be good investors," he said of the multistrategy sector, adding that "80% of a portfolio manager's opportunity is going to be from equity selection."

Player-coaches

As the industry has matured, the titans of the field have gone from brash traders to business-building executives. The leaders at Citadel, Millennium, Jain Global, Brevan Howard, and more do not run a book.

Steve Cohen, the billionaire founder of Point72 and owner of the New York Mets, stopped trading this summer — and it felt like the official end of an era.

But Balyasny has begun trading a book again for his firm after giving it up for a time. Other leaders on the equities team — including Schurr and Peter Goodwin, who's launching an internal stock-picking unit called Longaeva Partners and plans to hire PMs to work underneath him — are also managing portfolios of their own.

Balyasny, who has tapped people to run his quant, commodities, and macro units, isn't planning to hire someone to oversee equities. Jeff Runnfeldt, now the chief investment officer of Fortress' multimanager platform, oversaw the equities unit, but Balyasny stepped into the role on an interim basis after Runnfeldt and the firm parted ways in October 2023.

For now, the interim tag has been removed. Balyasny said he believes that trading alongside his employees helps him connect with potential recruits as he's in the trenches with them.

Balyasny has had its ups and downs — specifically in 2018 when the manager laid off 20% of its staff and saw investors redeem $4 billion. The circumstances this time around are much different, he said, thanks to the diversification of the firm's assets and LP base.

In 2018, 90% of the risk was in equities; now it's 40% to 50%. The firm's investors were only 20% institutional in 2018; now that figure is 70%, giving the firm long-term capital partners.

That's important to have as the firm has remade its biggest unit. There are 65 to 70 portfolio managers in the firm's three equities groups — Balyasny, Corbets, and Longaeva — and plans to expand, specifically in Goodwin's unit.

Schurr said the pitch to recruits was simple: "You're not just going to be a cog in the machine."

For years the best portfolio managers have had to choose between having all the resources and building a business — but Balyasny says you can have it all. He compares running an equities team to being a young company pitching a venture firm.

Year-end meetings between PMs and business heads lay out why someone should get certain resources and capital based on their plans and expectations for the year ahead.

While top investors can also launch their own funds, Balyasny argued that this path "is not really worthwhile" given where the capital in the industry is flowing — and which funds have been seeding new launches. "Why not be in-house and get all the resources?" he said.

Schurr has three questions for each potential PM: What's your unique strategy? How do you build a team and a research process to support it? And how would you construct a portfolio to optimize it?

"Among the multistrats, I think we have a really compelling offering," Schurr said, adding: "I'll let others try to call quarters. I want Balyasny to be the house of the best investors."

'You have to grow'

Growth is, in many ways, a requirement of a multistrategy firm instead of a goal. Assets, head count, strategies, office locations — all should be ticking up if things are going as planned.

Balyasny said the firm is always looking for people "to deepen the bench" on both the investing side and the business side of the equation, such as Kevin Byrne, who was brought over from Millennium this year to be the firm's chief operating officer. He pointed out that Byrne joined Millennium when that firm was roughly the same size — $20 billion, give or take — as Balyasny is now.

When asked if tripling the firm's assets was the goal — which would put the manager close to where Millennium currently sits — Balyasny said he didn't have a specific AUM goal in mind. Still, as long as the liquidity in the markets they trade in grows, their strategies should be able to as well, he said.

The firm wants to be a leading industry player, Balyasny said. "You can't be substantially smaller than others," he added.

Size certainly matters in the recruiting battleground as guaranteed payouts grow. Balyasny said the money the firm spent on new hires this year is in line with what the manager has historically invested in talent.

He said the manager had traditionally spent 1% to 1.5% of its AUM on recruiting annually, which would put this year's figure at $200 million to $300 million. A significant portion of recruiting costs are tied to performance over time, he said.

This year, more of that recruiting spend has gone toward equities hires, including big names like Goodwin, who have commanded larger packages.

The firm knows that to keep up, "you have to grow over time," he said. "But it doesn't have to be a straight line."

• Based on conversations with industry insiders, Business Insider rounded up the hedge funds to watch in 2025.
• Firms include Walleye Capital, Lone Pine, Renaissance Technologies, and an OpenAI-connected launch.
• 2024 was a strong year for the industry, though pressure is building on the industry's middle class.

With trillions of dollars in assets and dozens of billionaires, the hedge fund industry is doing fine, even if there's been a renewed push from the industry's biggest backers to rein in costs.

Funds performed well in 2024, returning more than 10% through November, according to industry tracker PivotalPath — even though the average firm won't match the returns of the S&P 500, which is on track to finish above 20% for the second year in a row. Managers handled the volatility around the reelection of former president Donald Trump well, and top managers can still command eye-popping fees and yearslong lock-up periods.

But, like any sector, the industry is increasingly splitting between the haves and the have-nots. Based on conversations with a dozen industry insiders — from LPs to prime brokers to fund executives themselves — Business Insider compiled a list of 10 hedge funds to watch in the coming year.

It's a mix of longtime giants, new launches, struggling managers, and overseas specialists.

1. Walleye Capital

$7.4 billion Walleye — a firm that is hoping to be the best midsize multistrategy fund in the industry — spent 2024 reconfiguring.

Coming into the firm were big names from bigger firms: former Citadel executives and investors like Matt Giannini and Rory Murphy, one-time ExodusPoint marketer Anil Jethanandani, former Balyasny PM Anil Gondi, WorldQuant's options head Rupert Graham, and more. Meanwhile, leaders like Raj Sethi, who topped the manager's macro and fixed-income team, and Anuraj Dua, who had led some systematic macro efforts at the firm, departed the manager.

The firm's ambitions have grown. The manager, which started in Minnesota as an options market maker, now has offices across the US as well as in London and Dubai. And it has former Citadel executive Tom DeAngelis as president.

With strong performance in 2024 — Walleye was up 15.4% through November — the firm is set to continue to make headlines in 2025.

2. Pinpoint Asset Management

Asia's hedge fund scene has been booming, with new launches in Singapore and Hong Kong from former Millennium executives as well as expansions from regional players like Dymon Asia. But while many players in the region focus on markets like Japan or South Korea — or look westward to the Middle East — Pinpoint boasts its China focus proudly.

The manager, which has headquarters in Hong Kong but offices in Shanghai, is set to have its best year in its $1.2 billion multistrategy fund since 2020, with an 8.6% gain through November. Yet it is the firm's China fund, which is soft closed, that has been the story of the year, with a 17.3% gain through November, according to HSBC's Hedge Weekly report. As Trump woos China's leader, Xi Jinping, Pinpoint hopes its expertise in the country will set it apart in 2025.

3. Viking Global Investors

Another year, another CIO departure. Since 2015, Viking Global, the $48 billion stockpicker run by cofounder Andreas Halvorsen, has had four CIOs or co-CIOs depart the firm, including Ning Jin, who left the firm in August.

Viking, however, has proven its ability to train the next generation of investment talent internally and keep the trains on schedule when a senior leader departs.

As Jin follows the path of many former Viking investing heads in setting up a new fund, the firm — up 12.2% through November — has tapped portfolio manager Justin Walsh to be its latest CIO.

