YouSaid · the spoken record

Bobby Jain

lines on the record: 76
first: 2026-02-16
most recent: 2026-02-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think a life lesson my parents taught us from the age of five to 20 focus on education 20 to 35 focus on career 35 to 50 focus on family 50 to 65 on service 65 to 80 on philanthropy 80 to 95 on spiritualism that's the stages obviously you're not going to follow those timeframes i knew that ahead of time i haven't listened i extended the career thing a little longer i've tried to do service with some charitable activities and time and resource contribution family's the important part of my life i have three teenagers so that demands some time it's a good thing for people to think of the stage of the life do i wish i knew that earlier i did knew that earlier but i didn't really think about it until you get older”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A boss at Chris Weiss, who died in 2010 called Paul Colello, and he was my mentor, and he was the president of the firm, and he ran all the divisions I was part of. We had to do some layoffs. And he said, by the way, you should get a thank you note from all those people, meaning do it with dignity and respect and treat people with dignity respect at every turn. I got to say that, you know, not that I've gotten that right every time, but when you start a firm after being in the market 30 years, you have a whole record of things. And I like to say I was doing favors for people for 30 years. Now I'm asking for favors for the next couple of years. Everyone delivered on that. It takes a village to raise one of these firms. And that village came in and I was able to take that advice in for a long time and treat people with dignity and respect. And that's the advice that I think of every day.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Queens, I did everything from a ball boy to a caddy holding for NBC News to a paper out. That was just what you did back then. But working at the stockbroker was a really interesting entryway, especially during the crash. I'll never forget those days. People's actual money being lost, they gave me a flavor for this isn't abstract. This is a real thing. Someone said to me, there's nothing casual about managing other people's money. I have that deeply embedded in my thinking. And I wouldn't say my first paid job, it was my first steady job. And that's stuck with me.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a gigantic reader. I got it from my mom. I'm reading a lot of literature, a lot of philosophy. That's how I understand the market. They view the markets as a complex system. I view myself as a student of complex systems. The most complex systems are actually systems with human interactions. The best place to learn about that to me is literature and philosophy. So I spend a gigantic amount of time on that.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the first time in my life trying to hit fast forward. I'm a cherish every minute guy, but everything I've done in my life process led to outcomes. Now the process is there. We're doing all the things that I thought we'd do, everything we said we were going to do. I see the alpha there. I see the value add to the investors. I see the value add to the market. I see value add to the people here. I'm enjoying what I'm doing. I'm passionate about it.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Framing element to it. If I hadn't started the hedge fund, I would have run with it. I've done nothing on is I was heavily involved in the charter school movement earlier in my life. I wanted to start charter prisons. Basically private not-for-profit prisons. Charter, the right-wing likes charter, left-wing people like, rehabilitation, and chances are the charter prisons, the people that get involved in that will want rehabilitation as part of it. We had about 20 people in this organization. It's been 11 years, a pretty autonomous by now.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 2014, we started something called the Jane Family Institute trying to take financial concepts and bring them into the philanthropy world, also to try to take either left-wing or right-wing ideas and put them in the opposite language. The original project we started on was trying to turn the student loan market into a student equity market via income sharing agreements. Some people don't like it because it seems kind of icky. What if I took 100% of your income for 100 years? That seems icky. So there's a branding element, there's a framing element. On the left, people think, well, college should be free. And so why should I even do that? There was a whole bunch of things. We did it with thousands and thousands of students. They're still running those programs. We did a lot of the guaranteed income pilots around the world. Generally people hate the concept of universal basic income. It feels something for nothing. People like earned income tax credits. People like child tax credits.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bobby somehow, in addition to having built all this over the last couple years, you also have for a long time run your family's charitable giving. And we'd love to hear a little bit about how you approach philanthropy.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To say, I say every meeting I'm in, there's me, there's whoever I'm talking to, and there's an investor sitting there. Having been put in that investor situation in various different forms there have given me a first-hand look at how an investor thinks about things. These firms, not just the multi-manager firms, but all these asset managers, an investor's taking a leap of faith, they're trusting that you're going to do what you said you were going to do with that. That's a big responsibility and it's something that I learned firsthand of sitting on these investment committee boards.