古根海姆

The corridors of Guggenheim Advisors’ New York offices are lined with photos of architectural gems: distinctive art museums in Berlin, Bilbao, Las Vegas, New York and Venice that bear the fabled family name.

古根海姆Advisors has created no less distinctive an architecture for its funds of hedge funds. Founded in 2002 by the Guggenheim family office as Guggenheim Alternative Asset Management, the firm invests about $3 billion in hedge funds for its four dozen clients, which include wealthy families and institutions. But unlike conventional fund-of-funds firms, which allow clients’ money to disappear into often-opaque portfolios of hedge funds, Guggenheim sets up separate accounts with each manager it uses.

“我们不会在对冲基金中投入客户的钱，而不是对冲基金，”Guggenheim董事长兼首席执行官Loren Katzovitz说。“我们确切知道我们的钱。”然后，该公司监控一系列数据，以确保资金保持轨道，就像古根海姆正在制定投资。Katzovitz在2002年加入Guggenheim之前联合了纽约加拿大股权衍生品和专有贸易部门的44岁，据称，他的公司模型类似于在华尔街投资银行的支柱交易台的“外包商人”。

古根海姆also tailors its portfolios to clients’ risk-and-return parameters, choosing among 35 to 40 hedge funds. “It’s not just a single pot of money,” says the firm’s president, Patrick Hughes, 45, who worked for Katzovitz at RBC and moved with him to Guggenheim. “It’s not every client getting the same solution.” Some want Guggenheim to create a portfolio to meet their return and volatility targets, and others want a voice in choosing the funds.

For such services clients pay Guggenheim management and performance fees on top of those charged by the underlying fund managers. Katzovitz says the firm’s fees are in line with those of other funds of hedge funds. Guggenheim won’t discuss performance, saying that its growth speaks for itself. Hughes adds that because the firm customizes client accounts, results vary.

传统智慧认为，随着投资者在额外收费层和一定规模的策略中，对冲基金的诱惑将使对冲基金的资金变得更加糟糕。为了生存，Katzovitz说，对冲基金的资金将不得不复制古根海姆的公式。

Dennis Sugino, president of consulting firm Cliffwater in Marina del Rey, California, sees a pattern of “managers coming out with more-specialized types of funds of hedge funds — they’re bundling fund investments together into a more risk-controlled model.” And risk control is Guggenheim’s sine qua non. Alan Dorsey, managing director of nontraditional research at CRA RogersCasey, a Darien, Connecticut, consulting firm, concurs: “Funds of hedge funds are developing a much broader set of products to defend their territory against multistrategy funds.”

古根海姆Advisors’ singular approach and rapid growth — from $500 million in assets in 2002 to $3 billion today — has attracted one very interested party: Bank of Ireland. In January the Dublin-based bank paid $184 million to acquire 71.5 percent of then–Guggenheim Alternative Asset Management from Guggenheim Partners, the $100 billion-in-assets onetime family office of the Guggenheims. Chicago-based Guggenheim Partners, which manages money for rich families and institutions, retains a 17.5 percent interest in Guggenheim Advisors; the remainder is split among the funds-of-funds firm’s senior managers.

Kevin Dolan, CEO of Bank of Ireland’s asset management division, gives a bleak assessment of traditional funds of hedge funds. “If a fund of funds is just investing in single hedge funds and hoping for good returns and providing monthly reports, that business model is pretty much dead,” says Dolan, who spearheaded the acquisition (see box). “On the other hand, a platform like Guggenheim’s really adds a lot of value in terms of risk monitoring and reporting and controlling the assets.”

Katzovitz和Hughes旨在复制专有交易台的业务。“如果你像摩根士丹利一样去了一家公司，那么看看它的支柱交易台，你就会看到两件事，”Katzovitz说。“你将看到由管理层获得指导方针和任务的贸易商，您将看到另一个具有风险部门的房间，这些房间监督这些交易员的每件事。我们创建的基本上是：我们有一个风险团队，监督我们的交易商正在做的一切。“然而，古根海姆的交易商是对冲基金。

Every night the firm receives all of its 6,000 or so positions from its hedge fund managers and, by blending them, gets a fix on where the firm stands. “With our separate accounts,” says Katzovitz, “we can have a real-time P&L.” The data, printed out in multicolored charts, enables Guggenheim to make nips and tucks to control its risk.

