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- [00:00]
Announcer
This message is brought to you by nuveen. How would you invest if you knew the future was watching at nuveen? This isn't a theoretical question, it's a perspective that comes from navigating 125 years of market cycles and the changing needs of investors around the world. Visit Nuveen.com future to learn more. Investing involves risk. Principal loss is possible. Your next product launch is coming fast. Don't let billing slow you down. Legacy systems can't handle usage based billing. That means your team is stuck gluing code together, piecing through spreadsheets and running ad hoc queries just to figure out what to bill. With Metronome, you can roll out new pricing in minutes instead of months, whether it's usage based, seat based, or a hybrid model. Visit metronome.com to see how companies like OpenAI and Anthropic launch billing as fast as they launch products. That's metronome.com Every business starts with an idea. How can you go from daydreamer to industry leader? Amazon Business accelerates your journey with smart business buying. Get everything you need to grow in one familiar place. From office supplies to IT essentials and maintenance tools. Amazon Business takes the buying experience you know and love from Amazon plus tools.
- [01:13]
Dimitri Bagliasny
That help you save costs and make.
- [01:14]
Announcer
Insights based decisions ready to bring your visions to life. Learn how@AmazonBusiness.com Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts Radio News this is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio on the.
- [01:37]
Barry Ritholtz
Latest Masters in Business podcast. Strap yourself in. Another great one, Dimitri Bagliasney. He's co founder of the hedge fund Baliasney Asset management. They're a $28 billion multi strat firm, 170 portfolio teams, 2300 people working their offices around the world. Started as a trader at Schoenfeld, grew into both a manager and just a person looking at the world and identifying inefficiencies and coming up with ways to capitalize it. Fascinating conversation. Not only are they one of the most successful multistrats, but they have a somewhat unusual business manager. They have lots of partners who are employees, traders, business people, fund managers really. Just just a fascinating approach to corporate culture, to creating the right set of incentives and creating a high functioning meritocracy. Very few people have seen the world of hedge funds develop from a trading perspective the way Dimitri has. I thought the conversation was absolutely spectacular and I think you will also. With no further ado, my discussion with Dimitri Bagliazny.
- [02:58]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Thanks for having me Barry.
- [02:59]
Barry Ritholtz
And we got to say hello to Mike on the way in. We'll talk about that a little later. I'm fascinated by your background. You immigrated from the Ukraine at age 7. How did that affect your perspective in terms of taking risk and just looking at the world?
- [03:18]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I think it was probably very formative in building a thick skin. So back in Kiev, we're living in Communist Soviet Union. Parents would stand in line to buy a jug of milk for a couple hours. I'd never been in a car until I was in the US Never taken a flight until we immigrated. So very different life there. A lot of discrimination from a religious perspective, an ethnic perspective. Being Jewish in Kiev at the time and then coming here, didn't speak the language. Different type of discrimination of being Russian during the height of the Cold War. Although never really thought of ourselves as Russian. So it's. I think it builds character and builds perseverance and the thick skin to be able to deal with the difficulties and figure stuff out.
- [04:21]
Barry Ritholtz
You go to college at Loyola University in Chicago where you study business. What was the career plan?
- [04:29]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I wanted to invest, so I did a lot of sales type jobs in high school because I figured out that was the only way you could get paid because you got commission as opposed to salary as a kid. But I wanted to transition from selling stocks as a stockbroker, which I was doing in college, to trading and taking risk and investing. I wasn't sure how I was going to do that in what format, but I was interested in trading and investing from a young age. Read Market Wizards, followed the careers of the top traders at the time, applied to every hedge fund I could find, and I was lucky enough to answer a newspaper ad, of all things. When Schoenfeld securities ran a newspaper ad in Chicago when they opened up that office, and it was the one and only time they actually ran a newspaper ad. So I was lucky that I was following the want ads.
- [05:19]
Barry Ritholtz
I recall seeing traders wanted Schoenfeld Securities. They were down on Wall street back in the mid-90s. So you began trading for Schoenfeld in the mid-1990s. What was the trading environment like? What were you doing for them on the desk?
- [05:34]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Well, at the time, they were looking for people who didn't have a lot of preconceived notions and kind of systems and strategies that they really thought worked because they wanted to start them from scratch and kind of teach them their methodology, which was working well at the time. And that fit me very well because I was making a lot of money at the time. In Commissions as a broker. But I was promptly losing at trading because I didn't know what I was doing from a trading standpoint.
- [06:01]
Barry Ritholtz
You had to support your trading habit with commission sales.
- [06:04]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Exactly, exactly. And so I would give people lots of great advice and then proceed to go do the opposite in my own trading. So I needed to go somewhere to learn a method that had more structure and discipline. And so they started you with a very small amount of capital and very tight risk limits in terms of what you could trade, when you could trade, what size you could trade. And from there, once you showed some proficiency, your risk box would expand, meaning.
- [06:34]
Barry Ritholtz
More capital, little looser reins on what you could do and how long you could hold things.
- [06:39]
Dimitri Bagliasny
That's right. And so I started with very short time periods, very small risk, didn't make any money for the first year, which was difficult because the salary was zero. But after that, I started kind of getting the hang of it and making money pretty consistently.
- [06:53]
Barry Ritholtz
How did you work your way through the various roles at Schoenfeld? Because eventually you end up allocating for their internal funds, right?
- [07:01]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah. So it was a almost completely flat management structure. So at one point there were over 1,000 people on the trading side and there was a handful of people in senior management and, you know, virtually no people in middle management. It was very, very flat. And so you were basically a trader. You could run a group of traders or you were just managing and not really trading. And so I kind of worked my way up from a pure trading position where after I was successful for three or four years, I went to Stephen and asked him if I could start hiring people to trade some of my risk. He was kind enough to say, sure, if you're willing to pay for them, you can hire them. And that was good enough for me. I did the same thing. I ran an ad in the paper and I started hiring the initial traders, some of whom are still with us today 25 years later.
- [07:58]
Barry Ritholtz
Wow.
- [07:58]
Dimitri Bagliasny
So, and then I would allocate some of my risk to them. And then as that became more successful, I hired more traders, eventually analysts, eventually portfolio managers, and we spun off into a division. And while I was doing that, Steve gave me the opportunity to co invest in a portfolio of hedge fund managers, external managers that we would allocate to. And that was a great experience. I got to meet a lot of the top hedge fund guys at the time.
- [08:23]
Barry Ritholtz
So from building a whole division at Schoenfeld, what led you to found Bally Osny Asset Management?