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you get into these large organizations, there are two different ways of thinking. Some people are like risk managers, let's diversify, and some people are concentration. Let's figure out where things are going to go and let's go there. It's no different than Republic is a Democrats, the tutorial of religions. That's a core topic to talk about. Second topic is people that have been operators of businesses. I consider myself an operator of business, they think about what are your core competencies and what are your competitive advantages and how do you build businesses around that? That's what you're taught as an operator of a business. Investors think in different ways, and that's a great thing. Taking the best of both of those people is something that these endowment boards have been good at. Sitting on these endowment boards gets you into the mind of how investors think. Part of my job is figuring out how to make money in a risk control way. Part of it is, especially in these pass-throughs, to represent the...”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The manufacturer and the first iteration of it, we're not doing a lot of speculative things. Let's figure out if AI can do this or that or the other thing. The model itself was innovative by launching it all at once, by launching comprehensively, by building it that way. The challenge in this business is balancing patients and excitement. I live my life in seconds and minutes and hours and days. And things take months and quarters and years. The metrics at the beginning of this, you have to get yourself into the middle of Am I getting better every day? Did I put together this thing? Do I believe in my system? Do I believe in my people? That's the metrics. And then eventually the gross returns turn into net returns. And that's the evolution of this business.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there's much. One of the leaders in the industry said to me when I was starting, you're going to underestimate the benefits of starting from scratch. He said, so often I want to throw the whole thing out. It's not just legacy systems. It's legacy architecture, legacy people, legacy processes, legacy mindsets. We've got to build everything instead of buy everything. We got lucky that AI became native to this place. We didn't have to hire hundreds of technology people and fire hundreds of technology. The biggest thing that would change as we scale is you're going to see the operating leverage start kicking in because we think we can get the two, three times the size without having to hire that many more people. If we had more scale, would I start doing a couple of things that I say a little more speculative? You have some firms that view themselves as manufacturers and some firms have viewed themselves as packagers. Like I'm packing the alpha and we're hiring places. You hear them talk about their BD departments. We view ourselves.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you go from a larger platform, prop desk, a millennium to a smaller business, what are the things that as you look out over the next couple of years as you develop scale that you can add in to what you're doing that you might not be able to do today because you're smaller”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally that next period is a very good period despite however anyone did in March of twenty or in the last quarter of 08 oh nine and April to December of 20 were by far the two greatest times in this market. You have to survive that previous period and that's what we spent so much time doing.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is embedded in this business. How do we deal with it? We deal with those concepts. We're fully construction, pre mortem, postmortem, tail hedges, and really culturally making people say that's what we're doing here. What people are doing in this business, they're giving us their money. They're not giving us their gambling money. They're giving us their alternative to fixed income money. We have to protect against that. When things go wrong, they want to look over this part of their portfolio and it looks okay. The good news is when it goes wrong.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market, I felt it crowded in various times. I felt it more crowded in 2010 to 2019. The markets were smaller, but VAL was low. And so what happens when VAL is low is some people accept a lower return and some people lever up to make the returns equal. People like me, we accept a lower return. We communicate that because the thing that we're most worried about is the asymmetry vol 10-day vol in February of 2020 was seven. 10 day vol two weeks later was 118. If you're not managing that risk, you can lose a lot of money. The second thing is the asymmetry liquidity, especially in dealer-driven markets. People that grow up in the equity markets are used to exchange traded markets. You go into fixed income markets. Suddenly liquidity disappears very quickly when things go wrong. You can manage it by portfolio construction. You can manage it by the pre-mortems. And then you got to deal with it. And it is a risk.