- Nick Maounis, who previously founded the now-defunct Amaranth, has his $2 billion Verition Fund Management up 22.3% through the end of October, according to a source familiar with the firm.
- Verition runs five strategies — equity, quant, credit, event-drive, and convertible arbitrage — that are all positive for the year.
- The firm is one of the better multi-strategy managers this year, with its performance so far outpacing larger rivals like Millennium and Citadel.
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Nick Maounis’ Verition Fund Management has surged this year despite the pandemic, ongoing market volatility and the US election.
Sources tell Business Insider that the Greenwich-based multi-strategy hedge fund is up 22.3% for the year through October, after gaining 1.5% last month.
The performance so far puts the firm near the top of the multi-strategy category in the industry, besting some better-known peers, according to performance numbers from a recent Institutional Investor article. Verition’s 22.3% is better than billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel and billionaire Izzy Englander’s Millennium, which have returned 20.1% and 15.9% respectively.
Balyasny leads the way for multi-strategy managers with returns of roughly 25% for the year. The Chicago-based fund was one of the few firms that made money during the initial market volatility caused by the pandemic in March. In an April letter to investors — after a first-quarter return of 4.75% — Dmitry Balyasny told investors that the firm was “increasing our trading oriented macro strategies across rates, FX, and equities.”
Large multi-strategy firms have been able to outperform throughout the year and avoid some of the troubles that quants and structured credit managers have run into. Hedge funds as a whole have trailed the stock market’s performance this year, with Hedge Fund Research’s global hedge fund index up a little over 1% for the year.
Verition — which has $2 billion in assets and is run by Maounis and the firm’s president Josh Goldstein — declined to comment. The firm runs five strategies — equity, credit, quant, event-driven, and convertible arbitrage — that are all positive, individually, for the year.
Maounis is best known for his previous hedge fund, Amaranth Advisors, which closed in 2006 after a natural-gas trader lost billions in a trade gone wrong. He then started Verition in 2008, and has had success, with the firm’s flagship fund averaging roughly 13% annual returns since its launch, according to a source familiar with the figures.
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