- [08:30]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I was always very entrepreneurial, and so Again, it was like a very flat firm. So I always felt like I was building my own business. And our strategy started to divert from the rest of the firm. Like we became more fundamental, we were holding things longer, we needed to meet with company management, so we needed sell side coverage. And so that led to separate office space, separate strategies, different types of PMs and traders that we wanted to hire. And eventually it led to needing to take in external capital because it was a more higher capacity type of strategy that demanded external capital. And so we gradually moved from an internal group to a division, to a proprietary funded hedge fund to a traditional externally funded hedge fund over a few years.
- [09:15]
Barry Ritholtz
So we'll talk a little later about some of the technology that you guys have built internally. But mid-90s had to be an incredible environment for trading. And it seemed like every month there was a whole different set of technology that came down the pike. Tell us about your experiences in the 90s and are there any parallels to what's going on today?
- [09:38]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Well, I think the world has moved, you know, tremendously in terms of the trading technologies that people are using today. When I think about at the time that I first started as a broker, that's really going to date me. But we had one monitor that would be on a little carousel that you would spin around between four different brokers when you needed a quote. And when I started trading at show and fo, we had a person whose job it was to be the printer reader. And so you didn't get your fills electronically, you would get your fills coming back on a printer. And some poor guy's job was to read out your prints so you would know where you got filled. So you contrast that with all the AI and data technology today that we and others use for trading and investing. And it's just tremendously different world from the overall kind of technologies coming through the pike. The Internet, I would say, was bigger change in terms of going from very little interaction, I would say, with technology for most companies at the time and really most individual people, to tremendously jumping in and trying to figure it out. Although I think AI will likely be a larger, more substantive change over time. We're coming from a place where everybody's already enmeshed in technology in so many different ways, whether you, you're an individual with your phone, your computers, your laptops, or your meta glasses, et cetera, or a company with zillions of engineers. So I think it'll be more profound over the long term, but the change feels a little bit less than it did at the time.
- [11:18]
Barry Ritholtz
I mean there's no doubt the Internet was a sea change. Being able to plug into the hive mind was huge. Mobile was pretty big. But it sounds like you're saying artificial intelligence has potential to be even a bigger change agent than.
- [11:35]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, I think so. I think over time, I think in terms of actual usefulness over time and ability to make you better and smarter in lots of different tasks at work, at home, et cetera, I use these apps every day and they're still very new and rough. But you could see at the rate of improvement if you project it out and you think about like where these are going to be in 5, 10, 15 years, like, I think it'll be pretty transformative.
- [12:02]
Barry Ritholtz
One of the things that really separates Bally asney asset management from many other large multi strat hedge funds are the amount of technology that you develop internally. Tools, apps, research, databases, tell a little bit, discuss a little bit about what's it like to constantly being on the bleeding edge of technology.
- [12:26]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Sure. So this was a big evolution for us, I would say over the last six, seven, eight years. First 15 plus years we mostly used external technologies and we had a pretty small internal tech team. And the idea was basically give people all the support that they needed, all the supporting type of tools, but do as much off the shelf as you can. And over time as we expanded different strategies and added macro and commodities and quant and these more technologically sophisticated strategies, we really found that we needed to build a lot more things internally. And so now Today we have 500 plus people in technology, another 100 plus people in data teams and AI teams and we build a of lot, lot of really outstanding tools that not only support the investing teams, but really enable a lot of the investing functions, whether it's trading, research, risk, even operational in some aspects. When we have folks come over from other firms, a lot of times they're. Because we don't really advertise it that much. A lot of times people are kind of blown away by some of the things that we've developed.
- [13:40]
Barry Ritholtz
So when I think of technology, I think of things when you say, say trading execution, the ability to get best execution. But risk is a big challenge. How do you identify how much risk is within a portfolio? And given that you're multi strat, how much does the risk cancel each other out? How do you do that analysis? That seems like a moving target.
- [14:03]
Dimitri Bagliasny
It's really important. So first the overall philosophy, right. Like this is a slugging type of business, right. So if you, if you contrasted with like high frequency trading, which is a hit rate type of business. Right. You're going to have 99% of your trades or whatever are going to be profitable or tiny loss. Right, right, tiny, tiny, tiny. And repeat, repeat, repeat. Right, right. This is more of a slugging type of business. So if we have PMs and we have 170 investing teams at the moment, right. When you hire 170. 170. And so when you hire an investing team, chances are depending on their Track record, maybe 75% of them will wind up working out. If they have a lower track record, they're coming as a former analyst making a transition to the PM, maybe it'll be 50, 50, but if you can control the risk, you might lose 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, and somebody who doesn't work out life to date in their performance. But the ones that do work out, you're increasing their capital, you're growing their team and they'll hopefully be with you for 10, 20 plus years and you might make hundreds and hundreds of millions off of them. So how that plays into risk, in order to enable the slugging, you have to have very well defined risk boxes within which people will operate to enable them to bet on the things that they're really good at betting on and try to exclude as much of the other stuff as possible. So for every strategy, we'll have stops, we'll have volume targets, volume limits, we'll have stress limits, liquidity limits, etc. And you create this box that's completely transparent and in partnership with the portfolio manager that you're hiring and customize it and iterate it. And then as their strategy evolves and there's new opportunities, you're adding to it, subtracting from it all the time, et cetera. But the idea is to create this platform for them within which they can create a very steady, growing alpha stream that really plays to their individual strengths.
- [16:13]
Barry Ritholtz
You mentioned market wizards at the beginning and I can't remember, I read all of them over the years. The first one a couple of times, I don't remember which trader it was. But the thing that stayed with me was your win loss record isn't what matters, it's how much do you lose when you lose relative to how much you're gaining when you win. And you could lose three quarters of the time if you're losing a little bit. But the winners are big winners. Net. Net. That's a big win.
- [16:41]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, we find our. It varies by strategies, but if you think about equities in equities. We find portfolio managers who have hit rates in the 50s with decent slugging could be very, very good. If somebody's got a hit rate in the upper 50s with decent slugging, that's an all star. Or somebody could be more like 50 50, but they have very good slugging that works. It's hard to find somebody with 25% hit rate and enough slugging to kind of overcome that because there's just too.
- [17:11]
Barry Ritholtz
Many reps, too much churn.
- [17:12]
Dimitri Bagliasny
But in some other strategies, if you have commodities, for example, or a directional macro there, you can have even a lower hit rate. If they're very good at sizing because they have a smaller number of bets at any given time and they're trying to find a few larger, bigger trades, Pyramid.
- [17:30]
Barry Ritholtz
The winners ride the trends all the way out. Really interesting. So you start the firm in 2001, really the beginning of a long plus decade. We didn't get back over prior highs in every asset class pretty much till 2013. What was it like launching right into the teeth of that.com collapse?
- [17:51]
Dimitri Bagliasny
It was a great trading environment, actually. So we did very well at the time. We were running a lot less capital. We started with $40 million, but the markets were less efficient. We were predominantly equity, long, short. There was a lot of dispersion. There was a lot of things that were unwinding from the bubble in both directions. We were able to take advantage of that and really grow the business.
