Hedge fund executives including Paul Marshall of Marshall Wace and Chris Gradel of PAG blasted excessive payouts from some so-called platforms for fueling a talent war in the global industry.
While on some levels justified, the business model has led to the “commodification of human talent” and “merry-go-around” where new recruits stay for only two or three years before being fired only to then turn up at rivals, said Marshall, co-founder of the $59 billion investment firm.
“Everybody wants that Cristiano Ronaldo on their team. But there are not very many Cristiano Ronaldos. And what’s happening is everybody is getting paid the same as Cristiano Ronaldo,” he said at a summit organized by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority on Wednesday. “That is not the right way to build great businesses or even to build a great industry for our clients.”
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Platforms including Millennium Management and Citadel allocate capital among investment pods employing different approaches for more consistent returns, a model that investors have turned to in anticipation of more volatile markets.
The comments came as platforms dangle pay offers sometimes in the nine digits to lure portfolio managers. Long queues of potential investors and the ability pass on some or all of their expenses to clients have enabled them to outbid rivals.
PAG has seen some employees of its hedge fund platform business poached by rivals with eight-digit signing bonuses, said Gradel, chief executive officer of the Hong Kong-based alternative manager overseeing $53 billion of assets, describing it as “absolutely insanity.” PAG is a part owner of Polymer Capital Management.
“I think this is a temporary phase. It is a very bad phase,” he added. “It’s not good for the clients. It’s not good for the industry.”
While the platforms have succeeded in keeping risk controls tight to limit losses, careers at some of them can be quite short, Gradel said. In markets like Japan, “some of these firms are career killers. People actually look for a place which is more supportive.”
PAG is trying to create an environment where portfolio managers can be successful for the long term, he added.
Reservations aside, Marshall Wace imposed a new “compensation surcharge” worth as much as 0.75% of the assets of its main $22.5 billion Eureka hedge fund, amid the heightened competition for talent.
Marshall added that generative AI is “very over-hyped in relation to fund management” and boosting excess returns. While his firm has been using machine learning and natural language processing for years and consider them massively important, generative AI is mostly a productivity enhancement: helping its coders write code and summarizing texts for its analysts.
“You are going to still need humans to be the people to generate the hypothesis and point the machines in the right direction,” he said.
