56岁的克劳斯在高盛囊度过了他的大部分职业生涯hs Group, becoming one of the firm’s premier bankers, before shifting to co-head of its asset management business. He left early last year and landed at Merrill Lynch & Co., where fellow Goldman alum John Thain made him head of strategy. When Merrill was sold to Bank of America Corp., he collected a reported $25 million bonus. Not bad for three months’ work.
Kraus will need all of his skills and good fortune to see him through his new job. On December 19 he was named chairman and CEO of AllianceBernstein Holding, a leading asset manager that has been hammered by the global financial crisis. Kraus succeeds Lewis Sanders, 62, an investing legend who spent 40 years at the firm and its predecessors and is regarded by some as among the greatest of all value players — after Warren Buffett, of course.
桑德斯努力引导the firm through the crisis, cutting costs and hewing to his value discipline as he bought up shares of financial companies that never rebounded. But nothing stemmed the spread of the rot. Though known for its superb stock picking, AllianceBernstein has fared much worse than most rivals over the past year or more. Returns for both the firm’s institutional and retail investors trailed those of its peers’ by about 90 percent in 2008.
克劳斯在一个非常动荡的时期接管了阿利安斯伯恩斯坦。商业银行和投资银行的阵痛可能成为头条新闻，但金融危机也伤害了基金经理，他们的收入来自管理资产的费用。当市场扩张时，这种收入模式推动了可观的盈利增长，但由于市场危机压低了全球股票、债券和大宗商品的价格，这种收入模式导致了大幅收缩。受糟糕回报和投资者撤资的影响，AllianceBernstein管理的资产从2007年10月31日8370亿美元的峰值暴跌44.8%，至2008年12月31日的4620亿美元。该公司去年净流出442亿美元。
AllianceBernstein has faced adversity before. If anything, it has thrived on it. Performance at value-oriented predecessor Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. suffered during the oil shocks of the ’70s, the savings and loan bust of the ’80s and the technology boom of the ’90s. Each time, Sanders stuck to his guns and waited for the market to catch up. He was vindicated repeatedly, an experience that inevitably fed his confidence.亚博赞助欧冠summed up Sanders’ — and Bernstein’s — approach in 1989 thus: "Sometimes Wrong, but Never in Doubt." Directors of AXA Group, the French insurance conglomerate that controls AllianceBernstein, evidently weren’t willing to wait years for another rebound.
It’s far from certain that Kraus can quickly manufacture any such rebound. The financial markets and the economy remain in a deep funk. He will have to work hard to earn his compensation, which includes a salary of $275,000 and a $6 million cash bonus for 2009.
Nor has recent history been kind to other would-be bank saviors. John Thain rode in from NYSE Euronext to clean up Merrill, only to be ousted by Bank of America in January, barely a year later. Another Goldman alum, Robert Steel left the Treasury department in July to run Wachovia Corp., which nearly succumbed before being bought by Wells Fargo & Co. in October. After 14 months on the job, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit is breaking up that reeling financial empire, even as reports swirl that his job is on the line.
Kraus faces a restive clientele. Though some investors pulled their assets last year, others remained loyal — to Sanders. "We always associated the things we liked about Bernstein with Lew, and his departure caused me to want to reassess my views on the firm, depending on their commitment to their past disciplines," says Matt Clark, chief investment officer of the $8 billion South Dakota Retirement System, which moved the $30 million it had invested in other AllianceBernstein funds into the All Asset Deep Value Fund in September. In January, Clark says, he told the firm that South Dakota, which manages most of its funds in-house, was taking all that money back.
Notes Robert Lee, a securities analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, of AllianceBernstein: "Their performance has been poor, and they need to demonstrate in the not-too-distant future that they can turn it around. That’s not easy. There are institutional clients who can lose faith, and it takes time to earn that back if you lose it."