- [18:14]
Barry Ritholtz
What was the biggest surprise to you in terms of the direction the business grew and evolved?
- [18:21]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I would say in those years there wasn't anything particularly surprising. In 2008, we made people a little bit of money, but we had 50% redemption. So that was a bit surprising and not particularly pleasant.
- [18:38]
Barry Ritholtz
They people just. Clients just panicked and said, I need liquidity.
- [18:41]
Dimitri Bagliasny
They need liquidity because. So we didn't. We chose not to gate people. We had the option in our docs, but we decided we were liquid and we actually went to cash. In Q4 of 08, did that cash.
- [18:52]
Barry Ritholtz
Come flying back in 09?
- [18:55]
Dimitri Bagliasny
It took a few years actually, but eventually, yes, eventually we got some credit for that.
- [18:59]
Barry Ritholtz
If you're positive in 08, what was 08? Down 37%?
- [19:02]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Something like that. 50 bucks or something.
- [19:04]
Barry Ritholtz
Oh, really? That's a win. Anything in the green is a win.
- [19:07]
Dimitri Bagliasny
So that was surprising. But outside of that, it wasn't anything too crazy.
- [19:12]
Barry Ritholtz
Coming up, we continue our conversation with Dimitri Bagliasney discussing what it was like building Baliasny Asset Management into a powerhouse. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
- [19:34]
Announcer
This message is brought to you by Nuveen. How would you invest if you knew the future was watching at nuveen? This isn't a theoretical question. It's a perspective that comes from navigating 125 years of market cycles, using foresight to innovate and adapt to the changing needs of investors around the world, and remaining steadfast in the pursuit of lasting performance for clients, communities and the global economy. Nuveen Invest like the Future is watching. Visit Nuveen.com future to learn more. Investing involves risk, principal loss as possible in business. They say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development and AI needs where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second cheaper. OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage and 80% less for networking better. In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads right now with zero commitment. Try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com strategic that's oracle.com strategic.
- [21:17]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless and if you haven't made.
- [21:21]
Barry Ritholtz
The switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should 1.
- [21:25]
Dimitri Bagliasny
It's $15 a month. 2. Seriously, it's $15 a month.
- [21:29]
Barry Ritholtz
3. No big contracts.
- [21:31]
Dimitri Bagliasny
4.
- [21:31]
Barry Ritholtz
I use it.
- [21:32]
Dimitri Bagliasny
5. My mom uses it. Are you.
- [21:34]
Barry Ritholtz
Are you playing me off? That's what's happening, right? Okay, give it a try.
- [21:37]
Announcer
@Mintmobile.Com Switch upfront payment of $45 for.
- [21:41]
Dimitri Bagliasny
A 3 month plan, $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first 3 months only.
- [21:44]
Announcer
Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
- [21:46]
Dimitri Bagliasny
See mintmobile.com.
- [21:50]
Barry Ritholtz
I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Dimitri Bagliazny. He is the founder of Balliasney Asset management, running about $28 billion in various strategies and currently your title is Chief Investment Officer. How do you balance that role while simultaneously running a firm of 2300 employees.
- [22:16]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Well, I think, number one, I have great partners and great management teams, so that helps a lot. We have 20 partners today and a lot of top senior managements across all the departments. But besides that, I don't think there's a tremendous amount of difference in the hedge fund business between being a CIO and a CEO. It's kind of commingled type of function. Because what are you doing as a CEO? You're trying to figure out where to make money in the hedge fund. That's basically how I spend my time, is trying to optimize our investment strategies. That really includes pretty much everything you need to do from a business standpoint. How do you get the best people? Where do you have edge? How do you build your competitive mode around a strategy? How do you break in and wedge into a new strategy and then how do you grow it from there? Again, that's going to go down to finding the best people and enabling them to execute in that area. How do you support them with the best infrastructure and technologies? So you have to work with all the departments to figure out how to do that.
- [23:24]
Barry Ritholtz
The one thing that continues to surprise me doing these interviews is how many people have said talent acquisition is absolutely the single most important thing they do. It sounds like you're in that camp as well.
- [23:36]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Definitely. It all starts with talent, right? And the talent starts with why are they going to come to you? Right? How are you going to differentiate? And that was always kind of the starting point from 25 years ago, because even at that time, we were competing with firms that were 25 times our size. And so how are you going to compete? You're not going to write the largest check for somebody to show up. So you really got to compete on enabling them to be the most successful over time. So that's the insights, the collaboration across strategies, the culture that you can foster, helping them build their teams, helping them build the resources and infrastructure around them, coaching, learning from other people's mistakes, having a very transparent environment, all these things that each individually might not be that important, but when you add them all up, it really makes the difference over the arc of somebody's career.
- [24:31]
Barry Ritholtz
And to put a little flesh on those bones, Baliasni Asset Management has won numerous awards in terms of best places to work in money management, including taking the top award from pensions and investments. Best places to work. How much of this is comp and how much of this is corporate culture beyond just the dollars?
- [24:55]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I think comp is always part of it. Like you certainly have to be competitive and you want to run a meritocracy. So the top people that are really driving the performance of the fund on the business side and the investing side should be super well compensated and have partnership opportunities. But besides that, I think the culture can lead to the performance. The culture is not just it's a nice place and people are nice to you, that's great. But if you have a culture that's really driven but at the same time collaborative and where people are collegial, but they also push each other and they're also constantly trying to figure out better ways of doing things and want to succeed themselves and be the best, but also they want the person next to them to succeed and make the firm better. If you can create that type of culture, that really is one that high performers are going to want to work in and thrive at.
- [25:53]
Barry Ritholtz
Really interesting. So let's talk a little bit about high performance. You operate a multi strategy platform. When I hear multi strat, I think fundamental equity, macro, commodity futures trading, arbitrage, systematic quant.
- [26:12]
Dimitri Bagliasny
You got it.
- [26:12]
Barry Ritholtz
Am I missing any?
- [26:13]
Dimitri Bagliasny
That's a nice. Those are the major strategies. They all have lots of subcomponents. So we have an arbitrage business, for example, that will include converts and credit, long, short and merger arbitrage, and a dozen different strategies and commodities. We'll have folks that are trading futures directionally. We'll have folks that are doing a lot of RV type tradings. We'll have physical commodities now that we're building out. So all these strategies have lots of sub strategies associated with them. But generally that's the right idea. And you're constantly trying to enable the next set of strategies. If you can execute well in the ones that you're in this year, you have the option to figure out how to expand them, which might be more dollars in the stuff you're doing well. But also what does that give you the right to compete in? That's adjacent. And we're always trying to kind of figure out what is the next thing.
