41%的男人

Hedge funds were once high-octane, superstar-led investment funds generating double- and triple-digit returns. These days — as journalists lament and investors applaud — many of them are actually pretty boring.

Joseph Edelman didn’t get that memo.

Edelman, 63, founded his biotechnology hedge fund firm,Perceptive Advisors，1999年。从那时起，这家以600万美元资产起家的公司，凭借其旗舰对冲基金“感知生命科学基金”（Perceptive Life Sciences fund）近乎难以置信的业绩，已经膨胀至41亿美元。该基金投资于生物科技公司，尤其是中小型股，自成立以来，已产生了扣除30%费用后的年化收益，使埃德尔曼跻身于业绩优异的可自由支配基金经理的精英行列。

Last year was even better. For 2017, the fund’s 41 percent gain propelled Edelman to the No. 13 spot on亚博赞助欧冠’sRich Listranking of the 25 highest-earning hedge fund managers. That performance was the best of any on the list, and netted him a cool $525 million.

更重要的是，该基金成立以来仅下跌了两年：2002年，纳斯达克生物技术指数跌幅超过45%的一年，该基金下跌了10.33%；2008年，Perceptive下跌了23.98%，几乎是生物技术行业当年跌幅超过12%的一倍。2016年，对生物科技来说是毁灭性的一年，总统竞选时关于药品价格的言论重创了该行业的股票，Perceptive的回报率为3.81%，而该行业的损失率接近22%。今年截至6月下旬，其回报率超过16%。

“They are the best in our business and I think the world of them. Joe is absolutely amazing and he’s got an incredible team there,” says布拉德·朗卡尔,a longtime biotech investor and the founder of Loncar Investments, a small family office specializing in the sector that also operates two biotech indexes.

但是，Perceptive惊人的长期年化回报率带来了巨大的波动和一些问题。

The fund has occasionally posted huge single-month losses, such as its nearly 12 percent drop in January 2016 — and equally volatile single-month gains that sometimes reach double digits (it posted a single-month gain of nearly 69 percent, by far its biggest ever, during its second month in existence).

“Their returns are so spectacular that nobody is in their league,” says one person hugely influential in the allocation of hedge fund assets in the U.S. “The only funds that come anywhere close are activists who really swing the bat.”

Part of this, to be sure, is simply down to the wild world of biotech investing. Perceptive typically shuns big pharmaceutical companies, insurance giants, and hospital chains in favor of small- and midcap biotech companies that develop drugs, often backing the kinds of companies whose fortunes hinge on a single drug that takes years to develop and can be crushed by a Food and Drug Administration rejection.

The hedge fund firm often sticks with its investments for several years — which is how long it takes for breakthrough treatments to go from testing to FDA approval — and isn’t afraid to buy stocks at far higher prices than it initially paid if it thinks the shares still have room to run, or, conversely, to sell shares for much less than it paid if it thinks there is more downside potential. And while the fund is highly diversified, holding upward of 200 positions at a given time, its top-ten positions typically account for half of the fund’s assets.

In other words, it’s a high-conviction, high-risk strategy that’s not for wimps. Which is exactly how Edelman prefers to invest.

“I don’t want to be a hedge fund manager who doesn’t take much risk,” Edelman toldForbesearlier this year. “Otherwise, why am I doing this?”

随着埃德尔曼的明星地位不断攀升，他的资产基础也在不断攀升。如今，感知生命科学基金管理着34亿美元。该公司于2013年成立了其信贷机会部门，为其认为具有创新性的医疗保健公司提供债务融资，并将于下月通过与Xontogeny（2016年成立的创业加速器）的合作推出一只风险投资基金，以支持有希望的早期生物技术公司。敏锐的顾问公司目前拥有21名员工，其中包括11名投资专业人士，并于2015年迁至位于曼哈顿东村中心的阿斯特广场（Astor Place）的新总部。

But even as the firm has evolved from small boutique outfit to renowned hedge fund, some would-be investors say the risks are simply too high.

---

即使是最老练的生物技术专家find the sector to be a tough place to make money.