克劳斯带给这一挑战证明作为一个技能banker and a strategic thinker. He also benefits from a long relationship with AXA chairman and CEO Henri de Castries. They met in 1991, when Kraus joined a Goldman team that advised the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S. on a large and complex deal involving Paris-based AXA — and first met de Castries, then finance director of AXA, and AXA founder Claude Bébéar, who was then CEO. In the deal, Equitable demutualized and AXA invested $1 billion in the firm, which went public in 1992. One measure of Kraus’s relationship to the French: In addition to running AllianceBernstein, he joins AXA’s seven-member management board, a position Sanders did not hold. The board membership places Kraus on the same level as his boss, Christopher ("Kip") Condron, who as CEO of AXA’s U.S. unit, AXA Financial, oversees AllianceBernstein. Kraus explains his board seat by noting that, during his career at Goldman, he advised some of the world’s largest insurance companies on demutualization and mergers. "Lew doesn’t have my background in insurance," says Kraus. "I can be useful to AXA in helping them chart a course of growth and opportunity."
保险就这么多了。尽管克劳斯因其聪明才智和干劲而广受尊敬，但与桑德斯不同的是，他没有实践理财经验。他职业生涯的大部分时间都在投资银行业度过。2007年，他在高盛资产管理公司（Goldman Sachs Asset Managament）的出色业绩因对冲基金业绩暴跌而受损。复杂的对冲基金globalpha下跌了约40%。此外，GSAM还被迫向另一只暴跌的对冲基金全球股票机会基金（Global Equity Opportunities fund）注资20亿美元。不包括货币市场基金，GSAM在截至2008年5月30日的季度净流出110亿美元。克劳斯于2008年3月离职，尽管他坚称对冲基金的表现不是他离职的原因。”这一点都不好玩，但那是在我决定退休九个月之后，”他声称。
Kraus浪费了在Alliancebernstein改变的时间里。他的第一个决定之一是关闭所有资产的10亿美元，桑德斯去年6月推出并管理自己。它被构造为有限的伙伴关系，如私募股权基金。据该公司称，桑德斯将自己的资金投入“Lew's Fund，”为2008年的少量利润。1月份，公司关闭了基金，因为克劳斯，因为一个“关键人”条款引用了一个经理，基金无法没有。
Kraus已经在价值投资团队的领导方面取得了重大变化。Effective February 2, he named Sharon Fay to be the new head of the value equities business, which makes up 38 percent of the firm’s assets — and houses its most brutally hammered investment strategies, which fell 32 percent in 2008. Fay, who was CIO for global value equities in London, succeeds a 25-year Bernstein veteran, Marilyn Fedak, whom clients had long regarded as Sanders’ closest confidante in the management of deep-value strategies. Fedak becomes vice chairman of investment services. John Mahedy, who was Fedak’s co-CIO for U.S. large-cap value equities, now reports to Fay.
Kraus has begun to reexamine investment disciplines, scrutinizing AllianceBernstein’s quantitative investment processes, which Sanders developed three decades ago and married to fundamental, bottom-up stock-picking strategies.
Kraus brings a ton of energy to the job. His business day starts at 7:30 a.m., when he arrives at the office after a workout at a local gym or a jog around his block on New York’s Upper East Side. (He’s in the process of moving to 720 Park Avenue, one of the city’s most exclusive and elegant buildings, where he and his wife bought a $37 million apartment last year.) Once at the office, which is decorated with about a dozen pieces from his vast collection of abstract European and American paintings and sculpture (see sidebar), Kraus prints out documents that were too long to read on his Blackberry on the way to work and gets his London-based global head of client service and marketing, David Steyn, on the phone for business updates. By 8:00 a.m. he is meeting with heads of the investment and sales teams.
