Pod Shops

“So we actually have recently found a derivative in an Asian market That we're buying for 10 to 20% of what we think it's worth, so 80 to 90% discount, and it's solely the result of the fact that there's a market in Asia that has such a large demand to be short…”

“I don't think of the pods as our competition. I mean, the market is obviously we're benchmarked in one of our products, and so that's obviously our competition and how we evaluate ourselves.”

“The game of, you hand me an earnings release, and I'll tell you what the stock's gonna do, was actually a fundamental game that we were pretty good at a decade ago. Now, it's like, coin toss. What's the setup? You tell me. What's the whisper number? What are t…”

“If you had told me 20 years ago that here's my strategy, I'm gonna go find people I think are really good at this, Pay them a lot. Charge that to the underlying investor. So the fees are, when you add it all up, are gigantic. And then I'm going to fire them ra…”

“I tend to think those shops probably can't grow by another factor of five. There's just a limit to alpha. There are limits how many great traders that are out there.”

“We've seen the pass-through cost structure eat away at investor returns, so now I think on average the end investor is keeping around maybe 45% of the gross return”

“The pod shops in merger arbitrage have become a very, very important player. Some of them do some amount of event-driven equities, but I think it's much, much more constrained because of the market neutrality that they run. But I think the biggest impact, I wo…”

“On the equity side, I think the pods have done just a terrific job in harvesting short-term alpha. Calling the quarter and things like that, they're just very, very good at.”

“Those strategies as a whole ran over the market this year. They were the best performers. They are giving back billions of dollars. They've generated double digit positive returns.”