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The contagion risk is what we lose sleep about every time. Is everyone going to start heading out of markets now? Maybe the next one's going to be way worse, but you've had a couple of interesting events in the last five years, six years. COVID was a real event. Ukraine was real event. GameStop was a real event. SVB was real event. Let's say the data got good in 2005. So you have at least 20 years of good data to give you some sense of how these businesses have done in that period. Now, obviously, the next one would be worse. Now, we spend our lives trying to understand this. What are the only ways you can deal with is actual diversification. And some of these strategies are actually diversified. Again, market take. The amount of dimensions that you could start diversifying, you have some strategies that are going to make money in times of stress. You have lots of different various tail hedges on. The market tends to be clever and tends to find a way to find the hedges that you didn't put on. Are you taking some crowded risk? There's some of that in there. When I'm in the...”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gotten really big, companies are starting to go public again. Some of the regulatory environments starting to get balanced. Now you're getting regulatory competition, different exchanges are starting to say list here that's good for the markets, at least in the short run.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm making up a number 25% of a company's index, and the SP is up 14x. So that's 70 times bigger. So the fundamental equity, someone's picking stocks in a structured way, doing the work, given the size of the market, pretty good business, right now. There's really opportunity in the liquid credit markets. A lot of people have moved into the illiquid credit markets, the private credit business has been the biggest growing business in the world in the last few years that leaves some opportunities in the credit markets. And then also what we call arbitrage, there's some money in the seams of different types of investors and different types of arenas. The biggest theme is in three or four years, apparently I read our industry until last year hadn't grown that much. Especially the multi-strategy. I think it actually was flat. In that time, governments issued another $15 trillion of debt. The equity markets grew by $30 trillion.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are you looking for you're looking for areas that there's not necessarily enough capital to provide for the service the market wants, areas that you can find cheap volatility? And sometimes you're trying to find areas where you're willing to take complexity risk to get into some market. Banks trying to figure out how to get partners in hedging some of the risks that they're left with that either take up a lot of regulatory capital or are not necessarily capital efficient for other reasons. It's called strategic risk transfer. We've set up a business to do that. Asia has some of that in the complexity side. You're setting up a business in India. Not that easy. But once you do it, you can probably get access to some things. If you took it out of business level, a more concrete level, the fundamental equities business, I started trading indexes in the mid 90s. The S&P was at 500, about 5% of a company was indexed. Now round numbers.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the strategy going to change? Is my market going to change? I got to put together a new team. Do I like coming to work? Do I feel like people are in my corner? Do I feel like what's the probability of success? Do I feel like the way I trade? I think that's the biggest one. It's the way I actually interact with the market in Sympatico, with the way these people think about that. And that's a big topic. You should be able to get that right 90% of the time when people coming in. It's a complex optimization function, but it's generally about fit more than about conversation. Once you're in the transparent, fair, competitive, and the basic point is you said what you were going to do and you did what you were going to say. Once you do that, you're in a good starting point.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you tried to run this model on a different compensation model, meaning you have to rely on how everyone else in the firm, people that you haven't even met are doing, it'd be hard to do that unless you did the talent creation side, unless you said, I'm going to hire everyone from scratch, a lot of the people that come into this industry are coming from places like that where for whatever reason they think they're producing more than the median of that group The world has constructed these portfolio managers as unitary one-track mind people. I'm just looking at my compensation. People want to get paid competitively. They want to get paid fairly. They want to get paid transparently. Once you're paying them fairly competitively and transparently, then the margin there has a lot more math going into it. The optimization functions are more complex. I can get paid a little more, but I got to sit out of the market for a period of time in that period of time.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially in the first 18 months, it's hard to form those convictions. You don't have enough data on your own systems of efficacy, on your own risk modeling, on your own PMs. They feel the same way. They don't have data on how you're going to react at a tough time. So that data building gets better every day. In the beginning, it's harder to push people to take risk than it is to stop people from taking risk. As we've gotten more and more data, we feel like we're getting onto offense. But that's a process. That's real. It's not like a philosophical thing. It's like as you get more data, as you get more badges, you get more experience. That all gets better. And it gets better every day. And the teams get more comfortable with each other every day. And I feel that palpably. And so that becomes a culture of risk management.