A POLISHED NETWORKER and corporate politician, Kraus was raised in Philadelphia, where his father was national sales manager of Bache & Co., a securities brokerage that, after a series of mergers, is now part of Wells Fargo. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1974 from Trinity College, where he studied economics and French history, he traveled in Europe for six months. Returning to New York, he took night classes to qualify as a certified public accountant and received an MBA from New York University, joining the mortgage-backed securities unit of Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co., an accounting firm that later became part of KPMG. He moved Goldman as an investment banker in 1986 and four years later was transferred to Tokyo. In 1991, Henry Paulson Jr., who was then co-head of investment banking at Goldman and, more recently, served as Treasury secretary in the George W. Bush administration, called him back to New York. He joined a Goldman team advising AXA on the Equitable Life deal, made partner in 1994, and four years later became co-head of Goldman’s financial institutions group. Kraus advised on landmark deals like the $16 billion acquisition of BankBoston Corp. by Fleet Financial Group and the $22 billion purchase of General Re Corp. by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
金曼萨奇斯资产管理的同事，其中克鲁士在2001年成为联合主管，将他描述为比日常经理的战略家。对于初学者来说，他将他的老人办公室留在纽约广场，留在他以前的投资银行同事附近，而不是在拐角处移动到85个宽阔的街道，投资管理团队所在地。他与Co-Head Eric Schwartz一起开展了GSAM进入蓬勃发展的对冲基金业务。高盛资产两倍以上，2000年的2579亿美元，克拉斯克鲁斯接管了GSAM，2007年的8091亿美元，他的最后一年。到2008年，GSAM在第12位II 300型最大的资产管理公司名单，从2001年他上任时的第19位上升。
彼得是一位天才的战略思想家。乔治•沃克（George Walker）表示：“我一直对他的能力印象深刻，他既能看到大局，又能沉浸在细节中。”他在GSAM负责另类投资，2006年离职，出任雷曼兄弟控股（Lehman Brothers Holdings）投资管理部门主管。去年12月，他领导了对该部门的管理层收购。
克劳斯在银行业和艺术界的成长经历与桑德斯截然不同，桑德斯是纽约尤尼代尔一家加油站老板的儿子。桑德斯的职业生涯始于1968年，当时他是华尔街一家初创公司的研究助理，一年前，该公司由价值投资者桑福德C。伯恩斯坦。刚从哥伦比亚大学毕业并获得运营管理学士学位的桑德斯涉足医院供应和办公设备领域。IIranked him as a No. 1 analyst on the All-America Research Team for two years in a row, 1978 and 1979. He became known for sticking to value principles and committing to sectors that appeared distressed but that he believed would ultimately rise. He was also an early adopter of mathematical investment models to screen stocks, marrying them with fundamental, bottom-up stock picking. Rising rapidly, Sanders became a director at Bernstein in 1972, CIO in 1979 and president in 1981.
Sanders was widely admired throughout the firm for his analytical mind and his unshakable devotion to the deep-value investing discipline, learned from founder Bernstein, according to longtime friend and colleague Roger Hertog. Hertog also joined the firm in 1968, and he and Sanders became close friends. Hertog, who was chief operating officer for a period of time, retired in 2006. "Lew is a very scientific, thoughtful, highly analytical person," he says.
Sanders saved Bernstein in one crisis after another, believing that a disciplined approach to value investing, even when the pack is running scared, pays off in the long run. "All you can say with any sense of reliability is that if you were an investor today, if you were to look back some years from now, even if things got worse first, your investments would probably be among the most rewarding. Because you bought maybe not at the low, but in a fairly advanced state," Sanders said in an an interview shortly before his resignation. In 1990, when Bernstein had $9.5 billion under management, more than one third of its assets were in financial institutions that had lost 35 percent of their value that year — not unlike the predicament that the firm finds itself in now. Sanders dismissed critics and predicted that his deep-value portfolio would bounce back, and he was vindicated. The Russell value 1000 index returned 31 percent from 1991 to 1994, whereas the Russell growth 1000 index produced only 11 percent. Sanders faced a similar crisis when tech stocks took off and numerous Bernstein clients fired the firm between 1998 and 2000 and took their money to growth managers. Hertog estimates that as many as 25 percent of Bernstein’s clients decamped.