“毫无疑问，它是股市中风险最大、波动最大的行业，”Loncar说。“即使是专家也很难挑选个股。与任何行业相比，多元化更为重要，因为药物开发非常困难。即使是拥有伟大科学知识的优秀公司，也总是会失败，也会遭遇重大挫折，因为这正是一个企业所面临的困难。”

根据巴克莱投资银行（Barclays）的研究，在美国大约500家生物技术公司中，只有大约20家盈利。这些公司往往专注于少数几个领域——主要是神经学、血液学和所谓的孤儿疾病，或影响美国不到20万人的疾病——并试图解决未满足的医疗需求，主要是在美国和欧洲。

分析师杰弗里·米查姆负责人报道of biotech and pharmaceutical companies for Barclays, says the biggest biotech companies these days are closer to pharmaceutical companies in their profiles: They are profitable, have more predictable businesses, have grown more moderately in recent years, and are generally less volatile than others in the sector. But innovation is mainly happening in the mid-, small-, and micro-cap arena, where companies typically aren’t yet profitable and often have a single asset or a pipeline of things in a single area.

“Some of this stuff is 'holy cow,’Star Trekkind of stuff — that’s why these companies have a little bit of a higher valuation,” says Meacham.

As an example, he cites a company called AveXis, which was recently sold to pharmaceutical giant Novartis. AveXis pioneered a gene therapy approach for the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy — a devastating muscle-wasting disease and the No. 1 cause of genetic death in infants. The potential rewards for such revolutionary treatments are huge — but so are the risks, especially if a company’s drug or treatment doesn’t get FDA approval.

A drug has to pass three trials, known as phases. Drugs that make it to the Phase 3 stage and pass are then eligible to be approved by the FDA. It’s a long and arduous process, and there is a high chance that a drug or treatment will fail after years of trying.

“The ultimate risk in this space is trial failing,” says Umer Raffat, an analyst at Evercore ISI. Indeed, trial failure is often the cause of gigantic one-day losses.

即使药物通过了第三阶段试验,there is a chance it won’t get FDA approval. Meacham says this is a lower risk than it used to be, in part because the agency is more industry-friendly and has become more transparent. But because most people assume approval following a successful trial, this can also be a potential landmine, Meacham says.

Another risk is simply timing. Meacham notes that hedge fund managers and other professional biotech investors like to buy into these companies before their drugs get to the Phase 3 stage of testing, because by the time they get there, they are already expensive. Savvy biotech stock pickers know that a successful Phase 1 trial can be indicative of possible success in Stage 2, but it’s impossible to get those judgments right all the time, he says. That’s where risk tolerance comes in handy — and where the real money can be made.

“真正的高风险，高回报的部分是当你不知道，没有先前的数据，只是一种药物的作用机制，看起来很有趣，但你只是不知道”如何在试验阶段表现良好，米查姆说。

“One thing that I think is unique about biotech is you have to get to know the management teams very well,” says Loncar. “You can’t just look at it like a balance sheet and an income statement like you can in some other industries. You have to get to know a management team to know if they are credible, honest, and creating good science.”

As for the sector’s prospects, biotech experts say the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index beat the broader market for several years in a row until 2016, when drug pricing controversies entered the nation’s bloodstream via the presidential election. Raffat says growth has been “anemic” in the large-cap biotech names. But Loncar and others say that amid those headwinds, major innovations are underfoot.

“对于生物技术来说，这是一个激动人心的时刻，”Loncar说。“现在医学界出现了一些新技术，它们具有颠覆性和变革性，非常令人兴奋，对患者和社会产生了巨大影响。你必须经历起伏。生物技术将经历许多高峰和低谷；低谷可能非常紧张，你必须能够度过艰难时期。唯一的办法就是多样化。”

Meacham says the biotech sector has matured, but he acknowledges that many long-held beliefs about the sector are still true — that companies need a lot of capital, aren’t profitable for years, and can spend a lot of money before suddenly hitting the jackpot, or going bust.

“There are more companies today that fit the bill of more mature, less risky,” Meacham says. “But that’s still a big risk in the industry.”

---

除了生物技术一位著名的投资顾问表示，该公司之所以能传递敏锐的洞察力，部分原因是其投资团队规模相对较小，而且专注于高风险行业。“你已经有（一些）人在一个风险区域进行了数百笔交易，”这位人士说。“它们可以产生惊人的回报，但你有更高的风险，他们滑倒在香蕉皮上。”

Perceptive投资者关系和市场总监帕特里克•莫罗（Patrick Morrow）回应称，鉴于该公司过去19年一贯的战略和流程以及投资组合的结构方式，该公司认为其人员配备充足，团队具备处理投资组合的能力。

另一个人的突出的投资顾问’s firm says its due diligence revealed other concerns — one of which is the potential for asset-liability mismatches, a hallmark of the 2008 financial crisis that left many hedge fund investors stuck holding investments that fund managers couldn’t immediately liquidate.

Perceptive’s hedge fund offers quarterly liquidity with 45 days’ notice — not unusual for a long-short equity fund, but frequent enough to give this investor pause — and also holds a number of private investments.