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You start a new firm, that's one of the things you don't really know in the interview process. You tend to get people that are a little less optimist. If they were more optimistic and more growth-minded, that they would have gone to a place where they could just be long. We emphasize risk management. And so people get that. We got a little lucky in that the financial crisis happened in March and April of 2025 with the Liberation Day and all that. So I got to experience it of how much did I feel like I was pushing people and how much did I feel like people were reacting. And it turns out, at least in that environment, I didn't have to do much. People got it. Harder to push people to take risks. What is hedge funding? Hedge funding is taking a bunch of information, turning it into data, taking that data and forming convictions on that data. Then taking those convictions and doing things in the marketplace. When you have less data.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a bunch of losses, and you're paying a bunch of transaction costs. The good news is when things settle down, when the VIX goes from 50 back to 30 or 20 or whatever, you now are clean. You're not nursing a bunch of positions. You have the ability to trade on offense. And so how do you get yourself on offense as the name of the game? If you can think that way and say, here's an opportunity. And the firms that did that in 2020 and thought that way did a lot better than the firms that were holding on. Because they're holding on. The thing went from 100 to 80. They're waiting for that 80 thing to go back to 100. You're buying something at 50 that someone else had to sell. You sold it at 9 define. You locked in a loss, but you're buying something else that wasn't even on your pad that someone needs liquidity. These are marked a minute firms. You'd run the pre-mortem and you run the mortem. It's not Formula A. This is what hedge funding is. You have to be ready to do it.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relative to the growth in this multi strategy industry, the industry's put on tens of trillions of dollars of market cap in the last few years. The multi-strategies has grown by 100 billion, 150 billion. The second thing is the capital structures in this industry have gotten infinitely better. People have five-year lockups, three-year lockups, four-year lockups. So it's not like everyone has to sell because they're going to lose their assets. The third thing is there are a lot of different risk management approaches. They make a decision. If things are liquidating, I'm going to buy more. And if I think they're liquidating because the fundamental model has changed, I'm only then going to sell. Most people have been rewarded for buying on dips. Now, I don't look at it that way. Everyone looks at it differently. That's the beauty of the markets. I view it as the reason you're cutting risk in a time of stress is it might get worse. So you're trying to hedge. The bad news is you're...”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's the pre mortem and there's the mortem. So you try to do your best to figure out what the pre-mortem. You've constructed a portfolio. Broadly, 95% of what we do or more is liquid. The vast majority of what we do is exchange traded markets. So at least you have a chance to get out generally in exchange-traded markets. If you do the pre-mortem and you say, hopefully I've constructed a portfolio that is robust to many of the things that are thrown against me. Generally speaking, in these models, you make more money in a high volvironment, but you lose money in the move from a low volviron environment to a high ball environment. As you've extended risk capital to the market and now the cost of risk capital has gone up, you're going to lose on mark-to-market on your current risk capital. The second thing is the mortem. When it's happening, you have to move your feet of, so does that get crowded? Do you get everyone rush to the hills at once? There's some of that. The markets have gotten so big.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somewhat integrated at risk fashion with some logic also as to how many people in each sector, how they interact, it's as much an art as a science.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are some fundamental questions in the equities business? There's a concept of are you factor ignored? No one's really doing that anymore. Are you factor aware? Are you factor obsessed? I'm generally skeptical of models, especially empirical models. So I'm more in the factor aware than factor obsessed model. The empirical models are taking a bunch of historic prices and then creating some relationship about it. One Amazon is worth 0.2 Microsoft and 0.3. You need a bit of humility around the models. That's one question around that. The second question you have to ask yourself is, what are you thinking about crowdedness and how you measure crowdedness, how are you dealing with it? The third question is, do you consider an industry bet an alphabet or a factor bet? Those are different dimensions of these risks. We've tried to say we're going to run it in a”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love to dive into the fundamental equities business, in particular how do you view both the risk and the capital allocation, both for your team and then in a world where there are a lot of other fundamental equity businesses like this?”