Hertog watched Sanders studiously avoid losing his temper, even as high-net-worth clients assailed him for refusing to buy hot tech stocks that they saw their friends getting rich from (at least on paper), while he invested their money in railroads, toilet fixture manufacturers and slow-growing consumer products companies that he regarded as safe bets. "A client actually said, ‘The reason I can’t take it anymore is that you guys are buying the same stocks my grandfather owned. I want to own what my children own,’" Hertog recalls.
In 1999 founder Bernstein died of cancer at 72, leaving the company’s fate in Sanders’ hands. With all the pressure from unhappy investors, Sanders went looking for a partner in the growth universe, ultimately aligning with Bruce Calvert, who was then CEO of Alliance. In 2000, Alliance acquired Bernstein, an institutional house with a thriving private client business and $88 billion in value stocks, for $3.5 billion. Alliance, a mutual fund giant with $368 billion in growth stocks, was controlled by AXA Financial, which was advised by Goldman.
The merger could not have been better timed. The bursting of the dot-com bubble that year left egg on the faces of the Alliance growth team, but the Bernstein value team rode the value rally. The Russell growth index fell 9 percent in an extended slide from 2000 to 2006, while Russell value shot up 58 percent, according to Lipper data. Calvert remained CEO of the new AllianceBernstein, and Sanders played to his strengths as firmwide CIO. Then Alliance got caught in the market-timing scandal in 2003. The Securities and Exchange Commission found that the firm had allowed some investors to trade in and out of mutual funds to the detriment of long-term investors. AXA Financial negotiated a $600 million settlement with the SEC.
With the backing of de Castries, Sanders succeeded Calvert as CEO in June 2003 and as chairman in November 2004, taking the corner office, overhauling senior management and launching new products. In September 2003, for example, the firm launched a suite of six mutual funds called AllianceBernstein Wealth Strategies, designed to bring AllianceBernstein institutional products to the retail market. Five of these funds used a blend of existing fixed-income and equity strategies from both the Alliance growth and Bernstein value sides of the house.
在接下来的几年里，桑德斯为公司主持了一段成长时期。在市场复苏的推动下，AllianceBernstein的利润稳步增长，从2004年的7.05亿美元增至2007年的12.6亿美元。
该公司还专注于建立一个固定缴款业务，以招揽计划发起人。在这项业务从2002年的几乎为零增长到2006年年中的150亿美元之后，桑德斯加大了力度，成立了一个名为“固定缴款服务”的新销售部门，并让一直负责该公司大学储蓄业务的理查德•戴维斯（Richard Davies）负责。戴维斯得到了一个由该公司固定缴款产品领域的11位顶尖专家组成的团队，并受命从外部再聘请6位专家。他们得到了与AllianceBernstein的固定福利销售团队混杂在一起的小隔间和办公室。由于股市低迷，这项业务陷入停滞：2008年底，该公司拥有约180亿美元的资产，此外，该公司还获得了35亿美元的授权，但尚未获得资金。
桑德斯也与投资文化o亚慱体育app怎么下载n the legacy Alliance side of the house, reeling in the freedom of individual portfolio managers. For example, the Alliance team changed its decision-making process from one in which any growth portfolio manager had the authority to instantly buy or sell a stock at any time of the day or night without asking anyone, to one where buy-and-sell decisions were made by the investment committee of a fund or product. The intent was to prevent the firm from inadvertently owning too much of any one company, such as Enron Corp.; former Alliance large-cap growth manager Alfred Harrison had bought 1.3 mil-
lion shares for Florida’s state pension fund just two weeks before Enron filed for bankruptcy.