According to a presentation he gave to Harvard Business School students this year, one of his biggest worries is a possible multistrategy meltdown.

4. Eisler Capital

Ed Eisler's eponymous firm has struggled to keep up with the multistrategy pack. With most firms in the firm's peer group expected to return around 10% or more this year, $4 billion Eisler will likely end 2024 with returns below 5%. The manager had returned a little over 2% on the year through November, a person close to the manager said.

It's not for a lack of trying, of course — another person familiar with the firm told BI that Eisler forced portfolio managers to be fully deployed earlier, meaning all of the capital they managed had to be invested in something, even if they didn't necessarily see a good opportunity.

One tough year doesn't doom a manager, and turnaround stories like Schonfeld prove that any fund is just a strong stretch of performance away from being back on top. Whether Eisler can rise to the occasion in 2025 remains to be seen.

5. Marshall Wace Asset Management

One of London's blue-chip managers, $70 billion Marshall Wace spent 2024 institutionalizing even further. The firm is fully invested in the war for talent, despite its billionaire cofounder speaking out against the trend — the manager has spent recent years poaching talent from rivals and added a talent surcharge on top of its existing fees.

It led to some growing pains internally, as Business Insider reported, as some of the new hires clashed with some of the firm's old guard. Still, the manager is on as stable a ground as ever.

The firm's expansion to the Middle East, with a new office in Abu Dhabi, is proof that it's not slowing down, and the firm just nabbed a former Citadel portfolio manager to trade for them. Its Eureka multistrategy fund was up 14.5% through October, a person close to the firm said.

6. Situational Awareness LP

A new San Francisco-based hedge fund is set to launch in the new year with serious backers and Silicon Valley-flavored team.

Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee who graduated from Columbia at 19, is set to launch his AI-powered fund with capital from Stripe's founding brothers, Patrick and John Collison, as well as former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross and one-time GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Named after a series of blogs Aschenbrenner wrote on AI's impending might, Situational Awareness will be a good test of what pure AI can do in the hypercompetitive investing industry.

7. Ilex Capital

2024's biggest launch, Bobby Jain's new firm, has sputtered out of the gate. One of the biggest from 2023 has not faced the same challenges — and is attracting new capital.

Ilex Capital, a stock-picking multimanager run by former Citadel employees Jonas Diedrich and Dave Sutton out of London, is set to end the year with more than $3 billion in assets after raising another $1.5 billion this year. The firm is one of the most notable, alongside former Millennium PM Diego Megia's Taula Capital, to spin out of the big multistrategy firms.

As managers like Millennium look for places to put their ever-growing assets, deals with former employees looking to start their own firm offer an interesting opportunity.

8. Lone Pine Capital

Long-running Tiger Cub Lone Pine Capital is getting its mojo back. Its long-short hedge fund Cypress made 9% in November alone, bumping its 2024 gains to 34.3% through the year's first 11 months.

Beyond strong performance though, the firm is investing in its business and looking to grow. After the retirement of its billionaire founder Steve Mandel five years ago, and the departure of buzzy industry star Mala Gaonkar in 2022, the $16 billion Connecticut-based manager has dealt with rocky performance and outflows.

In response, the firm has performed well the last two years and — for the first time in its history — put resources into its marketing. The 27-year-old manager hired Pat Cronin to be its first-ever business development leader in 2022, redid its website, and even attended last January's iConnections conference in Miami to meet with potential investors.

While some managers slowly fade away after a founder steps back, Lone Pine has decided to ramp up — and has two strong years of performance to go off of.

9. Renaissance Technologies

The late Jim Simons had already passed the torch of his legendary quant manager Renaissance to the next generation, but his death in May was still a monumental milestone for the asset manager.

Renaissance, known for the world-beating performance of its Medallion fund, which is only available to fund employees, had battled redemptions and poor performance in recent years in its largest strategies available to outside investors. But 2024 was a strong year, as its largest external fund returned close to 24% through November.

Unlike some of its quant rivals like Two Sigma and D.E. Shaw, Renaissance has not expanded into non-systematic strategies. In its first year without its visionary founder, the Long Island-based manager is one to watch.

10. Whale Rock Capital Management

Boston-based Whale Rock has dealt with the market's peaks and valleys in recent years. It surged 32% in 2023 after losing 40% and 9%, respectively, the two years prior. This year was another peak.

The manager's flagship fund is up 51% through November, thanks to a tech-heavy portfolio full of big-name US companies and under-the-radar international firms. A recent report notes that Alex Sacerdote's $9 billion firm plans to reopen to new capital, hoping to raise between $200 million and $300 million.

• Institutionalization was one of the biggest themes in hedge funds this year.
• A once-scrappy industry is starting to resemble private equity and venture capital.
• The biggest firms and new launches have evolved significantly from the days of a couple of guys and a Bloomberg.

The game has changed.

Hedge funds, led by the industry's biggest names who set the agenda for the multi-trillion-dollar sector, were once known for their scrappiness, speed, and reliance on the brains and vision of their founders.

Now, as the industry's investor base has shifted to long-term institutions from wealthy families and small funds-of-funds, hedge funds have become institutions of their own. 2024 may be the turning point for the space that, in 10 years' time, industry observers will look back on as the beginning of the next era.

The biggest managers in the space are preparing for life beyond their founders, long-standing funds are becoming more formulaic and bureaucratic, and new entrants need to raise more money than ever before.

Multistrategy managers like Millennium, Citadel, and Point72 have long been moving in this direction, but recent moves by each of the firms' founders point to a world in which these giants outlast their larger-than-life leaders.

Ken Griffin, Citadel's billionaire founder, said in November that he would be open to selling a stake in his $66 billion Miami-based asset manager. Millennium and the world's largest asset manager BlackRock have reportedly had talks about the latter taking a stake in the former.

Both firms are set to outlast their founders, with built-out infrastructure and leadership teams littered with former Goldman Sachs partners. $72 billion Millennium, for example, created the office of the CIO in late 2022 and promoted longtime executive Ajay Nagpal to president, providing investors with a clear line into the next level of leadership beyond founder Izzy Englander.

The legendary founder of $35 billion Point72, meanwhile, has stepped away from trading his own book of stocks, which is how he burst onto the scene decades ago.

While Steve Cohen spends plenty of time and money on the baseball team he owns, the New York Mets, a person close to the firm said the decision to step back from running a book was not an indication that he's spending any less time working at his manager.

In a recent internal town hall, this person said, he described no longer having a book under his purview as "freeing" as he can spend more time on strategic initiatives for the firm. Without a portfolio to manage, the market's hours no longer dictate Cohen's schedule — a flexibility he appreciates as he balances running the manager and his baseball team.

For example, in mid-October, Cohen was set to appear on a panel at investment consultant Albourne Partners' annual conference in New York, but canceled because the Mets had gone on a run in the playoffs, people familiar with the event told Business Insider.

Succession, quality launches, and a promising environment

Beyond the main multistrategy names, a number of long-running firms across the industry are, structurally, starting to look more like peers in private equity than smaller rivals in the hedge fund space.

