This story was first published in December of 2023 and has been updated with new information, including the names of more than 15 new hires.
Since last summer, former Millennium executive Bobby Jain has been laying the groundwork for one of the buzziest hedge fund start-ups ever.
Early on he set his sights on becoming the largest launch on record, drawing inevitable comparisons to ExodusPoint, the previous industry record-setter with a $8.5 billion launch back in 2018. Exodus founder Michael Gelband had also come from the Millennium C-suite, leaving in a huff in part because of the arrival of executives like Jain.
But some of that sunny summer optimism faded this fall when Jain Global came face to face with a more dour fundraising climate. The already crowded multi-manager hedge fund arena, which is in an expensive arms race for talent, lost a bit of its shine after a down year in which returns couldn’t keep pace with the stock market. By the time Jain, who is expected to launch in July, set a formal capital target this January — he couldn’t touch investors from his former employer until the start of 2024 — he’d settled on the $5 billion to $6 billion range, according to people familiar with the matter. Jain has offered investors who come aboard quickly and pony up a lot of cash juicy terms and discounted fees.
While short of ExodusPoint’s mark, that capital haul would still be enormous by any other standard, and Gelband’s fund, despite — or perhaps because of — that unwieldy sum of money to deploy, hasn’t lived up to its lofty expectations.
One key distinction between Exodus and Jain Global is the core competency of its founding investors: Gelband was a lifelong fixed-income trader, and Jain was a long-time equities executive. Exodus has minted steady profits from strategies in Gelband’s wheelhouse, like basis trading, but the equities business stumbled and dragged on returns.
Meanwhile, Jain will be leaning into fundamental equities trading. Once his fund is up to full strength, Jain expects to dedicate 25% of capital toward fundamental stock-picking strategies and another 20% toward equity arbitrage. Jain is angling to hire some 70 investment teams once fully deployed, including 15 to 20 fundamental equities portfolio managers.
Much of his leadership team — he has been hiring execs from a disparate group of banks and hedge funds, including Citadel, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — is now in place, though some executives have not started work at Jain and won’t officially come aboard till after its launch.
Business Insider in December, put together a list of known Jain Global hires based on our own reporting, LinkedIn, and other media reports. We’re periodically updating the list ahead of the firm’s expected launch in July. As of February, BI’s list exceeds 50 people.
A spokesman for the firm declined to comment.
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