YouSaid · the spoken record

David Snyderman

lines on the record: 67
first: 2024-03-01
most recent: 2024-03-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“We were very fortunate and we performed quite well in our credit strategies, which certainly we can talk about. We had both long and short credit products, and we had a long volatility position, meaning we protected the balance sheet very well if there was a dislocation. And I think that went back to some of the prior lessons from prior firms. We really need to have portfolios that we protect the balance sheet and make sure that we're able to stand up in difficult environments.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it was just north of the city, and it's across the street from northwestern. So that would be the draw, you know, the train lines end there so you can recruit people from the city. But it was probably a little more selfish. Like we all lived on the north shore of Chicago. And so it was an easy commute for us to work. And so that's where we started the firm.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To help us out, that's exactly what Ross was saying. And he very politely said to me, you know, you're here to invest, not to build software. And so I think he stopped by my desk for the next nine months every single day and asked the same question. But it truly took us nine months to build the systems and infrastructure just to be investment ready.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question and funny you ask that question because we talk about it often around Magnetar. I started and I hired three or four people that I started with. And Ross Lazar, right? And again, he's my partner, my close friend, and a great business builder. Two weeks into it, he came to me and said, what's the first investment? When are you going to start investing? And I said to Ross, look, we're going to build the systems and infrastructure to prepare to invest first.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a clean break, and Ross Lazar came from the fund of funds world, and he was the primary money raiser and business builder there. And so he did a fantastic job. I think we're the largest launch of 2005 with about $2.3 billion”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's correct. So Alec Littowitz and Ross Lazar founded the firm. And I did join the day we launched our main fund. Now, for me, Alec was a known quantity. He ran equities at Citadel. With Dave Bunning, my prior boss there. And then when I moved up into Dave's spot, Alec moved out and they started and he spent, I think, two years on a non-compete and then started Magnetar. Him and Ross Lazar co-founded the firm, and they had a vision to co-found the firm. And I bought into the vision immediately. And Alec always did a great job of laying it out, right? And first was we're going to have a culture of collaboration. Back then, you probably remember in 2005, there were a lot of what they called pod shops. So they give individual asset allocation to people and they go invest their money. This was going to be a multi-strategy vehicle so we'd have credit, we'd have equities, we'd have hedge fund strategies, but with no silos. So we're going to work together and put best opportunities into the portfolio.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was. And for me, I actually loved that part of Citadel. It was 16 hour days, and it was six or seven days a week, but you really got to learn the financial markets there.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's correct. I started there on the convertible bond arbitrage desk, and then we started capital structure arbitrage, which meant we were buying our selling credit and against that, buying and selling equities. And finally, we consolidated that together, and I ran that business for Ken and Citadel.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, to put together credit portfolios, we have to find hedges that offset that short volatility. So really learning the value of options was probably the biggest lesson coming out of Citadel.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but when I got there, I realized I was one of many. But I had the opportunity to work for a gentleman Dave Bunning. He was one of the original few handful of people that started at Citadel. And Dave was fantastic in so many different ways, a great leader, a great investor, but really a great person. And he took me under his wing there. It was a lot of work, but a lot of formidable lessons came out of my time there. The first one that I think about is the investing business itself is an operating business. Rank order them, and then only can we put together portfolios. And the second, and this is very credit specific, was when you own a credit portfolio, you're short volatility. So what that simply means is if you have a dislocation, you're going to lose a lot of money.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when I was there, they had 13,000 people, and that was before they bought Georgia Pacific. I think now it's probably 35,000 people. It's immense. And so they have many, many different business lines there. For me, I sat mostly in their internal, really an internal hedge fund. So it was their excess cash. They borrowed money at live bid at the time. So they borrowed money very cheaply. And our job was to make money on that money.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was Friborg, so a town 20 minutes from Burn, it was a tax free canton. So I was in a town that spoke half French and half German, and I spoke English.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cash optimization. So I had the opportunity to be a junior person there. I'd never left the US before. So I was sat in the middle of Switzerland and sat there for two years and worked in that business and then went to Wichita, Kansas. Wichita, Kansas was the home office. There were sort of a dozen of us very simply situated, all young and hungry, but they had great management at Coke. They really encouraged us to start businesses. So I remember writing the Merger Our Business Plan there and then implementing the business. So a quick fun fact about Coke. At Magnitur today, we have three of my prior bosses from Coke. So it's pretty neat. But to answer your question, I had a lot of broad experiences by the time I was in my mid-20s, but no real direction on what my career was going to be.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my path was certainly non-traditional. I didn't go to one of the East Coast Ivory League schools knowing I want them to go to Wall Street. I didn't even know what Wall Street work on Wall Street meant at the time. So for me, it was much more around being around fantastic people and really taking advantage of opportunities. So like you said, I started a Price Waterhouse and I went through a one-year rotation there. So it started with audit. So I saw many companies then taxed, then financial services. So it's a great training ground to understand how theoretics went into the practical business. From there, I went to Coke Industries and had a great experience with Coke. I was there five years. I worked in three different places for them. So I started in Houston, Texas, and I worked on their natural gas business. Then this opportunity came up in Switzerland. So it's a $13,000 person company. And there were going to be five people in Switzerland to manage about several hundred million dollars.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Washu back then was a great medical school and they still do today. And in my family, being a doctor was the highest level of achievement. So I had an older sister starting medical school, and I had a relative who's actually the dean of Duke Medical School. So I had this nice glide path to be a doctor. So I started off pre med, but I didn't end pre med. I found out quickly that's not what I wanted to do. The hardest part was telling my parents and especially my grandparents, no more pre-med. So I switched to being an economics major. I graduated economics with a lot of coursework and accounting and finance.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know why I thought I could, but I definitely thought I could at the time. And so I wanted to play at the highest level possible. My parents were much more focused on an academic institution. And so while she sort of met both criteria”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. I grew up in Freehole, New Jersey, so most people know home of Bruce Springsteen. You know, my focus coming out of high school was playing football. I want them to play football at the highest level I could.”
2024-03-01 · Masters in Business · David Snyderman on Specialty Finance and Data in Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source