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First thing is you have these different businesses. Ideally, you don't get overweight one versus the other. So you try to keep it within some tolerances or ranges. Within that, you're competing with a sharp ratio. You're trying to find strategies that have a sufficient sharp ratio that clears your cost of capital. If somebody wants more capital, your instinct is to give it to them as long as they're within the relative sharp ratio threshold. You're not too overweighted. You can assess what the tails are. But the capital allocation model is a lot more static than you'd think. If you look at most of these multi-manager firms, it doesn't change all that much over a period in certain market environments you move in capital to one place or another, but that's not the dynamic. It's not like every day we're saying, let's pull it from this person, move it to that person. We've been in a capital deployment phase for the last 18 months. We raise billions of dollars. We call the capital over a year. Took us about 15 to 18 months to deploy the capital.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absorbing information through reading. We're not heavy cold plays. Having said that, for the first 18 months of the firm, we did a weekly call every Monday morning for 25 minutes where all the call was 1 p.m. got up in front of the whole firm, talked about what they did. Then someone from a staff role talks about what they do. After 18 months of that, I think it sets a tone of that type of collaboration.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say there's three models there's discourage collaboration for whatever reason because A, you're attracting people that don't want to collaborate. B, there's something structural that you don't want collaboration. Maybe it's correlation or something like that. One is enforced collaboration. You want to put an idea into the model. You have to come into the auditorium and explain it to everyone else. And one is encourage collaboration. I'm in the encourage collaboration model. If you ask me how does it happen, what happens in these hedge funds, better or worse, is that the culture of the firm reflects their founder. I'm a pretty collaborative guy. My instinct is when someone needs something. I say, why don't you talk to these people? That becomes a cultural thing. And people realize that's the accepted topic of the day. It's more a cultural topic than a structural topic. Ever absorbs information differently? Some of the groups have daily calls, weekly calls. I never absorbed information that way. I'm more of...”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And figure out how to mitigate the tails, but different investment approaches there are CIOs for each of those businesses. I'm one of them. I'm for the equity arbitrage, and each one of them has a slightly different philosophy as to what the alpha engine is for that.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Broadly speaking, in the equity side, there's fundamental, quantitative, and arbitrage. Arbitrage could be options. It could be what's called Delta 1 or index rebalancing. It could be convertible bonds. It could be merger arb or other types of vent-driven trading. And the fixed income type strategies rates of macro is one. Credit is one, and commodities are a different one. There's a seventh business in the way we created the taxonomy, which was Asia, because I'm sick of people trying to run Asia from 7 in the morning when they're busy or seven at night when they're tired. I said Asia is going to be a more finessed marked market with a very Korea, China, onshore, offshore China, Japan, Hindia, Southeast Asia. You have a lot more going on in Asia trying to do that from the US through the US news filter is a difficult thing to do. So those are seven businesses. I would view it as we have a common risk approach, which is focus on the tail.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How they think about the people that work for them? Are these tools for me or are these people that have their own goals and ambitions and how you're using them, how you're developing them? This process is more self-selecting than you would think. People get a feel for what you're trying to accomplish, what they want, what's going to happen more and more is people are going to find their way to where they want to be. It's going to be become a talent development industry, whether it's talent development, talent acceleration. The people are going to start molding people into the way that they think of the world and those worlds will be different. Some firms, not in the multi-manager world, but in the multi-strategy firm, they run one global optimization at the top of the house. Everyone Hunter Gathers Alpha, and then we run its risk on top of the house. You could do that. You just can't do that and pay people unnetted compensation. Some people might move more towards that way and try to change their models and say, okay, I'm going to do clawbacks and do this, as this industry matures, it's not that old an industry. You had a couple of players that have been doing...”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sakata recognition, I probably interviewed 200 people a year for 28 years. One is getting a feel for it. Two is the word that gets thrown around a bit, but I'm going to use it here as alignment. What I try to figure out every day is, do I feel aligned with the people that work here, the risk takers? Do I feel like they're aligned with the interests of the investor? Inherent in these businesses is the trader has an option that if it goes well, they get some percentage of that. If it goes poorly, you're left with the bank. Do I feel a line? A lot of people, they talk about risk in the first couple of minutes. They're thinking about risk. And some are hedging to be polite. That's a different thing. Some people, when they lost money, they start using the passive tense. So when they talk about making money, they use the active tense. When they start talking about the winning trades, they talk about clever they were. When they talk about losing trades, they talk about the unwind. Okay, what about the wind? That you can get a pretty good feel. You start thinking about...”