Dmitry Balyasny
Founder & CIO, Balyasny Asset Management · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
54statements → 8claims → 2claims resolved → 3.83/5average certainty → 1.67/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 6 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 predictions · 6 assertions · 2 opinions · 25 insights · 19 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Dmitry argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Dmitry Balyasny on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Dmitry Balyasny said on Capital Allocators that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Young hedge fund analysts take a couple of years to become additive
“So we see a lot of times you'll have a younger PM. And by definition, they'll then wind up almost always hiring really young analysts, and the expectation is this person's going to come in and help me make a lot of money. It's just not realistic. At the stage …”
Firms hiring portfolio managers in three days fire just as fast
“You want to be aggressive and move quickly, but if you're going to take three days to hire somebody, they'll probably take three days to fire somebody.”
Short-duration capital cripples quantitative hedge fund recruiting due to non-competes
“If you hire a quant PM today, a lot of them have two year sit outs, and then they take another year to build. So they have to believe that they're joining a place that's going to have plenty of capital and resources for them to deploy three years from now. So …”
Cross-strategy infrastructure will increasingly differentiate hedge fund returns
“More and more, I think that's going to be a differentiator in return because the commoditized stuff that's fairly easy to do, by definition, more and more people are going to do that.”
Painful-to-build trading businesses create lasting competitive moats around hedge funds
“So we kind of like those areas where you can export some of your capabilities, but that are difficult and painful to build because it keeps competition up. It might take you a number of years, but if you can do it, you got to moat around the business.”
Public hedge fund managers cannot effectively execute private investments directly
“But there's also a lot of particulars in the private space, so you have to build that capability separately. You can't just have public guys do it. You can leverage off of their skills and team with them, but it's different because first of all, you have to ha…”
Analysis paralysis destroys opportunities; investors must get involved to truly learn
“You could do analysis forever, and if by the time it becomes obvious, usually the opportunity is gone, and so a lot of times you're not really going to learn everything until you're involved. You just got to figure out how to get involved in a risk responsible…”
Thomas H. Lee's advice to asset managers: 'do it big'
“This business is a pain in the ass. If you're gonna do it, you might as well do it big. He's like, it's a pain either way. Cause you're always dealing with lots of different constituencies and lots of different people plus the markets. So if you're going to bo…”
Novice traders should master a narrow risk box before expanding scope
“You just create, like, a very well-defined small box to start, where you just have, like, a few elements to worry about. Only had a small number of trades, a small number of potential trading instruments, small holding periods, You kind of define the types of …”
BAM began as a prop fund with only Balyasny and Schoenfeld investing
“We became a hedge fund, but with proprietary capital where myself and Steve Schoenfeld were the only investors, and then we fully spun it out and started taking external capital and also piece by piece weaned ourselves off of the middle and back office and sta…”
BAM's fundamental equity risk dropped from 100% to roughly 50%
“So fundamental long short equity trading is still the largest strategy, but that's down from being a hundred percent of the risk in the early days. Even five years ago, it was probably 85% of the risk. Now it's about 45 to 50% of the risk.”
BAM avoided physical commodity trading initially because it takes years to build
“For example, you know, physical trading takes a long time to build out. We didn't want to start with that.”
BAM has executed several fund roll-ins with more in progress
“You have the fun roll-in piece. We've done a few of these recently. We have a couple more in process where guys have done reasonably well as an independent shop, but they haven't been able to scale the business to where they've liked”
Balyasny Asset Management is building a growth-stage venture capital vertical
“We're building a growth stage, venture capital business is another vertical.”
BAM allocates capital by multiplying volatility dollars by expected Sharpe ratio
“So we allocate capital in the form of volatility dollars, and then somebody has an expected sharp, and they multiply that sharp times the vol dollars to arrive at their expected P&L for the year.”
BAM uses multi-step drawdowns to prevent drastic portfolio cuts at once
“And so you have like a drawdown framework that's very objective and clear that everybody signs off on on day one. And that's multi-step, so you're not forced to reduce the portfolio by a large chunk at any one time.”
BAM has averaged 4% to 4.5% volatility over five years
“We've averaged about a four to four and a half percent vol as a fund for the last, I'd say probably five years.”
Balyasny says BAM's equity strategy typically averages around 4x leverage
“Equity tends to average around four.”
BAM shifted entirely to two- and three-year duration capital lockups
“Today it's all Two and three year capital up from, you know, monthly and quarterly capital five years ago.”
Multi-strategy platforms hugely outperformed single-manager hedge funds in 2022
“So last year, the Multi-strap, multi-PM space, hugely outperformed the single manager space.”
BAM is still building its quantitative trading business and infrastructure
“The quant businesses there, for example, are very developed, whereas we're in the process of building out a quant business. So they have the advantage of having that P&L stream where we don't yet, and they have the infrastructure for it where we're building.”
BAM runs IPO teach-ins for venture-backed founders preparing to go public
“So we do teach-ins between the private PMs, the public PMs, your equity capital markets desk, and a venture capital fund that'll bring a bunch of founders who are looking to go public in the next few years, and we'll do a teach-in for them.”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Dmitry Balyasny – Multi-Strategy Platform at BAM (EP.341) | Oct 2, 2023 | 1h 8m |