Places like Elliott Management centralized decision-making and created more internal structure, which has frustrated some veterans of Paul Singer's asset manager but provides the needed hierarchy.

Meanwhile, firms like Two Sigma and Bridgewater have officially moved on from their founders with new leadership. Brevan Howard's billionaire founder Alan Howard no longer trades for his firm.

At the other end of the industry, the bar for new launches has increased substantially, and the next generation of industry leaders are starting the firms with a much more institutional feel than even five years ago. Bobby Jain's $5.3 billion launch in July, for example, had plenty of big-name hires and titles right from the start.

In 2023, the average fund launched with $300 million, according to Goldman Sachs' prime brokerage division. PivotalPath, the industry data tracker run by Jon Caplis, said in an end-of-year report that it expects 2024 to be similar, driven by the increase of multi-managers allocating externally.

It's been driven by a focus from allocators on "quality" launches, PivotalPath's report states; the firm is tracking 145 new funds launching between the start of 2024 and the second quarter of 2025 with founders who come from funds with more than $1 billion.

If you're able to command enough capital — either from a platform like Millennium or big allocators like pensions, sovereign wealth funds, and endowments — it should be worth it. Longtime industry players and investors believe it is shaping up to be a strong period for the industry thanks to increased volatility that will allow actively managed investment firms to shine.

"Our underlying hedge fund managers are active, fundamental stock pickers who seek to identify the best opportunities and offer differentiated exposure," wrote New York-based fund-of-funds Old Farm Partners in a recent note that focused on why active management should shine in the coming years.

"Given the argument that we have laid out in this paper, we think the current market backdrop should provide a favorable setup for our strategy going forward."

• The $19 billion manager Rokos Capital is an outlier in the increasingly institutional hedge fund industry.
• Its billionaire namesake, who was a cofounder of Brevan Howard, runs the majority of the portfolio.
• While multistrategy funds are attractive for their diversification, Rokos is appealing for its big bets.

Investors in the billionaire Chris Rokos' eponymous hedge fund had reason to celebrate the reelection of Donald Trump.

The firm made nearly $1 billion in profits the day following Trump's victory, Bloomberg first reported, pushing its year-to-date gains to more than 28% through mid-November.

The macro manager, now running $19 billion, made money across asset classes following the election, when US stocks ripped upward, the dollar strengthened, and Treasury yields jumped — as did many funds that put on the "Trump trade" before the election.

But very few firms the size of Rokos Capital Management have so much of their portfolio concentrated with a single risk-taker. While Rokos has hired quasi-portfolio managers who can put on trades — known in the firm's parlance as "investment officers" — the firm's founder still runs the majority of the portfolio, several people close to the firm said.

As the hedge fund industry's titans have shifted away from macro philosophers to business-building executives, Rokos is a throwback to a time when names like Stanley Druckenmiller and George Soros were on the top of every allocator's wish list.

And the anachronistic London-based manager has ridden its strong performance and, ironically, the movement away from its style of investing to its record size. The biggest investors in the world — sovereign wealth funds, pensions, endowments, and more — now need diversification in their portfolios from the sprawling multistrategy managers that often move as a group and put on similar trades.

Against this backdrop, Rokos stands out for its lack of correlation with the industry's biggest names.

"Pensions need the volatility," one Rokos investor at a US pension told Business Insider. Limited partners in Rokos include Canada's main pension fund and Blackstone, people familiar with the firm said.

And after raising another $2 billion in assets earlier this year, Rokos is not slowing down, industry insiders said. The firm declined to comment.

'Deprived' of his abilities

The 54-year-old Oxford-by-way-of-Eton grad cut his teeth at UBS, Goldman Sachs, and, finally, Credit Suisse, where he spent a little over three years trading alongside Alan Howard.

In 2002, Howard, Rokos, and three other Credit Suisse traders left the now-defunct Swiss bank to launch Brevan Howard (the "R" in Brevan is for Rokos). A decade later, the star trader left the manager hoping to start his own investment firm.

A five-year noncompete agreement stopped any immediate plans, though, despite Rokos' lawyers arguing that the sit-out period would leave the public "deprived" of his "skills and hard work."

Eventually, Rokos and Howard settled their dispute, and Howard even backed Rokos' new manager, reports at the time said. Rokos Capital Management launched in the fall of 2015, quickly growing to $3.5 billion before closing to new money.

In a preview of things to come, Rokos profited from Trump's first election in 2016 — the manager returned close to 20% in its first full year of trading.

Nearing its 10th anniversary, Rokos today resembles the original Brevan more so than the current iteration of Howard's manager. Brevan, which has seen its assets rise and fall thanks to uneven performance over the past decade, is structurally closer to multistrategy managers like Citadel and Millennium as it diversifies assets across risk-takers around the world.

When Brevan launched, Howard was the biggest risk-taker; Now, he no longer trades for the manager, BI reported earlier this year.

Headquartered on the posh London strip known for its bespoke tailoring, Roko's firm has a "Savile Row style" of customization for its founder. The team and research functions are molded to his way of investing, a former employee told BI, even down to the font and color coding of reports.

The goal of the firm's dozens of investment officers, analysts, and researchers — regulatory filings show that 60 people perform "investment advisory functions" across the firm's London and New York offices — is to be his "eyes and ears," this person said, adding: "When he had a question, there was a number we could find to answer it."

Rokos' superpower is his ability to monitor positions like "a human quant." One person who worked with him said he knows the positions put on by his investment officers better than they do, despite managing a much larger book.

This person also said he could stay steady in areas he's confident in, even if markets move against him in the short term.

"He's willing to wait through cycles if he believes the risk is worth it," another person who worked for him said.

A demanding place

It wasn't the plan for Rokos to be the only one putting on trades when the firm launched, people familiar with his thinking at the time said, though that was the reality for a number of years.

Several people at the firm at its start said the issue was that he couldn't find people who thought and traded exactly like him. These people said it's a physically demanding place that requires working long hours alongside a founder who constantly questions everything.

"He has a relentless pursuit of the truth," one person said.

As a result, the firm has cycled through several executives and management structures over the years. Mark Edwards, a former Goldman Sachs managing director who joined Rokos at its launch, stepped down from his CEO perch earlier this year, triggering a slew of changes.

Matthew Sebag-Montefiore, a onetime partner at the consultant Oliver Wyman, is now the CEO, while Pria Bakhshi was promoted to the global head of strategic solutions. Quita Ramirez joined last December as the global head of business development, investor relations, and communications from Schonfeld. Dmitry Green and Lauren Fairbairn, both partners, left this year.

Still, Rokos has worked to delegate some of the risk-taking to others. One investor estimated he takes 60% to 70% of the firm's risk, and that may continue to go down.

Several people close to the firm said he's hoping to add more investment officers, specifically in equities. The exact number of investment officers the firm employs is unclear, though a LinkedIn review shows 17 with the title, many of whom are also partners.

Volatility wanted

While it's counterintuitive, the manager's biggest selling point might be the roller-coaster nature of its returns. A 44% surge in 2020 was followed by a 26% drop in 2021. In 2022, when the S&P 500 dropped more than 18%, the manager had its best year on record, with a 51% gain.