该人士表示：“他们的大部分资产都在非常小的公司，如果他们试图迅速进行交易的话，就代表了巨额的浮动。”。“他们有私人投资，他们直接在基金里持有。如果你有百分之五的私人财产，这看起来没什么大不了的，但是如果你有百分之二十五的财产赎回，现在你有百分之七点五的私人财产，然后又有百分之二十五的财产出来，那么你有百分之十二的私人财产。我们更希望这些东西放在口袋里。”

换言之，如果一次赎回大量基金资本，流动性较差的私人投资的资本集中度就会上升，从而降低整个基金的流动性。

莫罗说，个人私人头寸在资产中所占比例不大，在投资组合中不允许超过一定规模，而且往往是后期公司，一旦上市，最终会进入其流动性投资组合。他说，简单地说，对冲基金并没有在流动性极低的公司持有大量股份。

He also notes that a third of the firm’s capital belongs to the general partner and that its external investor base has been steady over the years. Earlier this year the fund also raised a big chunk of fresh capital that is locked up for three years.

The investment adviser who passed on Perceptive points out that his firm’s research indicated that Perceptive’s investment team is highly respected on Wall Street. But he says his firm was ultimately nervous that Perceptive lacked the kind of infrastructure his firm typically looks for — all the more important given its focus on a sector that can be littered with landmines, such as failed drug trials or a rejection from the FDA.

但其他对冲基金业资深人士表示，在这个众所周知困难的行业，Perceptive在管理风险方面做得非常出色，他们赞扬埃德尔曼的投资能力，特别是他衡量和管理头寸的能力，以及他经常对其他分析师奉承的公司持怀疑态度的事实。

“He is incredibly well regarded. He’s done a spectacular job,” says one hedge fund founder. As for the concerns about an asset-liability mismatch, this person says such concerns are not unique to Perceptive and may be overblown. “As long as it’s not 30 percent of the portfolio, who cares? If all of [$35 billion multistrategy hedge fund firm] Elliott Management’s investors wanted to pull out, they would have an issue too. You shouldn’t have to hedge against 50 percent of your investors pulling out.”

Perceptive has put certain controls in place to mitigate the day-to-day volatility in the biotech sector. It has a maximum daily loss allowance of 5 percent on long and short positions, a mechanism that prevents the portfolio from getting crushed if a stock faces a bruising one-day loss for any reason, such as a drug trial failure.

In any case, Perceptive’s returns — which harken back to the heady early days of hedge funds — have attracted plenty of fans. The firm charges old-fashioned hedge fund fees to go with those retro returns — a management and administrative fee of 3 percent, plus a 25 percent performance fee, roughly 7 percentage points above the industry average, according to data tracker HFR. But that apparently hasn’t been enough to put off investors hungry for high returns.

---

像许多生物技术对冲基金一样，Perceptive boasts several MDs and PhDs on its investment team. As it happens, Edelman isn’t one of them — but his attraction to the sector came naturally.

The third of four children, Edelman grew up in San Francisco, where his father, Isidore, was a professor of biochemistry at the University of California at San Francisco. After earning a degree in psychology from the University of California, San Diego, he enrolled in a graduate program in psychopharmacology there but dropped out after just a few weeks, thinking that he didn’t want to follow exactly in his father’s footsteps and that he lacked the patience for research.

那时他已经开始意识到自己被金融界所吸引。他搬到了纽约市，他的父亲刚刚被任命为哥伦比亚大学分子化学和生物物理学系主任，并在纽约大学斯特恩商学院注册。他在校期间做会计工作以维持收支平衡，包括在演员权益协会担任助理主计长。

After earning his MBA in 1988, he got a job at small brokerage firm Labe, Simpson & Co., followed by stints as an analyst at Prudential Securities and then at Paramount Capital Asset Management for a biotech hedge fund called Aries. In February 1999, he joined First New York Securities, a proprietary trading shop that gave him $6 million to run a managed account. He launched Perceptive as a stand-alone fund in July 1999.

这家公司的名字来源于它分析生物技术领域企业事件的方式，而这种方式植根于埃德尔曼的心理训练。该公司在Perceptive Life Sciences Fund的宣传手册中表示：“我们通过了解这些事件的‘感知’，然后在进行深入研究后只投资于‘现实’，从而获得竞争优势。”该公司还补充说，它使用“谨慎的风险管理”来缓解这些股票的波动性。“在我们看来，投资决策偏差是产生正投资回报的最大障碍。”

The fund holds 15 to 20 core positions, which it defines as a position that constitutes more than 2 percent of its overall portfolio, with an average core position of around 5 percent of assets. Its five largest long positions are generally about 25 to 40 percent of the portfolio, while its five largest short positions are 10 to 20 percent. Fundamental shorts make up 95 percent of the fund’s short portfolio. Perceptive also actively uses options for hedging, given the volatility around biotech stocks.