- [27:12]
Barry Ritholtz
Really interesting. There was an article, I'm trying to remember which, which publication I saw it in that claimed you hired a trader with a $50 million pay package from a competitor. Is that remotely close to the sort of pay packages and how much does a trader have to generate in profits to qualify for a $50 million package?
- [27:35]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Sure. So you have to remember that the size of capital the folks are running these days has grown a lot. And so what publications like to do to get people to read the articles is put in large dollars as opposed.
- [27:48]
Barry Ritholtz
To percentages, denominator blindness. They leave out the context and it just looks like a big round number.
- [27:55]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, so you have these headlines all the time. One on how much people get paid to how much somebody made or lost. And if you have something that says Trader XYZ lost $50 million and that's like, wow, that sounds like a giant number. But, but you have to remember we're managing 28 billion.
- [28:12]
Barry Ritholtz
That's a normal drawdown in a bad week.
- [28:14]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I mean, a typical portfolio manager might be managing a couple billion in gross market value. So that's 2.5%, which is not good. But it's not, it's not a disaster. No, that's kind of the fluctuation that you're going to get. And so from a hiring standpoint, it's the same thing if you're hiring a trader with a $50 million pay package, for example, one that pay package is composed of lots of different things. It's not just, you know, here's 50.
- [28:41]
Barry Ritholtz
Million including his P and L for sure.
- [28:43]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah. Like that includes, you know, it might include a guarantee for the time that the person is out of the market. It might include budget for hiring out their team. Right. A lot of these teams are 5, 10, in some cases 15 people. So that's expensive. And it also might include extra upside incentives which are only paid out if the person delivers a certain amount of pm. So you know, they kind of like print one number, but it's actually like lots of different components. Usually with that type of number, you're budgeting that person to generate P and L of 100 million plus a year.
- [29:20]
Barry Ritholtz
That's a good investment.
- [29:21]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, we should have a track record of doing that. And if you're right on that, that leads to very healthy returns net to our investor, which we've delivered over time.
- [29:30]
Barry Ritholtz
That, that's the game. You have over 300 analysts and 170PMs. How many different teams do you. Are you guys running? 170PMs? Is that 170 specific strategies?
- [29:44]
Dimitri Bagliasny
So it's 170 teams. So within the equities business, for example, you'll have like 70 teams, which sounds like a lot. But you have to remember that that's split across, you know, three distinct equities businesses that all have a different front end. And it's also split across offices all over the world. And folks are based in London trading Europe, based in Hong Kong or Singapore or Japan trading Asia. So it's still fairly specialized and Each one of those teams will have a mandate. Where this is the group of stocks that they're focused on in the case of equities, or this is the macro strategy in RV or emerging markets, or rates or directional that they're focused on in macro. Or this person focused on trading gas or trading power and commodities. And they'll build a team of subspecialists, analysts around that.
- [30:37]
Barry Ritholtz
Really interesting. So I mentioned earlier, you've scaled up to $28 billion. Where does the general management strategy and style begin to get altered just by the size. At what point does that? We've seen a number of farms at 100, $200 billion and just the sheer heft becomes challenging. You can't generate alpha at that scale, or at least not the same alpha. How large can this get? Comfortably?
- [31:11]
Dimitri Bagliasny
It's hard to say. I think that's a function of how markets develop over time. If you have more companies, active capital markets, the world is growing, more places to trade in more credit instruments, more equity instruments, more macro instruments, then there's more to do. If I think of the subset of strategies that we trade today, a lot of these things weren't significant businesses 10 years ago or 20 years ago. So a strategy like merger arbitrage has been around a long time. A strategy like index rebalancing really got going the last 10, 15 years. Power trading in the commodities markets. Not a lot of people doing that 20 years ago. So a lot of these things go from very small strategies to much larger markets over time. And that enables you to, to run more volume there, increasing your capacity. The way that we go about it is every year and we update it throughout the year. We measure our capacity for this year and the following. And so we look at bottom up by each team, like how much can they grow at a steady pace? We don't want people to grow too fast and we don't want people to stay stagnant. You want to find a healthy pace of growth as you're expanding your coverage, as you're getting used to running larger dollar amounts and dealing with those constraints. And we look at the recruiting. So where can we expand? Who is coming in? What does the pipeline kind of look like? We discount that because not everyone's going to work out. But you add those numbers together and that gives you a sense of what the growth path is likely to be. And over time, that's averaged about 20, 25% a year capacity growth.
- [32:57]
Barry Ritholtz
So you mentioned you're looking both internally and externally at recruiting. When you're looking internally how do you identify and nurture talents? How can you tell when hey, this person started out as a trader or a pm, but they really seem to have skills and can manage a larger group. That that seems like a really challenging thing.
- [33:17]
Dimitri Bagliasny
We spend a lot of time on that and I think that's one of the keys to how we're going to grow from here on out. Like recruiting is super important, but being able to develop your talent, I think as you have scale and you have more people to learn from, that becomes a bigger and bigger slice of your senior talent pool over time. So when we started off for a long time, the vast majority of RPMs were recruited externally. Today, like in the equities business, which is the most mature of our strategies, 25% in the US are internally promoted and I wouldn't be surprised if that was 50% in a few years because now you have more senior PMs from up and coming analysts to learn from more programs that they can participate in, to work their way up if that's the path that they want to choose, which that wasn't available. You didn't have the mentorship and the tools. So how do you help people and select? It's both quantitative and qualitative. So on the quantitative side we try to measure as much as we can. So we have data on people's recommendations, not just on the ultimate trades, but the data on their recommendations and you see what is the performance performance and we track that. So you try to disaggregate the performance of the analyst from the PM and see who's driving value. And if it's a particular analyst that's doing great, we want to make sure that person is getting more authority, more autonomy and more leeway over time. More growth opportunities. The best growth opportunity for them might be with the team that they're on. They might become a more senior analyst, they might, they might become a partner on that portfolio or they might raise their hand at some point and say like, hey, I want to be a PM and we want to make sure that we facilitate a path to that. If we agree that they are talented and part of that is in partnership with the PM that they're working for. You don't want the person to just leave and go somewhere else to take that opportunity. You want to make sure that they replace themselves. They work in partnership with the pm, maybe they co run something for a picture period of time and then they have the opportunity to do their own thing. So it's definitely a combination of those and it's the same thing on the business side. Like you're always on the lookout for emerging business leaders who can manage others. And we have a lot of leadership development that we do and also utilizing external coaches as well to help with that.
- [35:51]
Barry Ritholtz
That's really interesting. External coaches. You mentioned mentorship. How important is mentorship partnership to the firm and how significant was it in your own professional journey?