这些变化造成了一些混乱。一些高级投资组合经理离职，其中哈里森于2004年12月离职，明星投资组合经理托马斯·坎普于2006年2月离职，成为明尼阿波利斯基石资本管理公司的首席信息官；美国增长策略公司（U.S.GrowthStrategies）首席执行官瑞斯曼（Paul Rissman）于2008年1月退休，据利萨•沙利特（Lisa Shalett）称，她于2008年1月出任Alliance growth Equities全球主管“你已经看到了一个朝着团队过程和创造力最小化的运动，”芝加哥恩尼斯Knupp+Associates的投资顾问克里斯•赖利（Chris Riley）表示。
With the onset of the credit crisis, AllianceBernstein’s fortunes turned down suddenly and sharply. Profits for the fourth quarter of 2007 shrank 15.6 percent, to $309.7 million, because of sharp declines in hedge-fund–related performance fees and mark-to-market losses in investments for deferred employee compensation plans. Profits have fared worse since, slumping 68 percent in 2008’s fourth quarter to just $97 million. For the year income was off 33 percent, to $839 million. Company shares, at $16.68 on February 2, are down 75 percent since January 1, 2008.
The culprit? Performance. The problem was that, rather than balancing each other off, the value and growth sides of the house both piled into one bad bet after another as the credit crunch worsened. The firm’s six main institutional value equity strategies missed their benchmarks by an average of 7.7 percentage points for 2008, and the firm’s eight main institutional growth equity strategies underperformed their benchmarks by an average of 6.5 percentage points, according to tables posted on the AllianceBernstein Web site. The firm began the year overly concentrated in financials, energy giants and tech companies and subsequently added to holdings of such troubled firms as American International Group, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, convinced that they were nearing a bottom. The temptation to load up was irresistible to Sanders, who thought that the market trough would be short because the last ten recessions, excluding the Great Depression, had lasted less than a full year, on average. "Our first reaction when a stock goes down in price is that it’s more interesting than it was. And the history of value is that almost all of its return premiums are from the fact that that’s usually true," he toldII在11月底的一次采访中。”今年股市没有回升。”
Indeed. For the 12 months through December 31, 2008, according to eVestment Alliance, a firm in Marietta, Georgia, that tracks institutional fund performance, Alliance Global Research Growth Equity, which invests about 40 percent of its assets in the U.S. and 60 percent overseas, was down 52.58 percent, underperforming its benchmark, the MSCI world index, by about 12 percentage points. Bernstein Global Value Equity was down 50.58 percent over the same period, about 10 percentage points worse than the MSCI world index.
The firm didn’t do much better in its more lucrative hedge funds, where it has about $5.5 billion under management. The largest of these, Global Diversified Strategies, lost 38 percent from January 1 to September 30. The smallest, the Multi-Strategy Fixed Income fund, was down 87 percent from January 1 to October 31.
由于绩效拒绝投资者跨越所有销售渠道的资金 - 机构，零售和私人客户。桑德斯在船上挣扎着;从第三季度开始，他开始削减成本。
He redeployed top talent too. He shifted Bernstein veteran Seth Masters from his post as CIO of blend strategies and put him in charge of an expanded defined contribution services unit. He replaced Masters in blend strategies with Marc Mayer, who had been in charge of mutual fund sales.
桑德斯不断修补投资，完善选股标准，直到他离开。例如，在2008年末，他决定公司应该避免持有那些资产负债表上债务过重的公司的股票。
But his efforts failed to reverse the company’s slide, and toward the end of the year, Sanders conceded that his view of the financial crisis had been flawed. In his interview withII, he acknowledged that both the Alliance growth and Bernstein value sides of the house had made the "mistake" of loading up on the most-troubled U.S. financial stocks under the assumption that they would bounce back long before the end of 2008. Sanders also admitted that he had rejected the possibility that last year could have been any worse than earlier downturns he had faced.
"It was far worse," he lamented. "We made some judgments that turned out to be wrong."
不过，在大西洋彼岸，人们的耐心越来越少了。9月中旬，美林出售给美国银行的消息一经宣布，德卡斯特里斯就向克劳斯伸出了援手，桑德斯在AllianceBernstein的统治开始走向终结。
"Lew had a conversation with the board over a number of periods of time, and they decided together that this was the time for him to retire," Kraus says. Now it’s his job to get AllianceBernstein back on track during the worst financial crisis in living memory.