Dmitry Balyasny
Founder & CIO, Balyasny Asset Management. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Dmitry Balyasny co-founded Balyasny Asset Management in 2001, scaling it into a global multi-strategy hedge fund. In 2021, he established ATLAS Fellows, a non-profit providing scholarships and finance internships to under-resourced students.
1shows
1appearances
54statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Dmitry Balyasny said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Multi-strategy platforms will continue consolidating market share and trading talent
“But if you look at it over five, 10, 15, twenty-year periods, I think the secular trend is going to be sustained. So if you look at the market share in terms of investor dollars, or the market share even more so in terms of the alpha pie in the markets, or the…”
Starting an independent hedge fund makes no sense 99% of the time
“It's a way to attract people who are very entrepreneurial and who are real business builders, whereas 20 years ago they probably would have just started their own fund, but now the industry has evolved to where there's so many impediments to doing that and so …”
Small independent hedge funds suffer from severe adverse selection in hiring
“They have negative hiring and retention selection because they can't compensate their teams as well. They have negative technology and data selection because you can't invest as much in that. And just the time suck of managing all that versus trading and inves…”
Long-bias funds pose far greater dollar risk than market-neutral multi-strat platforms
“I think for some reason it gets singled out to this space, but much larger risk in dollars is the more long bias strategies that are common across other areas. So if you look at last year and you think about the meltdown in growth investing and whether that wa…”
BAM delivered 20 positive years out of 21 with zero correlation
“We've had, knock on wood, 20 out of 21 positive years, and very consistent volatility, and drawdown management, and Zero correlation over that time.”
Overcrowded trading strategies rapidly shift talent from overbid to unbid
“If you have a strategy that's done well, and everybody's making money in that strategy, the talent in that strategy tends to get bid up. Then more people build teams in that area, more people overpay for the cost of building those teams, more capital gets depl…”
Series D companies fundamentally resemble multi-billion-dollar publicly traded stocks
“So if you're looking at a private company, that's a growth company raising a series D round. Is that dissimilar from a publicly traded company with a couple billion dollar market cap that your public PMs are investing in? Most of the time, it's not that differ…”
Managing large capital requires developing longer-term fundamental views on companies
“I thought we wanted to manage more capital and hold positions longer. The only way you can do those things is you have to have a view on companies longer term.”
Scaling multi-strategy verticals requires partnering with business builders, not just capital
“So it's much more than just hiring people and giving them capital, although that's obviously a significant and important part of it, but a lot of it is you're really trying to partner with business builders in these different areas that bring a lot of that Tho…”
BAM avoids long-term CTA strategies due to unappealing Sharpe ratios
“Or some things have sharp ratios that we're not excited about. So traditional long-term CTA type trading, we're not really that excited about.”
Balyasny says five- and ten-year trading business plans are completely unhelpful
“I think five- and ten-year plans, I think markets change too much, and it's not usually that helpful, but I think one, two, three years is pretty helpful, and then you're obviously iterating those every year.”
Specialist PMs get hurt by cross-market spillovers, not sector surprises
“In order to be a really effective specialist PM, they typically don't get hurt when there's something in their area of specialty that they're surprised by. Like, they're usually all over that. But they usually get hurt when there's something that's rolling thr…”
Talent mapping is efficient in equity long/short but inefficient in quants
“It's relatively efficient. I think it depends on the transparency of the strategy. So equity long short, I would say is pretty efficient. There's a lot of teams. They all go to the same conferences. A lot of them know each other. People move around. Analysts m…”
Running a standalone long/short equity sector fund is extremely difficult
“I think in longshirt equity, it's very hard to run a standalone sector fund. I mean, it's hard to run any sort of fund. You have all the challenges from running an equity fund, but then on top of that, you have all the challenges from running a specialist equi…”
Multi-strat funds survived Schonfeld's early days while single-manager funds failed
“If you look today and see how many of those funds are still around, very, very few of the single manager funds are still around. But the multi-strats we invested in at the time, most of them are around.”
Senior PMs distinguish themselves by predicting multiple changes, not just earnings
“A big difference between a more junior analyst and a more senior analyst and then a PM It's really an understanding the drivers, the story, the sentiment, which will lead to the multiple change. The frequent complaint you get from analysts when they're going t…”
Promoted analysts usually know stock picking but lack portfolio construction skills
“So typically they'll know stock picking, but they won't know portfolio construction. They might've not had a lot of experience to trading. They probably wouldn't have managed a lot of people before.”
BAM increased its allocation to macro strategies from 15% to 25%
“So we might take macro, for example, from 15% to 25% if we feel like the macro opportunity set just got a lot better, which we did the last couple of years.”
Relative value strategies require preserving capital ammunition during drawdown periods
“And so those are more on a mean reversion basis, where those guys will pick up their hands and go, this is the time we need to step up. And the trick is you want to hopefully have navigated the drawdown period well enough to where you have the ammunition to st…”
Directional macro and growth equities justify momentum-based capital allocation scaling
“Other strategies that are, I would say, a little bit more momentumy, like the growthy sectors in equity investing, or directional macro trading, those tend to be a little bit more momentumy, where a good environment feeds a good environment for periods of time…”
The best trading environments happen when generalist capital inflows are high
“In general, the best environment is when there's a lot of generalist participation in a strategy, and there's a lot of money coming into a strategy. Because then your specialist participants, whether they're trading bonds, currencies, commodities, equities, li…”
Specialist-only trading environments create low risk tolerance and cascading drawdowns
“Another side, the worst environment is when there is no generalist capital, and money's flowing out of the strategy, and the specialists in the strategy are all underwater. And so in that environment, you're trading against other specialists, and nobody has mu…”
BAM adjusts sub-strategy risk up or down 50% based on market regime
“Your risk in a particular sub-strategy could be up or down 50% very easily if you're in a good period versus poor period.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dmitry's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Founder & CIO, Balyasny Asset Management | 1 | 54 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Capital Allocators → |