- [36:02]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Well, that's where a partnership culture is really important. I think it's still fairly unusual in hedge funds, especially in our type of fund. And we've always wanted to build a true partnership where people own real equity in the business, they buy in with their own money, they participate in all the kind of of the business. And we have partners who are coming from the business side running a particular department. We have partners who are managers, heads of strategies on the investment side and we have portfolio managers. And so that dynamically creates like a culture where folks are incentivized to make the firm better, to make someone else better. And they're obviously much more willing and excited to be mentors in those situations. And I think when you start with that, and I started with two of my co founders, Scott and Taylor, 20 plus years ago in a partnership type structure. And I think that then flows down through the organization. And so now today we have mentors for interns coming up and you have mentors for younger associates in different areas of the firm. And then it goes, you know, all the way up and down the firm. Really, really cool. So for myself, sorry, I didn't answer that question.
- [37:20]
Barry Ritholtz
No, but you did. Yeah. Let's hear about your own mentorship.
- [37:23]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I mean, I certainly learned a lot from Steve Schoenfeld, working with him at the time, and got really good opportunities there. I think at a young age it was more, you know, certainly work ethic from my folks. And then it was a lot from sports. Right. I did a, a lot of basketball and taekwondo and things like that and seeing kind of what was possible. I remember as a kid watching taekwondo demonstration where our instructor, Master Shim, who was a very slight Korean guy, it was probably, I don't know, 140, 130 pounds. And he punched through a stack of seven cinder blocks. Punched through and, you know, seeing that as a kid, and I went to like examine the bricks after he did that and like tried to punch it and I was like, wow, you know, that hurt. And just seeing that just kind of shows you kind of what's possible because every day after practice you would see the guy sit there punching a lead slab you know, for, you know, I don't know, 30 minutes.
- [38:30]
Barry Ritholtz
Wow.
- [38:30]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Right. And it just adds up over time.
- [38:32]
Barry Ritholtz
Reminds me of the demonstration this, how old I am Bruce Lee did with the 1 inch punch. Do you recall that?
- [38:39]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, I was just showing that to my kids the other day.
- [38:41]
Barry Ritholtz
Just an inch. And he's also 40ft ways soaking wet. 140. And it's amazing the focus and power that you can create in such a small.
- [38:52]
Dimitri Bagliasny
That's exactly the thing. It's. It's focus and perseverance. Right?
- [38:56]
Barry Ritholtz
Mm. Really quite, quite fascinating. So let's talk a little bit about the current environment. I was kind of fascinated by something you told your team. You guys are trading too much and not investing enough, unquote. Explain.
- [39:12]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I think one of the keys to enduring success in the money management business is finding a balance between trading and investing. And you have to be true to your DNA and obviously the type of firm that you're at. But within each type of firm and each type of strategy, there's always this tension because you can't survive in a hedge fund type model just being a long term investor and you can't really scale in a significant growing hedge fund being just a super active trader. So you need some combination of the two. What we try to do both at the individual level and at the strategy level is help folks find that balance. Part of it is just seeing what's working and part of it is also lot of statistical analysis that we do on each of the teams. So when I made that comment, we were coming out of a period where I noticed that folks were really trading a little bit too much in the fundamental equities business and we're a little bit overly focused on each data point or we're kind of missing the forest from the trees. And we were chopping ourselves up a little bit too much, missing some of the bigger winners and creating a lot of trading slippage costs. So we really worked hard with the teams to find more balance with that. Like find some positions that you can really be a longer term investor in. Doesn't have to be years and years, but it could be months and quarters as opposed to days to weeks. And find investments where there's multiple ways to win, where you're not playing for one particular data point, you're playing for a whole series of data points that's going to revalue that security over time. And that's been very effective, I would say.
- [41:20]
Barry Ritholtz
So how much of this is a function of the environment that we all find ourselves in at any given moment, 22 was a double digit down year for stocks and bonds, but it was followed by 23 and 24 both years back to back. Plus 25% at least for US equities. If you're shortening up your investing timeline in a plus 25% year, is it just as simple as, hey, you're leaving too much money on the table?
- [41:49]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Well, for us, it's a little bit different because we're running pretty much market neutral in almost all the strategies. So if you're running market neutral, whether the market's up 25 or down 25, you're always going to have half your portfolio. That's losing money on an absolute basis. But you're trying to make the spread. You're trying to make the spread between your longs and your shorts. What influences our trading more than the absolute direction of the market is the volatility in the market. If you're in a period that's very high volume, you're naturally going to be trading more to manage your risk and also because you're getting stopped on things or they're hitting your targets fairly quickly. And high volume is associated with fundamental events like changing very quickly, 2022, 500 base, spring. So you're going to trade more April of 2025, exactly. Versus periods where things are sort of slowly trending. And that's okay. But over the course of the year, right, those periods are going to balance out. Some will be higher volume, some will be lower volume. You want to find the right amount of turnover to where you can capture your alpha, capture those relative mispricings and move on to the next thing that generate a strong sharp. Combined with enough capacity, you can have a very high sharp and low capacity. That doesn't really help. In a scale hedge fund, you can't de too sharp, but you need enough sharpe to be consistent. Putting up a pl, that kind of matters for the firm and that matters for the team that you're running. And so for every strategy, we try to come up with what is a reasonable range. And it might be higher for a tech portfolio manager than utilities portfolio manager, but each of them should have a range that is optimum for their style. And we try to help them, you know, find that.
- [43:44]
Barry Ritholtz
So with the benefit of hindsight, I'm looking back at 2024, a fairly low volume year. Hey, maybe we should be trading a little less and holding a little longer. And then 2025 volume spiked in at the end of Q1 and into Q2. All right, you guys can chop it up a little more. Is it just that simple or yes.
- [44:04]
Dimitri Bagliasny
But again, I would say the more nuanced answer would be there's lots of different types of trades that each person does and you don't want any PM doesn't want their portfolio to just be one type of trade. So you might have short term trades, medium term trades, long term trades, structural trades, tactical trades, risk mitigation trades, et cetera. There's lots of different types of trades and people run into problems, problems when they get too focused on one kind of thing and then when that thing is no longer working, it's very hard to then reinvent yourself because you don't have any other irons in the fire. So again, we're trying to run a lot of analysis and find what is the team really good at, make sure that's being expressed in the portfolio, make sure there's enough balance of different types of trades and that they're not betting on things that they don't really have views on that can take them out of the game before the things they do have views on pay off.
- [45:05]
Barry Ritholtz
Coming up, we continue our conversation with Dimitri Bagliazny, co founder of Bagliasny Asset Management, discussing the current market environment for trading. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
- [45:23]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Foreign.
- [45:33]
Announcer
Join Bloomberg in Houston or via livestream on November 4th for the Future Investor Finding the Opportunities. This 2025 event series will examine how.
- [45:43]
Barry Ritholtz
Companies are investing in their businesses to create efficiencies, innovating their products and services and improving the customer experience. This series is Presented by Invesco Q. Q. Q.