公司仪表仪表作为投资组合流动性，中立性和营业额。“我们有200多个我们看的压力测试，”休斯吹嘘。如果说，如果市场下降，则显示投资组合可能会发生什么，而波动率加倍。休斯表示，该公司可以协调其与客户的总曝光率分析：“如果一个机构拥有其他资金，例如唯一的账户或单独的账户，我们可以整合它们并为客户提供一个定制的风险报告。”

古根海姆’s 38 professionals can spot excessive concentration and smooth out exposures, much as an orchestra conductor brings up the strings or tones down the brass. Suppose several of the firm’s managers build positions in consumer retail stocks. “We would want to bring down our exposure,” says Hughes. “It could be done by taking away some money, but because we’re growing, it’s a question of allocating or not allocating new money to certain managers.” At its most basic, the rigorous portfolio review minimizes the prospect of Guggenheim’s being conned by a rogue hedge fund.

What do hedge funds think of all that scrutiny? Cliffwater’s Sugino wonders “why any hedge fund manager would give them the level of transparency they’re getting.” Some hedge funds do grouse at having to run a separate account for Guggenheim, Katzovitz admits. But, he adds, “being able to give somebody $50 million to $75 million, as opposed to $20 million, helps.” Contends Hughes, “We really hit very little resistance.” Guggenheim signs strict confidentiality agreements.

The firm’s officials grant there’s nothing special about how they pick funds. “We’re basically trying to find someone with a good pedigree as a trader,” says Hughes. “We don’t necessarily look at how long they’ve been a hedge fund or what their assets under management are. We look at whether they have a repeatable process.”

A couple of Guggenheim’s current funds are New York–based Scoggin Capital Management, an event-driven and opportunistic fund with $500 million under management, and Scout Capital Management, a $3 billion long-short value-oriented fund.

古根海姆always knows what its managers are up to. “To the extent that they’re doing something other than what we asked them to do with the money, we can see that,” says Hughes. When the firm detects managers deviating from their investment scripts, Hughes or another team member gives them a call. “It’s not necessarily to harass the manager,” Katzovitz says. “It’s to educate us.”

Jeffrey Berkowitz vouches for that. He runs some Guggenheim money in J.L. Berkowitz & Co., the New York hedge fund firm that was Cramer Berkowitz until James Cramer left at the end of 2000 to pursue his media career. “They’re unobtrusive,” says Berkowitz. “They never call me up and say, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What’s wrong — why is your performance suffering?’ A few times we struggled a little bit, and they were really supportive.”

古根海姆’s information highway is a two-way street. “Their analytics are great,” says Berkowitz. “They can take things to a third or fourth level and utilize their risk management tools. I check in with them every few weeks and use them as a sounding board.”

投资者in the firm find Guggenheim’s information bank helpful for the same reason. “Loren Katzovitz has a great risk-reward understanding of the marketplace,” says one Guggenheim investor, Don Torey, an executive vice president of GE Asset Management and CIO of its alternative investments. “He knows the landscape as well as anybody, so we use him for insights.” Guggenheim has helped GE assess the portfolio impact of market drops.

令人迷惑的是古根海姆在细节中，它一直专注于大局，部分是通过咨询委员会，包括劳伦斯·莱茵赛，该咨询局，该咨询委员会是经济政策总统和国家经济委员会前任主管的前助理。其他成员包括前大使斯蒂芬博斯沃斯和埃德加布里埃尔，前美国参议员弗雷德汤普森和两位前能源高管。Lindsey说，董事会的使命是预测意外。虽然董事会“不能预测流星将会击中地球，”经济学家说，他经营自己的华盛顿咨询公司，它可以概述全球趋势的期望。该小组每年举行三次，致古根海姆。

各种珍贵的在公司的信息。胡ghes scoffs at traditional hedge funds’ reticence: “You get 12 statements a year, and then comes January — you pay a bonus, and in April you get an audit that says what you did last year.” That’s not how a prop desk — or, by inference, Guggenheim — does it, he says. “Morgan Stanley does not hire a trader and say, ‘I’ll pay you in advance; I’ll see you at the end of the year; you mark your own books; here’s my capital.’”

Katzovitz and Hughes invoke the prop desk mantra so often it gets boring. “To some degree, it’s marketing,” allows Ted Gooden, a partner at Berkshire Capital, a New York–based investment bank that specializes in the asset management industry. But he also says their approach is “highly respected” and “pretty original.” Cliffwater’s Sugino agrees that Guggenheim has an unusual strategy. The consultant, however, points out: “You could be coinvesting, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to do well. You’ve got to coinvest with successful managers.”

Katzovitz warns those who would imitate the Guggenheim approach, “There’s a whole lot of cost.” For a start, the firm has some 30 analysts crunching numbers all day. Guggenheim was able to pull it off, he says, because it was lucky enough to have a half dozen investors willing to let the firm spend on processes to create risk reports and monitor portfolios “the way you would if you had a prop desk and it was your money that was being invested,” says Katzovitz, altogether predictably.