With worries the industry might be hitting peak multistrategy, managers with a higher risk-return profile should be more common, the billionaire AQR founder Cliff Asness wrote earlier this year.

Alternatives "are generally more effective in higher-vol versions," he wrote but "mostly (not entirely) missing from the market today and should take on a bigger role."

As Brevan has transformed into a more diversified platform, and the likes of Louis Bacon, Michael Platt, and David Tepper have returned outside capital, allocators and industry insiders said it's hard to find a peer of Rokos'.

Jeffrey Talpins' Element Capital mostly runs internal money after returning funds at the start of the year, and Said Haidar overhauled his manager after a 43% loss in 2023. Paul Tudor Jones has expanded into quant strategies and seeded external funds, though he's still known for big directional bets.

Rokos, a press-shy billionaire whose media mentions are mostly about construction projects at his multimillion-dollar properties, including a 100-bedroom manor that dates to the days of Henry VIII, is in a league of his own, one investor said.

The limit to the firm's growth, this person said, is going to be internal restraints, not external interest.

"He could raise another $2 billion with a snap of his fingers," this person said.

• Jaffray Woodriff's Quantitative Investment Management wants to grow after a stretch of tough years.
• The 21-year-old manager changed its research process, freeing Woodriff to focus on what he does best.
• In conversations with Woodriff and those running the $1.1 billion firm, they're as optimistic as ever.

Jaffray Woodriff, the face of $1.1 billion Quantitative Investment Management, is stepping back into the spotlight.

The firm, which fell from $5 billion in assets a decade ago thanks to a stretch of underperformance, has been quiet—likely too quiet. When contacted for this story, a few allocators who had met with the firm before but hadn't been in touch for a number of years thought it had been transformed into a family office.

Headquartered in Charlottesville, the western Virginia town home to the University of Virginia, QIM became an easy option to skip for investors looking to meet with multiple funds in a day in places like New York or Greenwich.

Yet its three cofounders — 55-year-old Woodriff, president Mike Geismar, and researcher Greyson Williams — are as optimistic as ever about the future.

"This is as excited as I've ever seen him about research," said Geismar, who was roommates with Woodriff 30 years ago, nearly a decade before QIM started.

"He's not going to stop."

New hires and the creation of a research team have freed Woodriff, still the firm's investment engine, to spend more time on idea generation and less on implementation. There's a renewed focus on marketing, and the firm is courting investors from institutions around the world with hopes of growing up to $4 billion.

And it's the time is right for firms like QIM.

As large multistrategy managers like Millennium and its peers become a bigger part of institutions' portfolios, there's a growing need for volatility that a place like QIM, which systematically trades equities, indices, futures, and more and has no correlation to stock or bond markets, can provide. Performance ticking up has also helped.

Strong returns from both programs, including a 19.2% gain in its oldest strategy, in 2022 opened eyes again. This year, through October, the firm's more aggressive offering is up more than 34%, while its older program has returned 1.7%.

"I like math geeks. That's what Jaffray is, and his team," said Salem Abraham, an investor in the firm for 17 years and a longtime business partner of late billionaire T. Boone Pickens.

"QIM is the type of firm Harry Markowitz would have been happy to find," said Abraham, referring to the late academic who came up with the Modern Portfolio Theory.

Volatile ride for a volatile manager

The 21-year-old quant manager was a darling in the industry at its start. Woodriff, who lives in Charlottesville and owns a farm nearby, grew up on a farm outside the "magical city," he said. He went to college at the University of Virginia, where he came up with the foundation of his trading system during a Pepsi-fueled, 40-hour coding session.

In 2019, he made history by making the largest donation in the school's history, $120 million, to create a school of data science.

Woodriff, deemed "the monk in managed futures" by a 2009 Institutional Investor profile, got the reputation of someone "obsessed with markets and how they work," said Kyle Dunn, a former hedge-fund marketer who now consults for funds and worked with QIM to develop their "story."

Its Global Program strategy soared in its first two full years of trading in 2004 and 2005, with gains of 21.8% and 18.4%, before its strong crisis showing put the firm on the radar of bigger allocators. With gains of 29.6% in 2007 and 12.5% in 2008, the firm added assets quickly.

But the 2010s were not a decade for a strategy uncorrelated to stocks. The firm's Global Program lost money in 2013, 2014, 2018, and 2019. QIM's Tactical Aggressive strategy, launched in 2008 and willing to take bigger swings than the flagship, followed a 60% gain in 2017 with a 42% drop in 2018.

Assets left for more stable managers with strategies that weren't a black box.

"There were lots of conversations with clients about what went wrong," said Geismar, QIM's president. There were also conversations internally about how it had gotten to this point.

Woodriff said he had "thought experiments" about going the family-office route or closing one of the programs.

"The consistent theme has been: The research looks way too good to give up now," he said about the tough stretch of performance in the mid-2010s. The firm was helped by its equity investment into Florida-based Voloridge, a $9 billion quant manager run by David Vogel, who first met Woodriff when they were competing in a Netflix data science competition.

QIM charges no management fee, so when the firm's strategies lost money, there were no revenues coming in. But thanks to Voloridge's rapid growth and strong performance — the firm went from less than $1 billion in 2010 to more than $6 billion in 2020 — bonuses were able to still be paid out to keep employees happy.

Still, Woodriff admitted he had "gotten close to the threshold of shutting things down."

Back to being an idea guy

Instead, the manager reworked itself.

The firm's risk management was overhauled, and Woodriff began sharing some of the research responsibilities, in part thanks to the 2022 hiring of Chris Lankford, one of five research team members with Woodriff and Williams.

Lankford, who had worked as a consultant for QIM for a year before joining the firm full-time, has a doctorate in systems engineering (from UVA, naturally) and previously cofounded a company that tracks the eye movements of disabled individuals to help them communicate. The company was sold to DynaVox in 2010.

"For the first time in my career, I had people who could listen to me describe a complicated scenario and process and go do it three times faster than me," Woodriff said.

"There's such an increased speed in trying out ideas. It's a shame we didn't have this dynamic five, 10 years ago."

It's given some relief to allocators who were concerned with all of the risk-taking being tied to one person. Woodriff said there was an "extremely consistent drumbeat from investors and potential investors asking how dare you be the only one working on alpha."

"It's always been a difficult conversation," he said, in part because "people have known my best skill is idea generation and creativity," and he wouldn't have time to devote all of his energy toward that.

Woodruff said the research team, which also includes longtime data scientist Seth Oldham and 17-year QIM vet Greg Tylka, gives him a better answer to the "bus question" — as in, who would take over if he was hit by a bus, a common question allocators ask during due diligence to understand succession plans.

Lankford, in particular, has given a new lease on life to the firm, Williams said.

"He's been a great link" between Woodriff and other parts of the business, he said.

"I don't think Jaffray appreciated the constraints on his time before," Williams said.

Not going anywhere

While Woodriff has passions outside work — on top of his work building out the UVA's newest school, he received a US Squash Special Recognition Award in 2014 for his "leadership and substantial contributions to squash," of which he's an avid player — one conversation with the intense researcher reveals where his true passion lies.