- [45:56]
Announcer
Register@Bloomberglive.com FutureInvestorHouston that's Bloomberglive.com FutureInvestorHouston.
- [46:06]
Barry Ritholtz
I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio and some of you are watching this on YouTube. My extra special guest this week is Dmitry Bagliazny. He is the co founder of Bagliasny Asset Management, a multi strategy hedge fund running over $28 billion. Do the different teams hedge their own positions or is that a function of firm wide risk management and somebody else?
- [46:32]
Dimitri Bagliasny
We do both. So each team is responsible for running within their risk parameters. So they'll have in the case of the long short portfolio portfolio manager, they'll have an ideal risk. How much of your risk is outside of factor risk and that should be 60, 70, 80% of your risk depending on the portfolio and the style of the PM but it's basically the vast majority of somebody's risk is their stock picking alpha depending on their skill and things like picking the right industry or trading the directionality of the market around which we might give them some more room or less room to do that. If you're a directional macro trader, you're not going to have that constraint because you're paid to directionally bet on the market. But you're going to have other limits, like stress limits. If your directional bets don't work out and there's a gap tomorrow, how much are you going to lose in a stress scenario if that number is too high versus the agreed upon risk limits? You have to do something in your portfolio to hedge that risk. It's a little bit different for each type of strategy, but the common philosophy is you want to be able to run it to maximize your return while staying in the game and delivering a relatively steady source of alpha over time.
- [47:58]
Barry Ritholtz
It's interesting because they're called hedge funds, but many hedge funds don't hedge. And it sounds like Baliasney really makes an effort to make sure that as a risk management approach, anything that's potentially downside, as you said, a gap has to be hedged.
- [48:16]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, I mean you're looking for consistent absolute returns. So how do you get that? You need specialists who have an edge in a particular strategy and they need a portfolio construction and risk management approach that maximizes that edge, maximizes the capacity of dollars they can earn off of those advantages that they have and minimizing the things that can create large drawdowns that they don't really have edge in betting on. And so that's the analysis that you're constantly running and iterating on with the teams.
- [48:53]
Barry Ritholtz
So I heard a fund manager say we have no competition because none of us in our space have market share. For the most part, we're all less than 1% market share. How do you look at the competitive environment for other multi strat firms? It seems like add them all up and you get a decent number. But there are, what are there, 11,000 hedge funds?
- [49:16]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, the way we think about it is we're not really competing with 11,000 hedge funds. I think what you've seen over the last 20 plus years is a consistent market share gain from the larger platform firms. Now I think there's really like four or five. And if you look at the private equity industry, it's pretty similar. There's probably more than 10,000 private equity funds. Many, but the vast majority of dollars, vast majority of alpha Vast majority of people are really at half a dozen.
- [49:52]
Barry Ritholtz
Fathead, long tail.
- [49:53]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah. So the hedge fund industry's really headed in that same direction. So we really compete with half a dozen firms. And now there's also competition from some of the high frequency firms that are kind of going upstream to some of the longer duration discretionary strategies. And we're doing more quantitative stuff going the other way. So maybe there's a couple more. But you're really competing with half a dozen to a dozen firms that are running specialist strategies at scale. And then everyone else in those strategies you kind of look at as like a generalist participant. And it's great to have generalist participation. We want as much as possible from retail, from other funds, from prop, from banks. The more liquidity there is, the more generous participation, participation there is, you know, I think the better for specialized firms.
- [50:43]
Barry Ritholtz
So the current environment kind of hard to compare to any other era. On the one hand, we had a fairly robust economy coming into 2025 following a whole bunch of Fed hikes. Now we're expected to resume Fed cutting by the time the shares were probably 25 basis points lower than where we are today. The whole tariff start, stop. And now back to the litigation. The Supreme Court agreed to take to that. It looks like inflation is starting to percolate a little bit as the labor market seems to soften. How does the firm look at all of these macro crosscurrents? Are they significant or are they just background noise or somewhere in between?
- [51:27]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Well, I would just say it's a really interesting fluid environment, particularly for macro and long short equities, because there's just so much change. So if you think about like what is the worst environment to be in, it's not when everything is clear. Because when everything is clear, there's like no volatility, there's no change, it's hard to get any dispersion. So that environment might be good for passive strategies, but not good sideways markets don't really help. Yeah. So now there's a ton of money sloshing around trying to figure things out. And that's a great environment. Right. So if you think about this here on the macro perspective, right, you went from a very positive view in January of how everything was going to play out to kind of the tariff mess and very pessimistic view of how the US was going to play out and what was going to happen with markets where were down 20% in the S and P briefly. And now you're right back up and still a lot of Things kind of swirling around as to how it's going to play out. To your point on rates and inflation, there's been a lot of change. It's created a lot of relative value opportunities as you get different hiking cycles, different cutting cycles in different markets. That's great for macro. In equity land you have all the changes not just from the economy, but from AI and how that's impacting tech but also impacting companies that are customers or going to be run over because of AI. Creates great long, short opportunities. I think it's a really fascinating market. I don't have any giant prediction of how things are going to play out tomorrow, but if you have strong teams who are on top of the latest data points and you can figure it out a little bit ahead of the next person, just tremendous opportunities like this. Last week Oracle reported a quarter.
- [53:21]
Barry Ritholtz
Crazy. 37% for a giant company company. Amazing.
- [53:26]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I mean when was the last time a company like that moved 35, 37%.
- [53:30]
Barry Ritholtz
Unbelievable, right? The dot com collapse and it was in the wrong direction.
- [53:34]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, I mean, amazing, right? So if you could figure that out or I think of some of these fintech companies. Circle went public. Right. Usually public offerings are placed pretty efficiently priced. This one goes up 400% after it starts trading and then it goes down 50% in a month after that. So in the first three months, think of the travel in the stock. So amazing opportunities if your teams can figure that out. So we're out there working hard, doing the research and figuring out the market.
- [54:03]
Barry Ritholtz
So it doesn't sound like you think the AI theme is overdone, but it certainly is creating a little more volatility and a little more opportunities.
- [54:12]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, I think the reality when we look back in 10 years or in 20 years, in the actual outcomes that have happened, it's probably underhyped in terms of the stock prices across the board. That's harder to say. They're probably way overhyped. There's some that are probably under. A lot of companies have moved from one bucket to another where they were in a loser bucket and actually turns out maybe they're a winner or vice versa. Where people got too optimistic and maybe they don't really have anything that's defensible and differentiated. So I think there's a lot of alpha to be gained in figuring that out. And it's hard to find things that are super bargain priced that have anything to do with AI. But in terms of the longer term potential to really transform how people work and how companies work, I think it's probably underhyped.
- [55:08]
Barry Ritholtz
I've been fond of thinking of this in terms of, hey, the Magnificent Seven certainly have been overhyped, but the Magnificent 493 people haven't really been paying attention to.