Perceptive专注于中小型公司，将对冲基金75%至80%的资产投资于生物技术公司，其余投资于专业制药公司、医疗IT公司、诊断公司和医疗器械生产公司。但该公司的面包和黄油是发展阶段的公司，生产改变游戏规则的药物。

“我们是医疗保健突破的超级粉丝，”该公司在其网站上说。“作为科学家，我们明白医学发现可以产生巨大的影响，没有什么比具有突破性潜力的创新更能吸引我们。”

Such groundbreaking potential often comes with huge upside. Take Neurocrine Biosciences, a position Perceptive has held for several years and its biggest holding at approximately 13 percent of the Perceptive Life Sciences Fund’s portfolio. The company’s drug Ingrezza was approved last year to treat a movement disorder “associated with the long-term use of drugs for schizophrenia.” Neurocrine climbed more than 100 percent last year.

Today the stock trades for nearly $120 per share. Edelman began buying it at $4 per share and kept on buying as the price rose above $90 per share. He correctly concluded that analysts hadn’t raised their estimates enough for the rest of 2017, according toForbes.

“We are really focused on only looking forward,” Edelman toldForbes. “你必须把你的历史和股票一起拿出来。”

Another home run last year was Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which showed promising results in a late-stage trial last year for a drug, patisiran, designed to treat a rare and deadly neurological disorder. The stock surged nearly 240 percent in 2017.

Other big positions in the fund’s portfolio as of the end of the first quarter included Amicus Therapeutics, a drug development company that surged 189 percent last year; Global Blood Therapeutics, which is developing a drug to treat sickle-cell anemia and which gained 172 percent last year; and Zogenix, a drug development company focused on treating epilepsy that surged nearly 230 percent last year.

Still, biotech companies can have hair-raising downside moves. One longtime Perceptive holding, Sarepta Therapeutics, is a medical research and drug development company that makes drugs to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Its shares halved in a single day in early 2016 after the company got bad news from the FDA. The stock faced another near-term setback that July, when the FDA halted a study of its Duchenne muscular dystrophy drug. The stock plunged more than 9 percent on the news.

尽管卖方分析师不同意，但埃德尔曼仍对其主要药物获得批准抱有信心。事实证明他是对的，仅在2016年9月，当埃德尔曼的预测成真时，该股就上涨了惊人的119%。

It returned more than 100 percent last year.

---

Now that Perceptive has exploded in size,the firm must figure out how to maintain its extraordinary performance record — a tricky feat given that the biotech sector doesn’t have limitless capacity. Edelman told this publication back in 2011 that he didn’t want the firm, then managing a few hundred million, to get to $1 billion for fear it would compromise his portfolio.

他当时表示：“如果你想让这些小公司对你的投资组合产生影响，那就改变了局面。”。“超过10亿，你的大部分回报都集中在更大的股票上。”

这家公司似乎正是以一种超越典型的股权投资的方式接近这一行业，从而打通了这个圈子。

据该公司网站介绍，除了Xontogeny venture partnership，Perceptive还经营其信贷机会部门，通过封闭式、五年期优先担保直接贷款基金进行私人投资，为“创新型医疗保健公司提供定制债务融资解决方案”。该公司目前正在为其第二只这样的基金——Credit Opportunities II筹集资金，该基金预计每项投资将分配1000万至1亿美元。过去的拨款包括专业制药公司Aquestive Therapeutics、VBI疫苗、医疗器械制造商Sonendo和体外诊断仪器制造商Singulex。

一位机构亚博赞助欧冠投资者表示，这种转变是有意义的，而且是投资该行业的一种更具吸引力的方式，而不是通过长短股权形式。私人投资意味着投资者不必担心市场流动性或资金赎回。这名投资者对做空的生物技术基金尤其谨慎，例如，如果一家管理人做空的公司获得FDA批准，而该管理人认为一种药物将要失败，那么该基金就有可能蒙受巨大损失。

Perceptive的投资者表示，该公司之所以能很好地管理这一风险，是因为它使用了期权，埃德尔曼有着超凡脱俗的能力，能够读懂其他分析师错过的茶叶，以及他固有的怀疑态度，他认为这使该公司与众不同。

“If you don’t know who the sucker is,” he told亚博赞助欧冠in 2011, “it is probably you.”