Free The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds by Maneet Ahuja Page A

believes any preconceptions GLG had about the old Man Group stalwarts have disappeared as well. “Many people talk about AHL as a systematic black box, very formulaic, like we’re all robots. But ultimately there’s a bunch of human beings here.”
     
    Wong says he has seen many changes since he began at AHL. “Back then, we traded about 50 markets. Now we trade over 200. In those days,” he recalls, “you had less integration between Europe and the United States. And nowadays, if you look at the correlation between the developed markets or G-7 market, it’s much tighter. So in order to really have this less correlated position, we have to look elsewhere.” They were one of the first to trade in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Brazil, and South Africa. Particularly in the early days, this was expensive and difficult to do, but it was worth it to AHL. “These markets have been much less correlated to the developed world, so they kind of diversify us.”
     
    One of Wong’s key objectives has been to develop close ties between the company and the academic community. “Having a firmer link with an academic institution would help us in terms of hiring people and getting to know the latest advances in academics and research, and might even give us some of new ideas that we could actually capitalize on,” says Wong.
     
    After some exploration, AHL focused on Oxford, mostly because the university had a clear vision for the collaboration. The result is the Oxford Man Institute of Quantitative Finance. “They offered us an entire department within the school,” says Wong. “We have an office there with a partner who is physically on site, and about another dozen of our people are there interacting with about 50 academics on a daily basis. And that’s a great match: academics love to solve problems, and we love to ask people to solve our problems.” The Man Group has contributed 13 million pounds to the venture, and Wong believes the investment has been definitely worth it. “The financial service sector and banks and hedge funds have a bad image,” he says. “This shows Man giving back to the society. It works on many different levels.”
     
    Pierre Lagrange: The Money Maker
     
    At the age of 50, Pierre Lagrange, a native Belgian who is one of the richest men in England, has the long hair and casual wardrobe of a classic rocker about to uncase his guitar and unleash a few choice power chords from the stage of the Hammersmith Ballroom. Instead, he is a successful leader of hedge fund operators, and a man whose fortune and influence may yet be decades from their peak.
     
    “I love what I do,” he says. “I love finding investments that people have missed. I love the whole discussion and arguing cases with bright people, or reviewing an obscure company, or discovering the best way to play that macro thematic on demand in that country. And I just hate to take no for an answer.”
     
    Coincidentally, like Wong, Lagrange began his professional career studying engineering—in his case, environmental engineering at Solvay University at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. Like many young people, Lagrange didn’t know what he wanted to do with his degree, and when J. P. Morgan invited him to join its six-month training program in New York, he jumped at the opportunity.
     
    It was at Morgan that Lagrange had his first exposure to investing, and he took to it with enthusiasm. “It was a fantastic bank with an extraordinary training program,” he recalls. He started on the currency side and was one of the few people with a university degree to join the treasury side of the business. After the initial program, Lagrange remained with Morgan, although in time, he began to look for other opportunities. “I wanted to be in London,” he says, “and I wanted to get into equity trading.”
     
    He joined Goldman Sachs, and found his métier. His next move came in 1995, when he and Gottseman and Green opened their own hedge