"I knew in college I'd never want to retire," he said, and nothing about the past three decades has changed that drive.

Woodriff would be "bored" if he retired, his cofounder Williams said.

"It's a passion, career, and hobby for him," he said.

Those close to him say his renewed interest in the firm's strategies and more time to think have not so much reignited his passion as added fuel to the fire.

"They're a unique find and a unique fund," said Abraham, the investor in the firm and a longtime quantitative trader himself.

"It's difficult to find the things to make the stew special," he said. Stocks and bonds are the meat and potatoes of a portfolio. Funds like QIM are the pepper.

"They're spicy," he said.

Since college, Woodriff has been on a mission to "be totally different from everyone else."

In that regard, it should be no surprise the firm didn't shutter during its tough years or that Woodriff still believes in what he and his team can do.

"I still feel like I'm very good at it," he said.

• In a new podcast, billionaire Point72 founder Steve Cohen talks about the intangible values good investors have.
• Cohen, the owner of the MLB's New York Mets, spoke about how the level of discipline is similar to professional athletes.
• Investing at Point72 requires analysts to be in a "constant learning," he said.

The employees of billionaire Steve Cohen's two companies compete in different arenas.

The New York Mets, the Major League Baseball team Cohen has owned since 2020, play their games in front of tens of thousands of fans in Queens and opposing teams' stadiums. Meanwhile, Cohen's hundreds of portfolio managers and analysts at his $35 billion hedge fund Point72 are trying to beat the market and peers at firms like Citadel, Millennium, and more every day in offices around the world.

Cohen just handed out the largest contract in baseball, signing phenom Juan Soto to a 15-year contract that could pay him up to $800 million — but he expects the mindsets of the baseball players and traders on his payroll to be similar.

No matter the situation, there are key intangibles that an individual must have, Cohen said on a Point72 podcast with the firm's co-CIO Harry Schwefel. Good investors need to be opportunistic, vulnerable, passionate, and curious, but most importantly, like great athletes, they need to be disciplined.

"The talent in this industry is exceptional," said Cohen, wearing a gray New York Mets pullover, speaking about investment management.

To outperform, it's about "doing it day in, day out, no matter how it feels, how you feel." He spoke about how he hated weekends early on in his career because he wanted to trade and compete, comparing it to baseball players who, despite having a season that spans at least six months, can't wait for Spring Training.

Because of the discipline required by high-level sports, former college athletes have become a major recruiting ground for finance firms. A 2023 Harvard Business School study found Ivy League athletes "outperform their non-athlete counterparts in the labor market."

"Athletes attain higher terminal wages and earn cumulatively more than non-athletes over the course of their careers," the study found. Athletes also attain more senior positions in the organizations they join.

Point72 is a good example: Schwefel played for Harvard's hockey team.

In the conversation between the two, Cohen also revealed the questions he asks of any potential hire. He wants to understand "what makes them tick" and also how flexible they are.

"Do they want to be right or do they want to make money?" Cohen said. People who are right are "rolled over by the markets" all the time, he said, so a good investor has to be "constantly redefining who you are."

It's why at Point72, Cohen said, "constant learning" is mandatory for any employee. Once you find the area you're passionate about, he said, you have to be fully in it, improving every day, just like an MLB player or a pro golfer.

"This is pattern recognition and knowing what you're good at," he said about investing.

"Throw your best pitch."

• BlackRock's acquisition of HPS brings the world's largest asset manager to the exploding sector.
• Despite worries about an oversaturated market, industry vets say there are plenty of opportunities.
• "The market is proving that private credit has a reason to exist," a Carlyle exec said.

Tens of billions poured into private credit funds in the third quarter — and then the world's largest asset manager joined the party.

BlackRock's $12 billion announced acquisition of the private-credit pioneer HPS Investment Partners adds an 800-pound gorilla to a sector already full of similarly aggressive primates. The $11.5 trillion asset manager has not been shy about its ambitions in the private markets, and there are worries about too many dollars chasing too few deals.

Other finance giants are trying to get in on the private-credit action, State Street is shopping around for a private-credit firm, and Citi has linked up with Apollo for a $25 billion credit fund. The Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek is forming a $7.5 billion private-credit platform. Many smaller asset managers and hedge funds have also launched funds in recent years.

Despite everyone looking to get a part of Wall Street's hottest market, longtime private-credit players are not feeling crowded. Managers are focusing on how private credit is servicing certain parts of the market that are set to grow, such as mergers and acquisitions, or differentiating themselves from peers.

"The market is proving that private credit has a reason to exist," Nicola Falcinelli, the deputy head of European private credit at Carlyle, said Thursday at Edelman Smithfield's annual investor summit in London.

With M&A activity expected to tick up thanks to the reelection of Donald Trump, private-credit providers will be in demand to finance deals, executives said.

"Private credit has done a really nice job of filling cracks in" the deal-financing market, Matthew Theodorakis, a cohead of European direct lending for Ares Management, said at the Edelman event.

Falcinelli pointed to the "long-term trend of banks retrenching from financing M&A" as validation for the expansion of his sector.

"There's healthy competition between capital markets and private credit" across different markets, he said.

Money is being thrown around

From some points of view, this competition has given a lifeline to companies that may not deserve it. April LaRusse of London's Insight Investment, which manages $665 billion across different vehicles, said the number of companies defaulting on their debt held steady in recent years despite interest rates rising.

Typically, an interest-rate increase would squeeze troubled companies to the point that they're unable to pay their creditors. Instead, LaRusse said, there's plenty of capital willing to extend a lifeline.

"High-yield companies have had money thrown at them by private-debt and -equity companies," she said.

With the expansion of players in the lending space, there's more of a focus on putting money to work in the right opportunities, not just owning a broad swath of the market, said Putri Pascualy, a client-portfolio manager for private credit within Man Group's Varagon, a $11.8 billion private-credit firm the asset manager purchased last year.

Managers will "differentiate through alpha, through credit selection," she said at an event at Man Group's London headquarters. For her, she said, "cash is king" when it comes to judging the quality of borrowers — she wants to see a decent amount of liquidity on companies' balance sheets.

Additionally, despite the industry still being a very human-run space of finance, Pascualy said Man was setting itself apart with its artificial-intelligence tools. Blackstone similarly has used its AI tools to pitch insurers looking for private-credit options.

Man uses these tools to scan credit documents and weed out human error, Pascualy said, adding that the firm was just at the beginning of seeing which parts of the process it could make more efficient.

No matter what, though, she said, the firm and others will expand in the space.

"The private-credit universe globally will continue to grow," she said.

• Citadel's Ken Griffin is skeptical of Elon Musk's ability to cut trillions from the federal budget.
• Tesla CEO Musk has been tapped to run the proposed Department of Government Efficiency by Trump.
• Entitlement reform would be needed for the level of cuts Musk has called for, Griffin said Wednesday.

Billionaire Citadel founder Ken Griffin wants to get America's "fiscal house in order" but doesn't believe Elon Musk can do it alone.