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helping the people there? How is it helping the investor? How is the aggregate return to the firm? If you're in a business where having multiple people touching the street, like in a dealer-driven market, it gets confusing to the street. Having that thought of ahead of time is something that's attractive to people. It's hard to actually do the interview process. All the risk takers here, I met myself. We don't have a giant business development department. There's two or three dedicated people in business development. And then it's me and the CIOs that are doing the business development. If you weren't in the trenches for years, it's very hard to do. People know it right from the beginning. Your conversation changes from, let's talk about this trade. I think the market's driven culture. It's not a hire and driven culture.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interest rate for zero. The whole multi manager industry was tiny in 2016-17 when Millennium and Citadel were really the two big ones that were managing third-party capital. Then these smaller firms got bit. There was a talent war to that. Now you have to pay competitively. You have to pay people a reward if they make the money. But the friction cost not as crazy as it was back then. We were able to attract a lot of people. There's seven of us that are running the investment side of the business, the CIOs of the businesses. Good $30,000, 40% of them. Either I or one of them knew already. That created a ballast. Another topic is a lot of people like this business structure. The PM structure, one of the things is as you raise more capital, you're going to have more people doing the same thing you're doing. I do say to people, it's not like you get a veto on anyone. I might still hire another person doing that same thing, but you get a vote and it's going to be done consciously. And we're going to say, how are we?”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The third is a bunch of IP. If you said to someone, go try to buy it and sell equity. It's very difficult unless you put them into a structure where you say, here's how we do research, here's the corporate access that we have, here's the research model that we have, here's the factor model that we run into, then at least you give us some framework to make decisions. It's more than just the people. The biggest thing is that there are a lot of people that realize this multi-strategy model has moved towards the autonomy section, autonomy of compensation, autonomy of action. That's something that attracted people. I have a reputation for developing people, me and some of the other people that we've hired here to run these businesses. The third is it's a big thing. People that get here first to the extent, along that option, many people would like to work at Microsoft and Google and Apple. And many people want to work at Stripe. People want to work at the startup. That's actually a pretty attractive concept. There was a big talent war in 2017 to 2012.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two topics. So, one is how you make money. There's three core ways of making money. One is the world is somehow giving you money. The world is saying we want you to provide a service and we're going to pay somebody to provide that service. If the government wants to issue $2 trillion of debt, somebody has to buy that debt when people want to use portable alpha type strategies. They want to buy futures instead of the bonds. Fine. They're going to pay up for those futures. There's an opportunity there. You can find liquidity. People love index funds. Okay, but somebody has to keep those index funds in line. Same with the dispersion trading assets. Sometimes you can get paid for a service, even in fundamental equities. If you conceptualize it that way, somebody has to price these equities. Someone has to price them in the long run. Someone has to price them in the short run. The index funds are relying on that pricing service to happen. And so there are some services that we provide. The second is they're clever people. There are people that are experienced, that have done it, that understand it.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It feels like in all of these places there's a certain number of portfolio managers that are able to generate alpha, the sharp ratio that you want. How did you go through the process of attracting talent to Jane”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's why people get paid 20. I've tried to focus on risk management's a core. This is what this is, a risk management doesn't focus on controlling the losses and let the profits take care of themselves. But you have to pick a lane on that.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For that. Now you want to do the next thing, which is quant or fixed income. A, you haven't done that in four years. B, you have the core satellite problem. And C, your system isn't built that way. I said, I want to build it properly. Fine. A little harder at the beginning, clearly, but over time, that pays huge dividends. I'm thinking about these decisions we made. Thank God we have one common risk system and we have one common architecture. Fifth, I picked a lane on the risk management. This industry broadly pays all these firms when the PM's there, they're getting paid twenty percent round numbers. Some people pay deferred, some people have clawbacks, some people have sharp ratio thresholds, but round numbers, that's the industry that we're in. Why you paying people even that much? You're paying them for a sharp ratio, and you're paying them to manage money in stop loss context. The stop loss context is harder. If you're losing money on something, it's easier. If you could buy more, you buy more, you buy more. If you have to cut when you're losing money, that's hard again.