Neal Berger has been working on Wall Street for over 30 years with more than 25 of those years within the hedge fund industry. For over 22 years he has allocated capital to hedge funds both personally and on behalf of wealthy families. Prior to founding Eagle’s View, Neal was the Founder and Director of multi-strategy funds, Apogee Fund, and New Edge Fund. He had previously been employed as a Managing Director and Global Macro trader at Millennium Partners and as VP of Proprietary Trading with Chase Manhattan Bank and Fuji Bank in New York.
When Neal Berger founded Eagle’s View Asset Management (EV) in 2005, he was already convinced that the ballooning assets within mainstream hedge fund strategies would sooner or later arbitrage away much of the Alpha. Berger therefore positioned EV as a boutique Firm focusing on a subset of non-directional strategies that are often too capacity constrained to interest the larger allocators that would ultimately saturate the strategy and degrade the edge. He foresaw the falling returns in quant strategies as a result of “robots are trading robots”, and says EV has currently no exposure to them.
Today, EV is known as a thought leader and well known in the industry for investing in strategies such as congestion trading across the electricity grid, capitalizing upon inefficiencies in shipping derivatives, volatility arbitrage, new issues trading and strategies of similar ilk. As today’s inefficiencies can and likely will be degraded due to continuous changes in the market micro structure, Berger believes that longer term success investing in uncorrelated absolute return strategies requires a specialist focus.
Berger has recently taken the decision to expand EV’s product offerings and directly manage strategies of the same ilk of what EV has been investing with for more than a decade through external managers (e.g. electricity trading), “because we've seen first-hand how attractive some of these strategies can be both from a risk adjusted return perspective as well as a capital efficiency perspective.” EV continues to manage it’s flagship multi-manager and advisory products in addition to these new product offerings.
In this Opalesque.TV BACKSTAGE video, Neal also talks about:- Hedge funds can be attractive but investors need to truly understand their goals and objectives for investing in hedge funds
- How ballooning hedge fund assets ($50bn to $3tn) changed the industry
- The equity correlation malady: Many major strategies are highly correlated to equities, but certain niche opportunities remain
- How Neal Berger uses hedge funds & how to achieve a truly uncorrelated return stream. What Berger isn’t investing in and why. “Indirect beta” of many strategies investors should be aware of
- What to do with the broken 60/40 asset allocation model
- What happened to quant trading?
- There is always an edge somewhere
Neal Berger is President/Chief Investment Officer and Founder of Eagle’s View Management. Neal has been working on Wall Street for over 30 years and has been in the hedge fund industry for over 25 years. Prior to founding Eagle’s View, Neal was the Founder and Director of multi-strategy funds, Apogee Fund, Ltd. and New Edge Fund, Ltd. He had previously been employed as a Managing Director and Global Macro trader at New York-based Millennium Partners. Neal has allocated capital to hedge funds for over 22 years both personally and on behalf of wealthy families. He had previously been employed as a Vice President of Proprietary Trading with Chase Manhattan Bank and Fuji Bank in New York. Neal started his career as a Financial Analyst at Morgan Stanley.
[less]
Neal Berger has been working on Wall Street for over 30 years with more than 25 of those years within the hedge fund industry. For over 22 years he has allocated capital to hedge funds both personally and on behalf of wealthy families. Prior to founding Eagle’s View, Neal was the Founder and Director of multi-strategy funds, Apogee Fund, and New Edge Fund. He had previously been employed as a Managing Director and Global Macro trader at Millennium Partners and as VP of Proprietary Trading with Chase Manhattan Bank and Fuji Bank in New York.
...more
