Inside the elegant Breakers Palm Beach resort, Bobby Jain made his multibillion-dollar pitch. His audience: the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, steward of one of the world’s great petro-fortunes and, to Jain, a perfect client for his new hedge fund.
His vision — laid out in the hotel’s seafood restaurant — was ambitious, even unprecedented. He would hatch a giant, fully formed hedge fund that would trade a half-dozen strategies and employ hundreds of people globally from day one. It required quickly finding gifted traders amid an expensive talent war, building complex infrastructure over months and raising enough investor money to pay for it.