Kz Manager Millennium
Hollie Galipeau
Millennium Management is an investment management firm with a multistrategy hedge fund offering.[9] In 2023, it was one of the world's largest alternative asset management firms with over $61.1 billion assets under management as of January 2024.[10] The firm operates in America, Europe and Asia.[11] As of 2022, Millennium had posted the fourth highest net gains of any hedge fund since its inception in 1989.[12]
Israel A. Englander and Ronald Shear, an acquaintance from the American Stock Exchange (AMEX), founded the firm in 1989 with $35 million.[3] The initial $35 million consisted of $5 million from Englander and "$2 million from the Belzberg brothers, wealthy Canadian financiers."[3] Millennium Management initially underperformed and co-founder Ronald Shear left the firm six months after founding it.[3]
In 2019 London-based investment firm LCH Investment ranked Millennium Management 12th on their ranking of most successful hedge funds of all time reporting that since its founding in 1989 the firm had made $22.4 billion for its investors,[3] an average of 14% annually since inception.[15] In 2019 the company raised $4.1 billion after a two-year hiatus from raising new capital. The company expects to have raised $7.1 billion by March 2020 and manages a total of nearly $50 billion in capital. The company ended the year 2020 with 265 portfolio manager teams, the most in its history.[16] As of February 2020 Millennium managed over 2,000 data sets from close to 400 providers, for a total of about 10 trillion records of data and over 2,000 terabytes of compressed stored data.[17]
In April 2024, Jane Street Capital brought forward a lawsuit against Millennium, alleging that the firm stole Jane Street's trading strategy through engaging two of its former traders, Douglas Schadewald and Daniel Spottiswood.[18]
The company has a platform model of investing[4] made up of approximately 280 investment teams[19] with each portfolio manager allocated money "to deploy in a variety of trading strategies."[20]
The company has 17 locations including regional offices in London, Singapore, Miami, Bengaluru, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Dublin, Greenwich, Geneva, Zug and Paris, with its principal office in New York, in addition to operating additional offices in locations around the world.[21]
Our culture is shaped by our people. Our portfolio managers thrive on autonomy within our framework, and our teams excel at solving complex problems. Together, we are focused on building a firm that continuously evolves.
I've just received multiple buy-side offers, and one of them is a pod at Millennium on the US Eastcoast. I'm kind of mulling over the options here and would really appreciate some candid feedback that would help me to make a decision.
I'm a little cautious about firms like MLP because of the well-known reputations of high turnover and apparently cutthroat culture. Wondering if anyone who's knowledgeable about MLP can share some frank/realistic views on MLP?
For some context, I'm looking for a place that I can steadily grow, take on more trading/PnL responsibilities, a reasonable degree of security. As for work life balance, I lean quite heavily toward work, but I prefer that by my own choosing as opposed to being pressured to do so because I have to. My goal is to become a PM within 3 to 5 years. I know MLP is great for the resume, but then again, so is having some PNL responsibilities and gathering a successful PNL track record, which I see as slightly more attainable in the other offers I have from smaller / less branded shops.
MLP will offer you what you want from a career perspective - pod shops are the best path to building a track record and getting PNL quickly in the entire industry if you are able to perform because of the investment style + incentives + tracking of performance for everyone + ability to get a carve out relatively quickly if you perform well. MLP being good for resumes is less about branding and more about having a track record + responsibility relatively quickly (and being transferable to other firms+ formulaic payout for your work).
I can't speak to the smaller firms you mentioned without more details obviously, but why do you believe that it may offer a better path towards that?
I think the more important question is what type of investment style do you like and where do you think you honestly thrive. If market neutral + strict risk parameter + knowing / trading only 50 names very closely seems like something you would do well in, I would pursue it. You will learn a tremendous amount about market expectations and what moves stocks in the short term as well as portfolio management and using good judgement when it comes to deploying risk. If you have other goals or don't want to be in that environment, I would not pursue that.
The biggest questions are 1) what type of work you enjoy the most 2) where will you thrive the most 3) what your eventual goals are. HFs all have different processes and investment styles so nailing the differences between those is most important. The cutthroat stuff and turnover is there (as a result of the structure) but anxiety over performance is everywhere in the industry. I am a firm believer in being honest with what you enjoy the most + thrive at, and looking for a place to maximize that, rather than fitting a square peg in a round hole for branding / to build a resume for an eventual goal. Success will come eventually if you enjoy what you do and can be great at it, so focus on that fit over everything else.
I'm just a little wary of the notorious reputation that MMs like Millennium has about letting people go. Obviously, I don't intend on being a bad performer, but I've not worked in pods before, so I'm keen to take into considerations any stats on what the turnover is like / how common people are let go.
Also safe to say that if you are an analyst, the PM under whom you work is more important than the shop/platform itself? I've heard cautions from people that if you don't have a good PM, your life could be miserable. Could be true anywhere, but more specifically at a place like MLP?
Any other feedbacks would be greatly appreciated. Others have any feedback would be appreciated as well!
Again this is just from what I have read + heard. That reputation about MLP is true for all the pod shops because they all have risk limits and if a PM blows through them or fails to generate returns they will be fired. If an analyst cant contribute, they are let go for the same reasons because the PM doesn't have the time or money to turn it around.
Yes your PM is everything over the specific firm. The PM will dictate your work life balance, culture, exposure, responsibility, learning, opportunity for advancement, compensation (until you get sleeve/formula), etc. Doesn't really matter where you are. The only difference between pod shops is on the margin when it comes to risk limits and how long they give you before cutting you, and payouts (and that is also probably not that different anyways). For the most part, your PM sets everything that is important and then there are some smaller differences after that (like titles, what it takes to run a sleeve, etc.). If your PM underperforms and is a bad leader it will be bad, no matter at MLP or baly or citadel.
One caveat I have heard is that at point 72 they are supposed to be a bit kinder to analysts under a PM who underperforms and will try to find you a new home rather than kick you immediately, but I am sure it depends on lots of factors.
MLP has created this odd titular structure now - because there were/are a lot of less experienced people who want the title PM, they basically created a structure akin to Citadel's PM/Analyst/Associate structure but titled it Senior PM / Portfolio Manager / analyst.
I know a lot of people at mlp with the title portfolio manager who are not actually capable of being portfolio managers and who do not actually perform the function of being a portfolio manager. But they feel good about themselves and get to tell people they're PMs. And then when they get fired, they have trouble finding jobs because they think they should get a pm job elsewhere and the world tells them that they're not pm material. Then they go back to the sell side (where they came from) and lament how they went from beings PM at mlp to a lowly desk analyst on the sell side sending out blast emails to clients.