- [55:21]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, I mean it's a good question, like have they been overhyped? Right. If you look at the dollars in earnings and cash flow that they're generating, pretty impressive and the market caps that they're growing, I think they're executing amazingly well. I think it's quite different from what we had in the dotcom era where companies weren't really making money. So that's one difference. The other 493, I think there's a lot of headwinds and tailwinds. So some companies are going to figure it out and they're going to kind of make the leap into the future and figure out how to be much more efficient. And you're starting to see that in some of the commentary on the earnings calls where margins inflect positively for the way that they figured out how to leverage the tech and others are going to disappear. So I think it's going to create a lot of opportunities.
- [56:14]
Barry Ritholtz
So the trader in me sees recording this on the 15th, another set of all time highs. I always learned on the desk, all time highs are bullish. What's your perspective on all time highs?
- [56:27]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, I think you have this two tiered market that you mentioned where you have the tech leaders and AI leaders and everything else. Everything else companies definitely got hurt more with all the tariff ups and downs and inflation ups and downs earlier this year. That seems to be certainly calming down. And the partially top down is coming down and partially bottom up. Companies are figuring out how to navigate these things and maybe it's not as troublesome as they thought. And so you're seeing better execution and probably a little bit more positivity from companies than you were seeing certainly six months ago. And that's starting to get reflected and the market's broadening out a little bit. But the largest tech companies certainly have tremendous advantages that they're continuing to press.
- [57:28]
Barry Ritholtz
So last of our regular questions. What are traders and investors not thinking about or talking about but perhaps should be? What topics, Assets, geography, policy, data points? What's getting overlooked? But shouldn't.
- [57:43]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I think it's. I don't know if it's getting overlooked, but I would say when you think about AI, where it's going, what are the ramifications for every type of company? So at the moment, while AI is making us much more productive and efficient. We haven't let go of one person because AI has automated their job. We're just hiring more AI people. But if you look out five years from now, is that still going to be the case? Probably not. Some jobs are going to get automated. We're on the high end, I would say, of skills that are necessary to work at a leading hedge fund. If you think of a typical company where there's a lot of folks doing very beautiful bureaucratic type of things, like a lot of pretty mundane tasks, all that stuff is going to be automated. I don't know if it's in a year, in five years, but somewhere in that timeframe it's going to be automated.
- [58:40]
Barry Ritholtz
So when you think about with the entry level jobs under 30, unemployment is like 9.9% double regular unemployment.
- [58:48]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, exactly. And so as you think about that, what does that mean for every type of company? If you, if you're a company that can really harness that and you could produce your products, your services at a much lower price point and you figure that out ahead of the competition, your margins might explode to the upside. On the other hand, if everybody in your space is doing that, maybe your margins are actually going to collapse because everybody's going to drive down pricing. How does it flow downstream? Do you need as much office space if you're going to have less people in a particular. So all these kind of things, I think everyone is focused because there is a lot of volatility. Everyone is focused very much on the next quarter. But if you think out 2, 3, 4 years, how's this space going to look? And that's kind of the balance of trading and investing. You got to have one eye on each.
- [59:38]
Barry Ritholtz
And before I get to my favorite questions that I ask all of my guests, I have to ask you about some of the philanthropists you participate in. Tell us a little bit about the Atlas Fellowship and some of the other things that you've been doing over the past few years.
- [59:53]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Sure. So this is a program that my wife Rebecca and I started, I think this is five years ago now. We were looking to start an initiative to help kids go to college who were a bit under resourced, maybe first in their family to go to college, et cetera. And as we're looking at these scholarship opportunities, particularly in finance, we couldn't find any program that had a combination of internships with scholarships. There were some that had ones that were captive to a particular company, but then you were beholden to work just at that company forever. But there wasn't anything that was diverse, where someone could get real exposure across the industry. And so that's what we started with with Atlas Fellows, where we give kids who are super bright driven merit based scholarships. Right. So these are top students in the class a lot of times from diverse backgrounds from. With no connections to finance. Right. And they get scholarships of up to 20 grand a year for four years. And in addition to that, they get fully paid internships at finance finance firms for all four years.
- [61:04]
Barry Ritholtz
Not just your firm, but a broad variety.
- [61:06]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Exactly. So we take them their first internship when they're coming out of high school, and that one is typically done at bam. And they work either on our investing teams, our data teams, our tech teams, our business teams, and then the next year they go to work at a bank or they go to work at another hedge fund, or they go to work at a prop firm or a VC firm. And every year they rotate. And we just had the first cohort graduates last year. They all got jobs in finance, some in Chicago, some in New York. And employers are really competing over the kids. Like they're super smart, driven, passionate kids. And now they've had four years of finance internships at top firms. So I think it's working really well. And we're working to scale it up.
- [61:48]
Barry Ritholtz
They become a hot commodity.
- [61:50]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, exactly. And just like the fund, now we got 100 kids in the program and. And we're trying to really scale it up to hundreds.
- [61:55]
Barry Ritholtz
Wow, that's great. All right, so let's jump to our favorite questions that we ask all of our guests, starting with, we talked about mentorship at bam. Let's talk about who are your mentors? Who shaped your career? You mentioned Steve Schoenfeld. He had to be significant. Tell us about him and anybody else that made a difference.
- [62:15]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, I think what Stephen did really well at the time in the firm was it was a super entrepreneurial type of environment. Everyone was kind of in business, running your own little business. Right. And most folks kind of stayed as one man shops. Right. As a one man trading unit. Right. But I had the opportunity to kind of build that into a unit of, you know, 5 and then 10 and then 20 and then, and then 30 and then we spun off. So just the freedom and support to do that was really helpful. Right. And then a lot of business learnings from seeing how we allocate it to different people, seeing how they manage risk, that was very helpful. And then philosophically, I would say the biggest impact was reading Applaud Shrugged in college, which I read in an English Class, college. And that really kind of articulated a moral philosophical framework around which I think makes it much easier to build a successful business.
- [63:25]
Barry Ritholtz
Right, Hence the name Atlas.
- [63:27]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, exactly. There's the name of our fund and the name of our scholarship program. I think a lot of times people have all sorts of conflicts with being successful and at the same time being a good person and helping the world. And I don't actually think there's any conflicts. And that objectivist philosophy in her work really does a good job of laying that scaffolding for people. And I think it makes it much more fulfilling and less conflicted to also be successful in all realms.
- [64:03]
Barry Ritholtz
So since you mentioned Atlas Shrugged, let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now?
