Robert Hess, who interned at [Fortress] in 2008 and will attend Yale University in August, will try to see the future over the next seven days — on a chessboard. The 19-year-old grandmaster is alone atop his group in the first phase of the 2011 U.S. Championship in St. Louis, and has clinched a spot in the semifinals. In five months, he plans to use his chess skills to help study finance at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, and join the likes of Harvard University economics professor Ken Rogoff as grandmasters to attend the university. “These are the kinds of things that I like doing, strategizing and finding patterns,” Hess said in a telephone interview from St. Louis. Hess, who deferred from Yale for a year to play chess full time, worked a summer internship at Fortress. There, Hess analyzed entertainment stocks and developed an interest in finance. [Bloomberg via BI]
chess
Carl Icahn Likens Judge Saying He Owes Bill Ackman $8 Million To Being Wrongfully Accused Of Murder, Sent To Death Row
By Bess Levin
Five weeks ago, Carl Icahn announced he’d be closing the hedge fund he opened in 2004. Was this a sign retirement was next to come, some wondered? Hell no, Icahn recently told a reporter who checked in with the activist investor. “What else would I do? Play shuffleboard somewhere?” Mr. Icahn said from his vacation home in Florida. Carl’s got no time for anything so patently ridiculous, and is in fact busier than ever. What’s he been up to? Continue reading »
In writing about hedge fund managers and other celebs in the world of finance, sometimes I find myself wondering what these men were like as children, before the billions, and the bitches, and the fleece. I’m pretty sure Ken Griffin carried a briefcase to school starting at the age of 5, and the 12 year-old Jim Simons was a lot like the 72 year–old one we know today– bearded and chain smoking a pack of Pall Malls. Stevie didn’t develop a taste for the finer things in life (fleece) until college, preferring until then to swath himself exclusively in silk. And so on and so forth. But what of Biff Basness? I’ve had some difficulty getting a good picture of the AQR founder in my head. Luckily, a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson, The Quants, sheds a little light.
As a child, Clifford Scott Asness gave no sign of his future as a Wall Street tycoon. He was born in October 1966 in Queens, New York. When he was four, his family moved to the leafy suburban environs of Roslyn Heights on Long Island. In school Asness received good grades, but his interest in Wall Street didn’t extend beyond the dark towers of Gotham in the pages of Batman. Obsessed with little besides girls and comic books, Asness was a listless teenager, without direction and somewhat overweight. At times he showed signs of a violent temper that would erupt years later when he sat at the helm of his own hedge fund. Once a chess team rival taunted him in the school’s parking lot about a recent match.
That’s when things got real.
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