A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that trades in relatively liquid assets and is able to make extensive use of more complex trading, portfolio-construction, and risk management techniques in an attempt to improve performance, such as short selling, leverage, and derivatives. Financial regulators generally restrict hedge fund marketing to institutional investors, high net worth individuals, and accredited investors.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market manipulation.
The 2003 mutual fund scandal was the result of the discovery of illegal late trading and market timing practices on the part of certain hedge fund and mutual fund companies.
Fidelity Investments, commonly referred to as Fidelity, earlier as Fidelity Management & Research or FMR, is an American multinational financial services corporation based in Boston, Massachusetts. The company was established in 1946 and is one of the largest asset managers in the world with $3.9 trillion in assets under management, and, as of December 2022, their assets under administration amount to $10.3 trillion. Fidelity Investments operates a brokerage firm, manages a large family of mutual funds, provides fund distribution and investment advice, retirement services, index funds, wealth management, securities execution and clearance, asset custody, and life insurance.
TD Cowen, is an American multinational investment bank and financial services division of TD Securities that operates through two business segments: a broker-dealer and an investment management division. The company's broker-dealer division offers investment banking services, equity and credit research, sales and trading, global prime brokerage, outsourced trading, global clearing and commission management services. Cowen's investment management segment offers actively managed alternative investment products. Founded in 1918, the firm is headquartered in New York and has offices worldwide. Cowen claims it is known for successfully identifying emerging industries early on, especially the emerging cannabis industry.
Private equity in the 1990s relates to one of the major periods in the history of private equity and venture capital. Within the broader private equity industry, two distinct sub-industries, leveraged buyouts and venture capital, experienced growth along parallel although interrelated tracks.
Publicly traded private equity refers to an investment firm or investment vehicle, which makes investments conforming to one of the various private equity strategies, and is listed on a public stock exchange.
Man GLG is a discretionary investment manager and a wholly owned subsidiary of British alternative investment manager Man Group plc. It is a diversified and multi-strategy fund manager that operates strategies including equity long-short funds, convertible arbitrage funds, emerging market funds and long-only mutual funds. The firm is also a founding member of the Hedge Fund Standards Board and a signatory of the Principles for Responsible investment. As of 2022, Man GLG had $35.4 billion assets under management.
Arthur Jay Samberg was an American businessman and philanthropist. He founded Pequot Capital Management and served as the chief executive officer, president and chairman of the company. Samberg's flagship Pequot fund, started in 1986, netted 17.8 percent over the life of the fund. After the fund closed, he managed his family office through Hawkes Financial. He was also a significant contributor to several hospitals and universities, including New York-Presbyterian Hospital and his alma maters Columbia Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Nasdaq Private Market (NPM) provides a secondary market trading venue for issuers, brokers, shareholders, and prospective investors of private company stock. Since inception, NPM has facilitated more than $40 billion in transactional volume and has worked with 400+ private companies and 100,000+ employees, stakeholders, and investors. NPM offers private company and investors different solutions including tender offers, auctions, block trades, and custom company marketplaces. In 2021, NPM spun-off of Nasdaq to become its own, independent company receiving strategic investments from Silicon Valley Bank, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Allen and Co.
Highbridge Capital Management, LLC is a multi-strategy alternative investment management firm founded by Glenn Dubin and Henry Swieca in 1992. In 2004, it was purchased by JPMorgan Chase; as of 2019, it had about $3.9 billion in assets under management, out of $150 billion in JPMorgan's global alternatives division.
Gary J. Aguirre is an American lawyer, former investigator with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and whistleblower.
Winton Group, Ltd is a British investment management firm founded by David Harding. In the United States, Winton is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment advisor and with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a CTA, and is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK. The company trades on more than 100 global futures markets in a wide variety of asset classes and on global equity markets. The firm was launched with $1.6 million in 1997, reached a peak of $28.5 billion in assets under advisement, before dropping to 7.3 billion by late 2020. Winton Group has seven offices around the world: London, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Shanghai, Sydney, and Abu Dhabi.
Millennium Management is an investment management firm with a multistrategy hedge fund offering. It is one of the world's largest alternative asset management firms with over $50 billion assets under management. The firm operates in America, Europe and Asia.
SAC Capital Advisors was a group of hedge funds founded by Steven A. Cohen in 1992. The firm employed approximately 800 people in 2010 across its offices located in Stamford, Connecticut and New York City, and various offices. It reportedly lost many of its traders in the wake of various investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In 2010, the SEC opened an insider trading investigation of SAC and in 2013 several former employees were indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice. In November 2013, the firm itself pleaded guilty to insider trading charges and paid $1.2 billion in penalties. The firm shrank after returning the vast majority of its outside investor capital. Point72 Asset Management was established as a separate family office in 2014. SAC ceased to exist as a separate entity in 2016.
FrontPoint Partners was a hedge fund that became well known for its bet against subprime mortgages during the 2008 financial crisis under Steve Eisman. It was based in Greenwich, Connecticut, with other offices in New York and London.
WorldQuant, LLC is an international hedge fund and quantitative investment management firm headquartered in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. Founded in 2007, the firm is currently managing approximately $9 billion in assets under management for Millennium Management via quantitative trading and other methods of quantitative investing. WorldQuant operated the WorldQuant Challenge, where participants compete in the field of quantitative finance, and WorldQuant Accelerator, an independent portfolio manager platform. In 2015 the WorldQuant Foundation launched WorldQuant University.
Joseph F. “Chip” Skowron III is an American former hedge fund co-portfolio manager of FrontPoint Partners LLC's health care funds. He was convicted of insider trading, for which he served five years in prison. He was also required to repay his hedge fund employer $32 million it had paid him in compensation, because he had been a “faithless servant.”
Visium Asset Management LP was an American multi-strategy hedge fund. It began as a healthcare-focused hedge fund, founded in 2005 by Jacob Gottlieb. Visium controlled investment funds with about $8 billion of assets under management and had 170 employees at its peak in 2016. That year, three of the company's traders were indicted by United States federal authorities for securities fraud. One of the accused employees killed himself days after he was indicted. Visium subsequently liquidated several of its funds and wound down operations.