Speaking at Wednesday's DealBook conference in New York, Griffin said it's unlikely that Musk, who has become a close advisor of President-elect Donald Trump and is set to co-run the proposed Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, will be able to cut the trillions he has called for without entitlement reform.

"Making cuts in any form or fashion will be very politically unpopular," said Griffin, who was one of the biggest donors to the Republican Party this election but declined to support Trump directly — though he said he voted for the real estate mogul.

Griffin — who paused for a couple of seconds when asked for his opinion about Musk's new task running Doge, prompting scattered laughs from a crowd that included fellow hedge-fund billionaire Dan Loeb and Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan — said the bond market could eventually become unsteady if there isn't a clean-up of the country's spending.

"To make Elon wear the entire burden of that responsibility is preposterous," he said.

Griffin, who lauded Musk's entrepreneurial abilities, also said he hopes the Federal Reserve will remain independent so it can make decisions too unpopular — but necessary — for politicians.

The wide-ranging interview between Griffin and New York Times editor and CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin revealed that the billionaire hedge-fund manager does not think Trump's most explosive economic policies, such as his aggressive tariff proposals, will go into effect.

Last week, Trump posted about implementing tariffs on countries like Brazil and Russia that were considering creating a new currency to reduce the power of the US dollar. "It's not going to happen," he said, bluntly about Trump's recent warning.

Griffin said this is how negotiating is done in real estate, and he believes items like tariffs are a "second-order" issue.

"America is open for business," Griffin said repeatedly, and he pushed that throughout the interview. Gone, he said, is the "paralyzing regulation" of Joe Biden's administration, and executives are "smiling from ear-to-ear."

"For corporate America, it's a better world today than it was before the election," he said.

Griffin's $65 billion firm had a strong November, returning 1.8% in its flagship Wellington fund. Asked if there was still room in the investment industry for smaller funds and individual investors, Griffin said there's always going to be a dominant incumbent in any industry.

"When I started out, I had to go compete with Salomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs," he said.

Now, new launches compete with his firm and peers like Millennium and Point72.

"Your entrepreneurs find a way to make it happen," he said.

• The industry's biggest names were up despite choppy markets following Donald Trump's victory.
• Balyasny led the way among multistrategy firms, posting a 3.9% monthly gain.
• Firms like Citadel and Schonfeld continue to build on a strong year of returns.

The biggest names in hedge funds ended an up-and-down month in markets in the black.

Multistrategy managers overcame the volatility surrounding Donald Trump's electoral victory — when markets initially skyrocketed but then sold off briefly before rebounding — with firms like Balyasny, Schonfeld, and Citadel posting strong returns for the month.

Balyasny led the way among its peers with a 3.9% gain in November to bring the Chicago-based manager's 2024 returns to 11.6%, a person close to the manager confirmed.

Schonfeld meanwhile continued its strong streak for the year, returning 1.8% in its flagship fund. The New York-based manager is up 17.2% for the year, a person close to the firm said. Ken Griffin's Citadel was also up 1.8% last month in its Wellington fund, while Izzy Englander's Millennium made 2.2%.

The billionaires' firms are up 13.2% and 12.5%, respectively, on the year. Bloomberg previously reported on the firms' November returns.

While multistrategy managers' returns were dwarfed by those of macro managers like Rokos and Discovery Capital that took big swings on Trump's victory, their biggest selling point — steadiness in turbulent markets — was proven true in November.

See below for more performance data. Additional firms will be added as their numbers are learned. The managers declined to comment or did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

• Quant funds are expanding beyond computer-run strategies.
• Firms like Qube and Squarepoint are backing legions of human stockpickers.
• "We want to diversify our alpha sources," said Squarepoint's Nicolas Janson.

As mega hedge funds like Millennium, Citadel, and Point72 battle for the best stock-picking talent, another segment of the multi-trillion-dollar industry has joined the fray.

Quant funds are increasingly turning to their longtime competition — human stock-pickers — to diversify their returns. Firms like Qube Research, Squarepoint Capital, and Engineers Gate are backing human traders through portfolios run by third parties, also known as separately managed accounts, or hiring them to trade internally.

Qube, the $20 billion London manager that started 2024 with a bang, has backed 44 stock-picking managers via its SMA platforms since the start of last year. This platform gives the firm insight into the managers' trading and risk management but allows the stockpickers to remain external and raise capital from other allocators.

The firm hopes to grow that number to 100 in the next few years, a person close to the manager told Business Insider. The firm declined to comment.

Squarepoint Capital declined to say how many portfolio managers it has backed on its SMA platform but noted that it only allocates to non-systematic strategies. The manager does not allocate externally to a strategy that would compete with one they have internally, according to Nicolas Janson, the firm's head of external investment strategies who joined at the start of 2022 to build out the platform.

"We want to diversify our alpha sources," Janson said in an interview with BI.

As these firms' assets swell thanks to strong performance, executives are constantly evaluating possible growth areas.

Engineers Gate, for example, is continuing to grow its footprint. The quant firm, which expanded to Asia earlier this year and runs more than $10 billion, according to regulatory filings, hired Mike Daylamani to build out a fundamental team, several people close to the firm told BI.

Daylamani will start in his new role in 2025 and comes from Schonfeld, where he ran a team that blended fundamental and quantitative strategies. He previously ran a similar team at Balyasny for a year after working as a fundamental portfolio manager for Steve Cohen at Point72 for close to a decade.

Two Sigma, one of the largest managers in the hedge fund industry, started hiring human stockpickers for the first time over the last few years, nabbing people such as Zach Rieger and Daniel Schuster, former partners at Maverick spin-off fund ROAM Global Management, in 2022, and Ernesto Cruz, who is the firm's director of research for fundamental equities after working as a portfolio manager for Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, in 2021.

While the manager cut 10% of its workforce in November, no PMs were included in the culling.

Firms that expand beyond their core strategies can occasionally struggle to integrate a different style, but big-name quant managers like Two Sigma and D.E. Shaw have been able to consistently generate returns as they've added investors focused on areas like private markets, real estate, and more.

In fact, D.E. Shaw might be the poster child for other quants considering expansion. The firm's website lists eight different discretionary strategies compared to three systematic offerings and two hybrid strategies that blend the two.

• Business Insider selected 25 young professionals, 35 and under, as its rising stars of Wall Street.
• We asked these up-and-comers what TV show, book, or movie best represents the finance industry.
• They shared some parallels and even pointed to works about nonfinancial subjects.

There's no shortage of colorful characters depicting Wall Street. There's the serial-killer investment banker, the corporate raider who declares that "greed is good," and the crooked, if charismatic, stockbroker, to name a few.

Two of those are fictional movie characters, and one was based on a real person, but they've all shaped the public's perception of what working on Wall Street could be like.

If you ask successful people at some of the biggest banks, asset managers, trading firms, or hedge funds whether they see their reality accurately perceived on the screen or in books, they'll tell you that working on Wall Street is a little less colorful than it's often painted to be.

