When Bobby Jain announced in late 2022 that he was leaving his hedge fund job to hang his own shingle after decades of minting money for others, Wall Street just watched and waited for the money and talent to follow him. They’re still waiting.
Jain’s fundraising target has steadily, if quietly, shrunk from $10 billion to perhaps half that, and has been struggling to hire more star traders before its July launch, according to people familiar with the matter.
At resort hotels up and down Palm Beach and Miami Beach this week, talk regularly turned to Jain, who spent more than 20 years at Credit Suisse and seven at Millennium Management during a second golden age for hedge funds. The perception — confusing to many who’d envied Jain’s magic touch for years — was of an industry giant passing an empty hat.
Money once flowed into funds founded by big name portfolio managers at big name funds striking out on their own, like Jain’s fellow Millennium defector Michael Gelband, who launched ExodusPoint Capital Management in 2018 with $8.5 billion under management. But things have changed quite a bit since then.
Investors pulled more than $100 billion out of hedge funds in both 2022 and 2023, and the average shop returned about half the S&P 500. And Jain is trying to hire in the shadow of established multi-manager giants — known as “pod shops” — like Millennium, Citadel, Point72 and ExodusPoint. Meanwhile, The Financial Times reported that Jain has cut his management fees to 10% for investors looking to funnel more than $250 million, and has steadily lowered his fundraising goal.