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentorship. You can call that guidance. You can call that coaching. You can call that risk managing. That was a very important part of what I thought to do. Of course, I just started a firm. I had to acquire talent. But my real business proposition is talent acceleration, taking good people and making them great. I break up the world into killers, then steady producers, you need steady producers. If you had all killers, they'd start killing each other. Options on killers and options on steady producers. And I want a balance of the killers, the options on killers, and the steady producers. And then fourth is I wanted to create something which was diversified at the beginning. The whole system wants you to create sequentially. They say, Bobby, why don't you start in one area? Start a billion and a half dollar fundamental equities business or quant equities. When that works, go do the next thing. Normal. The problem is now you started that first thing. You built everything for that. You've built your risk system for that. You've hired your lawyers for that. You've built your trading system.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Third thing is where I felt you had a few great talent developers where 80% of the people coming out of college and you're putting them in through your training program, you're teaching them how to do the business. And then you have some great town acquirers. A lot of the businesses that grew up in the last 10 years were talent acquirers. Talent acquired is expensive business and it's a business that lends itself very well to the market leader. They have the most resources. What's missing, which is what the prop test was, was a talent accelerator, the talent transformer. You're taking the market maker on the desk. You're taking the guy from quant research. You're taking the equity research analyst and you're turning him into PMs. That's the core competency of what you're doing. You're also doing the talent creation. And you're also doing some talent acquisition, but you create a core competency in that. I want to be a business of the 35-year-old killer. The person that has all the tools, but they need people in their corner. You can call that.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The view of a PM in this industry is they want autonomy, especially the people in the next generations don't necessarily want autonomy. They want autonomy of compensation, but they don't necessarily want autonomy of lifestyle. So they want to say, if I make money, I should get paid on what I do. And if I don't make money, I don't want to get paid on what I do. That's a normal thing. But they do appreciate that the concept of five people sitting in a room with a few Bloombergs and a few phones, not that easy. You want people around you. You want IP. You want a business that you're tapping into. You want an operating system you're tapping into. Some of the edge ones do that and some of the hedge funds don't. The beauty of this industry is that they're successful hedge funds on every side of it.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, this core satellite thing bothers me. And it was something that, to the extent of firm, is seen as a fixed income firm or an equities firm or a quant firm. It's difficult to shed that label. When you're attracting people into the satellite, someone said it to me once, well, you haven't done this thing in 10,000 days. It can't be that important to you. People know it. You attract better people if you get it at the beginning. One way to do it is hire a bunch of PMs and put in a manager later to run that business. It's a lot easier to build it from the beginning that way. It's part of your core thing. You have a seven-legged stool at the beginning. That's a different topic than I have a one-legged stool and I've added a second layer of stool when that thing doesn't go right. Your own investors, your own people say, why are you doing that then? Whether that thing's not going well, whether your thing's not going well, people say, why don't you get out of the non-core thing? The core Sadela thing is the first thing. Second thing is the world has confused a couple of things.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He mentioned that all of these multi-strategy hedge funds have their own different flavors of how they do things. After seeing so much of this over a couple of decades, what first principles were you bringing to develop at Jane?”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your own balance sheet. And then the money comes in. That's a bared entry that you have to get through. I was prepared for that. I had been doing this exact thing in my mind for 30 years, for the first many years as what's now called a PM. Back then you just call it a trader. For the last many years as a leader and designer of these businesses, we got the launch in about a year, which was a reasonable time to build something from scratch, especially with the advent of AI. You didn't have to hire as many programmers to build versus buy decisions were better. A lot of that data stuff I was talking about, you could buy a lot of that now. In the end, it was a good time to start.”
2026-02-16 · Capital Allocators · Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source