"I don't know that there's a great movie or book depicting life on Wall Street," Mark Zhu, 34, a managing director at Blackstone, told Business Insider. "The day-to-day is a lot more boring than you think. It's a lot of calls and a lot of emails. There's not as much flamboyance or out-there behavior. It's almost not movie-worthy. Why would you pay money to watch somebody just sit in front of a computer doing Zooms?"

So maybe they think all that partying on HBO's show about twentysomething investment bankers, "Industry," is a little overdone, but there are still some elements the entertainment industry gets right occasionally.

We asked up-and-comers on Wall Street about the shows, movies, or books that best represent their daily lives. While no one representation was perfect, the young professionals talked about the parallels they saw. Some even shared some nonfinancial references that give a window into their world.

Here are the shows, movies, or books that give a flavor of what it's like to work on Wall Street.

Shows: "Industry"

The hit TV show "Industry" — full of sex, drugs, and spreadsheets — just wrapped up its third season.

"My friends in the last few years have nonstop bothered me about 'Industry,'" Justin Elliott, 29, a vice president of institutional rate sales at Bank of America, said.

"They see a crazy show about the industry and say, 'My God, I can't believe that happens in your world every day.' From what I've seen, there's definitely some thrills from getting a trade done that might mirror the show a bit, but it's a very exaggerated depiction of life on Wall Street."

"I don't know that any of them do a great job, but I am quite a fan of 'Industry,'" Erica Wilson, a vice president at the private credit firm Blue Owl, said. "I am still behind on the third season, but I think that show is fun."

"Succession"

Though the blockbuster show "Succession" isn't specifically about the banking industry, Daniela Cardona, a 29-year-old investment banker at RBC Capital Markets, watched it in its entirety and found some similarities in high-stress moments.

"In the last season, when they're trying to merge the two companies, there's one scene that always makes me giggle. I don't think this is fully accurate, but I do think it's funny — they're in a conference room, and Kendall says, 'Just make it up!' and they're all with their laptops sitting in the middle, and the consultants are looking at him like, what do you mean, make it up?" Cardona said.

"There have been instances where it sometimes feels that way — where you're in a time crunch and it's 3 o'clock in the morning."

"Scrubs"

Ben Carper, a 34-year-old managing director at Jefferies, pointed to the medical comedy sitcom "Scrubs" as a better representation than anything that features board rooms and trading floors.

He said the show had a "similar high-pressure environment where there are some opportunities for amusement and humor, but generally a pretty vigorous focus on doing a job well done."

Movies: "Margin Call"

The 2011 drama "Margin Call" follows the 24 hours after an analyst at an investment bank discovers it has taken on more debt than it can handle — illustrating the early stages of the 2008 financial crisis.

"I think it picks up the cadence of working at a big bank the best," said Austin Anton, 32, a principal at Apollo Global Management.

"The Wolf of Wall Street"

"The Wolf of Wall Street" follows the story of Jordan Belfort, who actually only worked at a Wall Street firm for a few months before the 1987 stock-market crash. He goes on to run his own brokerage, which ultimately scams several people, but the movie highlights the debauchery, opulence, and excess that ensued during his run.

"This almost sounds weird, but I'm going to say 'The Wolf of Wall Street,'" Matt Gilbert, a managing director at Thoma Bravo said. "The absurdity of that movie, to some extent, I do think, kind of incorporates some aspect of our job."

While finance is the backbone of the economy and certainly has global implications, what bankers and investors do on a day-to-day basis isn't saving lives, the 35-year-old added.

"I think the fact that you could have a comedy wrapped around the finance world is important, and it always makes me take a step back and think through, sure, I want to win every deal," he said. "Our fiduciary duty at Thoma Bravo is to produce the best returns for LPs, but this job is supposed to be fun. I'm supposed to work with great people. We're supposed to laugh together. I think if people take this job too seriously, that's when burnout and other things happen."

"The Big Short"

"The Big Short," the movie based on the financial journalist Michael Lewis' book, chronicles how Wall Street helped fuel the US housing crisis in 2008 and the investors who profited from it.

"It's not our day-to-day, but I think it is an OK representation of what happened at the time," said Chi Chen, 34, a portfolio manager at BlackRock. " Maybe it is not all factual, but it is a good one that is representative."

"The Internship"

Patrick Lenihan, a portfolio manager at JPMorgan Asset Management, said "The Internship," which features two old-school salesmen trying to restart their careers through an internship at Google, reminds him of the importance of having and supporting a diverse team.

"I feel like that team with Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, the rest of them, and how they come together at first, you see there's just a variety of different people that you're like, 'Oh, this is going to fail,'" he said. "But I think a large part of my success is going back to that teamwork, getting the right people in, and ensuring that diversity of opinions."

Books: "Market Wizards"

BlackRock's Chen, who focuses on fixed income, said that to really gain insight into the investing industry, it's best to read the "Market Wizards" book series, which features interviews with top traders.

"A lot of those investing stories for that book series are more from two, three decades ago, when market volatility was much higher. But we have seen a comeback of market volatility since 2020," she said. "So I have always enjoyed that whole series of books."

"Free Food for Millionaires"

Elliott, the Bank of America VP, recommends Min Jin Lee's novel "Free Food for Millionaires."

"It's about a Korean woman navigating life who ends up on Wall Street in an admin capacity. But really, it's a story about belonging and identity — about trying to make it in a world and industry you didn't initially know much about," he said.

"To me, it's a lot more humanistic. It gives me a bit more of a personal perspective when I think about my journey on Wall Street. When I think about the people — and understanding people is so much of this job — I go back to 'Free Food for Millionaires.'"

"The Man Who Solved the Market"

There's no fictional piece of media Bridgewater's Blake Cecil has found to reflect life in finance; he said shows and movies "feel quite distant" from his day-to-day.

A biography of the late hedge-fund billionaire Jim Simons, "The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution," reflects how the deputy chief investment officer and his colleagues approached challenges.

"It resonated with my experience of working with people who are using algorithms to solve problems that often hadn't been asked before," Cecil said.

"The Inner Game of Tennis"

Harrison DiGia, a vice president at General Atlantic, had another book recommendation: "The Inner Game of Tennis" by W. Timothy Gallwey.

"This book is all about the mental game and trusting your intuition and yourself. You use practice and your preparation before a competition so that when the time is right, or you have a big opportunity, you're ready, and your mental game is as strong as it can be," DiGia, 31, said.

"When I think about investing, a lot of it is setting yourself up to get that big opportunity and making sure you're prepared and can have a clear mind when that pressure situation comes. I'm a huge tennis fan, so I think about this when I'm on the tennis court, but I think about it in a professional setting as well."

"Unreasonable Hospitality"

In the book "Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect" by Will Guidara, the co-owner and general manager of Eleven Madison Park describes how he manages his business, his customer-service style, and the things he'd do at Eleven Madison Park to go above and beyond.

Craig Kolwicz, an investment banker at Moelis, said the "unreasonable hospitality" described in the book (such as having an employee run out to get a hot dog for a customer who you overheard saying they hadn't had one in New York yet) isn't dissimilar to the type of service that could differentiate an investment banker.

