Morning Coffee: The most impressive 30-year-old hedge fund manager in New York is a Cambridge graduate. No vibe coding at Goldman Sachs
Business Insider has released a list of Rising Stars of Wall Street. It does not contain the now infamous figure of 24-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner, high-cheeked founder of Situational Awareness, the hedge fund that lost $35bn in July. It does contain at least five young portfolio managers, and at least eight young bankers busy financing the AI infrastructure boom.
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The youngest and most impressive portfolio manager listed is Ben Atlas, the mere 30-year-old ex-Barclays rates trader in London who's now CIO of his own $1bn pod at ExodusPoint in New York.
Business Insider is short on details for Atlas, who didn't provide a photo or divulge how he spends weekends. Noted, instead, are the facts that Atlas grew up in California and went to Cambridge University in the UK to study philosophy before staying on in London after he graduated in 2017. He returned to the US in 2020 to work for DRW in New York.
Atlas worked for BlueCrest before ExodusPoint. Business Insider says he made more than $50m in profits for Mike Platt during his final year there, aged only 29. BlueCrest's pay structure implies Atlas may have kept $15m of this for himself.
Atlas has become something of a legend among young London traders, who tell us he's one of a few 20-something portfolio managers to have made huge amounts of money in the past few years. Atlas is rumoured to have married a Deutsche Bank trader and to have had a large wedding attended by an unknown pop star, but this is not confirmed.
Others on the Business Insider list include: 27-year-old Theo Saarinen at Bridgewater, who is chief AI researcher there; 32-year-old Goldman Sachs MD Mike Washington, who works in high touch sales trading; and 31-year-old Sahil Singhal Balyasny Asset Management who now works for Balyasny but who says he was one of the youngest PMs at Citadel, aged only around 22.
Women on the list seem more likely to be financing data centres. 32-year-old Kate Casey is a director in KKR's infrastructure group who alludes to herself as working on the "data centre support team." Casey is married to a man whose family run a vineyard. 33-year-old Cody Kiechle (a man on the list) is also financing data centres at Bank of America, but grew up driving tractors on a farm.
Separately bankers and traders at Goldman Sachs no longer have the freedom to create their own tools using AI.
Bloomberg reports that the firm has put a stop to such vibe-coding and that now only actual developers and strats at Goldman can use AI coding tools themselves.
The change is reportedly the result of productivity and risk-related concerns and is possibly the result of traders and bankers trying to get developers to improve their creations. It is not entirely popular. Individuals at Goldman had reportedly created their own tools to monitor client trading flows, model market changes and positions, and create content.
Meanwhile...
Elliott Investment Management says times are hard. “So many factors have lined up to cause this great boom that it might take disruption in only one or two of them to shift this momentum into reverse, leading to a cascading, self-reinforcing unwind of this bull market and an abrupt change from FOMO to FOGO (fear of getting obliterated).” (WSJ)
Most hedge funds are levered six times. Multistrats are levered an average of eight to 14 times and many are holding the same assets. "A shock affecting these managers together would meet high leverage, overlapping positions.” (Bloomberg)
Millennium is redeeming $1.5bn from external funds Troluce Capital Advisors and Axebrook Capital after they made losses. (Bloomberg)
Banks are back to hiring from a few universities. In the UK, these include The London School of Economics, Imperial College London, University College London, the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge. (Financial News)
Boutique bank Qatalyst Partners was the lead financial adviser to chip giant Marvell Technology on its $102.6 billion takeover of laser supplier Lumentum Holdings. This is three times larger than Qatalyst's previous largest deal. (Bloomberg)
HM Revenue & Customs is investigating whether some partners at Boston Consulting should be employees for tax purposes. (FT)
CFA Institute is launching a new Responsible AI in Investment Research course. It will be a practical skills module and will focus on use of the technology while preserving rigour, independent judgement, verification, ethical responsibility and accountability. All the adjectives. (Financial News)
How one trader turned divorce counsellor persuades his male clients to consider different types of women: "If you were always putting on the same trade and it was going wrong each time, what would you do?” (The Times)
If you want to lock down a sperm donor so that no one else gets the sperm, it will cost you at least $80k. (Bloomberg)
The more you use AI, the longer you work. (Bloomberg)
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