Josh Birnbaum的才能：识别廉价选择

Tilden Park Capital Management co-founder and CIO Joshua Birnbaum possesses the classic traits of a great trader: discipline, patience and intestinal fortitude, as well as the ability to see the big picture and think on his feet. All were on display the morning of April 27, 2010, when Birnbaum and three other Goldman Sachs Group executives appeared before a U.S. Senate subcommittee to testify on their firm’s role in the 2008 financial crisis.

“It was political theater,” says Birnbaum, 41, who as co-head of Goldman’s structured products group had generated $3.7 billion for the bank in 2007 by shorting the subprime mortgage market. During the five-and-a-half-hour hearing, the four executives came under repeated attack as senators questioned why Goldman sold subprime securities to investors at the same time that it was shorting them. Birnbaum calmly defended his actions, describing the factors that led him to turn negative on the subprime market in late 2006, the short positions his group put on and the instructions by senior management to reduce those positions in the spring and summer of 2007.

“It was frustrating to us that the tenor of our holding period wasn’t commensurate with the opportunity,” explains Birnbaum, who says Goldman could have made two to three times what it did if management had kept the short positions. “Nothing against our managers at the time — Goldman is a bank, it’s not a hedge fund, and they were doing their jobs — but we realized that this was not necessarily the right platform for us.”

Birnbaum于2008年4月离开高盛，经过14多年的银行。他之所以是杰里米·底漆，这是一位高盛研究策略演员，他们已经开发了计算机模型，以评估公司交易的证券所在抵押贷款的可能性将早期支付。到2006年下半年，Goldman的入门和他的团队建立了一个模型，以分析了新创建的资产支持证券指数（ABX）的选择，追踪了次级抵押贷款的价值。该模型倾向于毕尔诺布姆，即次级市场严重定价，确认他对该部门的快速恶化基本面的评估。“我在乔什看到了什么，他不仅仅是一个商人，而是一家商家，”蒂尔登·49号帝国首席风险官员和研究总监刘家大学说，他们拥有哈佛大学的硕士学位。“所以我离开高盛参与了一家新公司的增长。”

The two longtime Goldman colleagues soon had a third partner, Sam Alcoff, who had known Birnbaum since they were undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania in the early ’90s. In 2008, Alcoff was working in the technology and risk management group at New York–based hedge fund firm Drake Capital Management, but the bulk of his career had been spent at asset management giantBlackRock. As co-head of BlackRock Solutions’ software engineering group, he helped develop the architecture for its trading system applications and infrastructure.

Josh Birnbaum Nehal Chopra Deepak. Gulati Greg 利马曼 杰弗里 Smith

Joining Birnbaum “was really an unprecedented opportunity to reflect on my experience and build a system that addressed a lot of the shortcomings,” says Alcoff, 42, Tilden’s chief operating officer and chief technology officer.

截至2008年夏季，Alcoff，Birnbaum和Primer在纽约租赁了办公空间，并开始建立业务。他们使不传达的决定最初在外面的资金上拒绝，而不是建立估值，分析，风险管理和后台系统，并越来越多。“一部分使我们取得成功的是我们是非常流行的，这意味着拥有强大的工具，使我们能够提出我们的投资方法，”Birnbaum说。“我们采取了我们将以自己的美元建造这些东西的方法。”

建筑造成了18个月。Tilden - 在加利福尼亚州奥克兰附近的公园命名，Birnbaum成长 - 2010年2月开始投资，拥有2500万美元的托管账户。“我们曾经开玩笑说，我们是最大基础设施的最小基金，”Alcoff说，除了来自Penn的工程学院外，他还拥有Villanova大学法学院。一年后，该公司推出了泽根公园投资硕士基金。今天它有25人，管理23亿美元。截至4月，硕士基金总累计返回101.8％，经历了两个月。

Tilden Park invests both long and short across a variety of asset classes, including mortgage-backed securities, nonmortgage asset-backed securities, collateralized loan obligations, equities and credit default swaps. The firm does capital structure analysis, rotating between stocks and credit depending on where it sees value. “In 2012 we were essentially constructive on credit versus stocks,” says Birnbaum, who graduated from Penn’s Wharton School with a degree in finance before joining the mortgage group at Goldman. “We flipped that switch in 2013, fortunately, because stocks ripped.”

Tilden的投资策略将自上而下的宏观主题与自下而上的证券选择相结合。当宏Level Birnbaum和他的投资团队尽量识别广泛的趋势，雇用他们的定量模型和定性判断。与此同时，Tilden的交易商寻找有吸引力的个人投资机会。“如果你把它煮沸到最简单的水平，我们在做的事情上得到了什么效果是识别廉价的选择，”Birnbaum解释道。

In the spring of 2012, one of Tilden Park’s traders came across an option whose price was seriously out of whack. Further investigation led the firm to the source of that option, Bruno Iksil, the JPMorgan Chase & Co. trader known as the London Whale because of the size of his positions. Tilden Park was one of just a handful of hedge fund firms to make money betting against the London Whale, whose ill-fated trading strategy led to $6.2 billion in losses for JPMorgan that year — and more fame for Birnbaum.