- [64:09]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, that's definitely the number one. The current one that's on my bookshelf is a fun one. It's from this explorer. I didn't know there were explorers anymore, but there are apparently. And we had this guy, Mike Horn at our VC conference. We do like a public, private VC conference every year called Elevate. And we had him as a guest speaker and we had two guest speakers this year. We had Steve Kerr, the coach of the warriors, and we had Mike Horn. Steve went first and he was amazing and had great stories on teamwork and collaboration and work ethic and Michael Jordan stories and stuff, courtesy stories. So it was great. And then Mike had to follow him. And I was like, oh my God, how is this guy gonna follow? And my partner Scott brought him on. And Scott's great at finding talent that's, you know, other folks haven't discovered yet. And this guy, you know, has circumvented the equator several times around the world, you know, self powered walking, et cetera. He's gone to North Pole, South Pole, swam the Amazon, like all these, you know, insane stories one after another. And he's, he's got a book called, I think it's called Nothing is Impossible or something along those lines. And you start like, you shake hands with this guy and he's not like a particularly big guy, but he like crushed my hand. And I go, mike, how do you get. And he's 60 years old. How do you get this handshake? Oh my God. He's like, well, I kite surfed across the Antarctica. And that involves holding a kite across frozen Antarctica for 14 hours a day as this huge wind is pulling you along. And it's like, okay. That's how you get.
- [65:48]
Barry Ritholtz
Builds up a little grip strength.
- [65:49]
Dimitri Bagliasny
That's how you get some grip. Strength. Yeah, but he had like these amazing survival stories and just mental fortitude stories that I think really relate to trading and investing. So he was an awesome speaker. And so I just got his book.
- [66:03]
Barry Ritholtz
Have you ever read Endurance, the Shackleton story?
- [66:06]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yes, yes, I read it, watched the movie. That one was hard to sit through.
- [66:09]
Barry Ritholtz
The book is just like, it couldn't be fiction because nothing is believed. It's so amazing at how to be real.
- [66:16]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Yeah, this is all along those lines, but less abusive and more fun.
- [66:20]
Barry Ritholtz
Let's talk about streaming. Anything interesting that you're watching or listening to these days?
- [66:26]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I mean, shows I like. I really enjoyed the Three Body Problem that was on Netflix. That was a fun one.
- [66:31]
Barry Ritholtz
And then the book is a tough slog.
- [66:32]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I read the book actually afterwards.
- [66:34]
Barry Ritholtz
So it's a little challenging because it's originally Chinese. Chinese and Transit. But the show is really good.
- [66:40]
Dimitri Bagliasny
The show is really good. And the books, the books, like the creativity in the books are really fun. So that was a good one. Yellowstone is great. Usual ones there. On listening to. I think podcasts are like the greatest invention in the last five, 10 years. Not that they weren't around before, but popularized in terms of being able to just expand your knowledge set in a very efficient way. So I try to listen to as many as I can. I listen to a lot of yours. I listen to a lot of Tim Ferriss. He's. He's got all sorts of super interesting people on there. The invest like the best ones. There's a ton on there. So there's a lot of finance ones. There's a lot of VC ones I enjoy. I was just listening to one. They had Vinod Khosla and then another one with Mark Andreessen. They're just like super thought provoking. And so I encourage all our young people coming up that ask just you have this amazing resource. You could tap Spotify and you got a thousand different podcasts from world's best people in every field that you can listen to, sharing their insights.
- [67:41]
Barry Ritholtz
There's no excuse to be bored these days.
- [67:43]
Dimitri Bagliasny
No, it's amazing. I remember when I was coming up and I wanted to hear, like, how do hedge funds make money? Right? Like, you couldn't figure that out? Like, if you had no connectivity to a hedge fund, like, how are you going to figure that out? You read Market Wizards. And now what? Right. But besides that, reading all the books that are available now, like the podcasts, like, amazing resource.
- [68:02]
Barry Ritholtz
Absolutely. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent College grad, interested in a career in either trading, investing, multi strat hedge funds.
- [68:13]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I mean one is just follow your curiosity which hopefully leads to a passion of something that you want to really do. Don't go into finance, hedge funds, whatever it is, because your friend is making a lot of of money, right? Like you got to be interested in the work, like you got to be driven and curious and hopefully passionate about what it is that you're doing. Because you know it's like pro sports or anything else. Like, just because you know LeBron makes a lot of money doesn't mean you're going to go make a lot of money playing basketball, right? You know, one, you know he's six' eleven, but besides that, like he's put in a lot of work over the years. Years, right. And it's because he loves the game of basketball, right? If you don't love it, you're not going to put in the work and in trading for sure. If you don't love the process and you don't love sitting there looking at the screen and trying to figure things out, you're not going to survive the emotional ups and downs because there's lots of downs in addition to the ups when things work out. So that's the first thing. The second thing I would say is go to a firm that's growing and where there's a culture where you can learn from others, where you can get good mentorship, there's top people you can learn from and you'll have some amount of access to be able to do that. The particular thing that they're trading or investing or how they're doing it, that's a lot less important because you might change, the company might change. And then the third thing is once you're in a seat that's a decent see, ask for feedback. Like, here's what I did, here's what I think I could have done. What do you think? Don't ask for feedback when the market opens or the person's in the middle of a disastrous day, but when things are quiet, early late lunch hour, get feedback proactively. Don't sit around waiting for your year end review to see how things are going and iterate it together with the people that you're working with.
- [70:17]
Barry Ritholtz
And our final question, what do you know about the world of capital markets, trading, investing today that would have been useful in 1994 when you were first starting out?
- [70:27]
Dimitri Bagliasny
I think the things that we've been doing the last five years, I wish I had figured those out earlier. Investing more aggressively across strategies. Right. I think we were too equity heavy for too long. We weren't serious enough about how do you build those strategies outside of equities and not serious enough about hiring top people to manage those areas and then building like all the tech and the infrastructure that that you needed to really be competitive and leading in those areas. So I wish I would have figured that out a little bit earlier and pushed at it harder, but I think it's on the right trajectory now.
- [71:17]
Barry Ritholtz
Dimitri, thank you for being so generous with your time. This has been absolutely fascinating. We have been speaking with Dimitri Bagliasny, co founder of Baliasny Asset Management. If you enjoy this conversation, well check out any of the 550 we've done over the past 11 years. You can find those at itunes, Spotify, Bloomberg, here on YouTube as well. Check them out. They're really a great collection of resources. And be sure to check out my new book, how not to Invest the Ideas, Numbers and Behavior that Destroyed Destroy wealth and how to Avoid Them at your favorite bookstore. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps us put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega and Anna Luke are my producers. Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts here at Bloomberg. Sean Russo is my researcher. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
- [72:34]
Dimitri Bagliasny
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- [73:05]
Barry Ritholtz
Why is this taking so long?
- [73:07]
Dimitri Bagliasny
This thing is ancient.
- [73:08]
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- [73:22]
Dimitri Bagliasny
Whoa. This thing moves.
- [73:24]
Announcer
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