"It depicts a restaurant that's an extremely expensive restaurant where there's an extremely discerning clientele base. They could go to all these other really fancy, really nice three-Michelin-star restaurants in New York or in the world," the 35-year-old managing director said.

"How do you differentiate yourself? There's a lot of investment bankers out there and there's a lot of really smart clients and folks that we work with all the time — and how do we get them to stay with us? How do we get them to hire us on the next deal? It's some of the stuff that we do," he said. For example, he'd recently flown to Los Angeles for an 11:30 a.m. pitch meeting and flown back.

"It's like hospitality, but it's kind of an unreasonable client customer service to do something like that," Kolwicz said.

• A 2017 presentation for macro investor Scott Bessent's hedge fund explains his research process and "edge."
• Bessent, the nominee for Treasury secretary by President-elect Donald Trump, said his "guiding research principle is change."
• His firm, Key Square Capital, struggled to generate returns despite its strong pedigree.

As Scott Bessent's political profile rose, so did the chatter around his macro hedge fund's relatively poor returns.

Bessent — the former righthand man for billionaire George Soros and now the nominee for Treasury secretary by President-elect Donald Trump — saw billions of dollars leave his firm, Key Square Capital, after its 2016 launch, Reuters reported. The manager lost money in 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2021 before notching double-digit gains in the last three years. This year's gains were helped by a bet on Trump's reelection.

In macro investing though, performance can be choppy, and Bessent's investing process is a throwback to old-school macro traders like his former boss, according to a 2017 Key Square presentation reviewed by Business Insider.

It's not clear if there have been any changes to the investment process in the seven years since the presentation was created. Bessent worked for Soros for 15 years and, before that, was the first-ever analyst for legendary short-seller Jim Chanos' Kynikos Associates.

The presentation details how Bessent might go about crafting his views on fiscal policy in his new role, should he be confirmed by the Senate following Trump's inauguration.

"Key Square views its research process as a think tank that is bolted on to disciplined trading and risk management," one slide reads. The manager describes the team as "aggressive intellectuals" who "organize frequent teach-ins" and have a constant stream of outside experts coming to the office to speak to the team.

"Our guiding research principle is change," the presentation continues, stating that there isn't a "singular framework" for evaluating potential investments, but instead an evolving view that changes when new information is available.

The firm prides itself on finding that new information. The presentation claims that the Key Square team reads "voraciously," travels frequently, and taps the firm's "unparalleled global network of contacts consisting of policymakers, political advisors, industry leaders, corporate management teams, consultants, academics, and market participants."

Sell-side analysts, though, do not factor heavily into Key Square's process.

"We finish rather than start with the Street," the presentation states, tapping the research teams at big banks only to "understand consensus or seek alternative views."

The presentation also said that it considered the firm's patience and investment horizon a part of its "competitive edge."

"We are investors, not traders," the presentation reads. The typical investment is held for one to three years, and the firm is comfortable waiting to put money to work until the timing is right.

"We invest in the future, study the past, and focus on current pricing."

• Citadel founder Ken Griffin said on Thursday that he's "open" to selling a stake in his hedge fund.
• Griffin had previously sold a minority stake in his market maker to VC funds Sequoia and Paradigm.
• He said he'd look for "a partner that feels like Sequoia."

BlackRock's potential investment into Izzy Englander's Millennium might have Citadel founder Ken Griffin thinking.

At the Economic Club of New York Thursday, Griffin complimented BlackRock founder Larry Fink for being a "legend in asset management" and said that if the tie-up eventually does go through, "it's a very interesting" one. The early-stage talks between BlackRock and multistrategy rival Millennium were reported by the Financial Times earlier this month.

Asked if he would consider such a move, the billionaire said he'd "be open to selling a minority stake," which Citadel, the $65 billion hedge fund that's become the most profitable firm in the industry's history, has never done.

"We take great pride in being a private partnership," he said, and believes the structure has helped the firm run smoothly for the more than 30 years it's been in existence.

Nearly every hedge fund is still owned by its founders and a select group of partners, even the older industry giants like Citadel, though Griffin may be looking to sell a stake at the peak. He said in a Bloomberg interview on Tuesday that the extreme growth that has added billions of assets to his fund and his peers' is not likely to continue.

In New York Thursday, he pointed out the benefits of selling a stake in his market maker Citadel Securities in 2022 to venture capital firms Sequoia and Paradigm for more than $1 billion. The investment valued the firm at $22 billion.

He said Sequoia in particular brought "real insights" into how to manage a rapidly growing company, noting the firm's past investments into Apple and Nvidia before the two companies were public.

Griffin said Sequoia has pushed Citadel Securities' leadership in the boardroom, making them a better company.

As for who he'd want as a minority stakeholder of Citadel, Griffin clearly has a type.

"We'd look for a partner that feels like Sequoia," he said.

• Two Sigma laid off 200 employees Thursday, 10% of the $60 billion firm's workforce.
• The hedge fund is run by co-CEOs Carter Lyons and Scott Hoffman, who took over for Two Sigma's billionaire cofounders in September.
• The firm is planning to continue to invest in its core strategies, a person close to the manager said.

Thursday brought the latest twist in a year full of them for $60 billion Two Sigma.

The New York-based quant giant has cut 200 jobs — roughly 10% of its overall workforce. The layoffs come less than three months after co-CEOs Carter Lyons and Scott Hoffman took the helm for billionaire cofounders John Overdeck and David Siegel.

No portfolio managers were eliminated, a person close to the manager told Business Insider. Bloomberg earlier reported the cuts.

Two Sigma, which produced decent returns in its two largest quant funds through the first half of the year, is still planning to grow areas it found to be the most impactful following the firm's strategic review, the person close to the manager said. Those areas include quant and discretionary strategies, machine learning, and the manager's tech platform.

The leadership change offered the firm an opportunity to do a broader review of its different units, the person said. The manager has expanded in recent years, including a real-estate strategy in 2021 and risk management and portfolio analytics platform Venn in 2019. The firm also started hiring investors to focus on discretionary strategies for the first time last year.

The goal is to be more disciplined as the firm grows going forward, the person close to Two Sigma said. They noted that the employee retention rate is 95%, so any meaningful changes at the firm would have to be done through job cuts.

The firm is just starting on the journey that very few hedge funds ever begin: life without its founders.

Two Sigma's investors though were ready for a change. The firm's cofounders had been feuding for years, dividing the manager internally.

Lyons, the former chief business officer, was lauded for his work in expanding Two Sigma's product offerings in the August announcement of his promotion. Meanwhile, Hoffman, Lazard's former general counsel, was picked in part for his experience "navigating complex governance changes," the announcement noted.

The announcement also pointed to Hoffman's key role in shepherding Lazard's IPO to completion in 2005. It said he was a key player in the process, advising the boutique investment bank's leadership and board.

One industry insider noted that his hiring might pave the way for a potential listing from Two Sigma one day; the manager's diversified offerings and tech platform make it more well-rounded than the average hedge fund, and a liquidity event could at least partially detangle the bickering cofounders' fortunes.

In this light, the latest cuts could be seen as a clean-up of balance sheet bloat — but the person close to the firm said that a listing has not been discussed in any form.