As you may have heard, Bridgewater Associates is a hedge fund committed to probing the depths of any situation until it finds the truth. And, when one makes it his or her business to go after the truth, one must be persistent, and not take no for an answer. For example, at other funds, recruiters would probably not care to find out why any given individual chose not to work them, especially if said person had never even gone through the interview process in the first place, whereas Bridgewater simply rejects your rejection and demands a detailed list of valid reasons why you’ve chosen not to even consider what life could be like with BDubs. Last August, we learned of a Dartmouth student who was paid $100 to “explain why she did not want to work for them” and today, a Yale senior** relates being crammed into a hotel room to do the same. Continue reading »
Yale
Gang, something big has come up this morning and we need to discuss it right now. Don’t want to scare anyone but also don’t want to minimize the enormity of this news so let’s just get right to it. Wall Street has been keeping a secret. Look around at your colleagues this morning. The ones who attended schools like Yale, Princeton and Harvard and played sports like lacrosse and squash and use the word ‘summer’ as a verb and describe the color red as Nantucket red and argue the HJs don’t count if you give them to a guy whose named ends in IV and get aroused at the mere thought of an ACK sticker? They might have had an easier time breaking into the industry than those who graduated from lower ranked universities and did not get their WASP on. Yes, really.
After you’ve picked your jaws up off the floor, you’re presumably going to want to fight us on this and shout “It can’t be!” and “You lie!” Sorry to say it, pumpkins, it’s the truth. But don’t take our word for it- someone actually did a study on the shocking phenomenon. Continue reading »
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]
In King of Capital, a new book out this week by David Carey and John Morris, the authors chronicle the deals and personalities that shaped the Blackstone Group, starting with how its founders, Steve Schwarzman and Pete Peterson, met at Lehman Brothers. We’re told many times that Schwarzman had a drive like no other to make money and absolutely “hated to lose it,” which informed the firm’s approach to risk taking and helped it to “avoid the kind of brazen, outsized gambles that caused some high-flying rivals to run aground.” But Steve is not just about the coin; he, too, loves to get his freak on. Continue reading »
Blind Item: Which Hedge Fund Will Pay A Portfolio Manager $50+ Million For Losing 25% In A Year?
By Bess LevinFor the fiscal year ending in June 2009, Yale’s endowment fell 24.6 percent. In that same time period, Chief Investment Officer David Swensen’s salary and benefits totaled $5.3 million, up from $4.3 million in ’07-’08. Some people think this is an outrage. Today University administrators explained the rationale behind Swensen’s package.
On Wall Street or even at other universities, they say, the several million Swensen makes yearly would be a pittance for an investor as renowned as he is. Endowment managers at Harvard have earned as much as $35 million recently, dwarfing Swensen’s and Takahashi’s pay. “Here’s a guy who could make 10 times his salary,” former deputy provost Charles Long said of Swensen last April. “But his goal is to make as much money as he can for Yale.”
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