Skirting close to the boundaries of good taste comes New York magazine, which as part of a special feature on hedge funds has a listing of the hedge fund wives and girlfriends. This must be the NYC equivalent of the England football team’s infamous assortment of wives and girlfriends, collectively known as the Wags. Which would make their US counterparts what? The H-Wags, the Hedgehogs, or perhaps just the Hags?
Except of course, to a woman, this bunch look impeccably turned out, and have CVs to die for.
There’s Lisa Perry at number one, wife of Richard Perry, who heads the $12.3bn Perry fund. She’s a graduate of New York’s Fashion Insitute of Technology, a vintage sixties-clothing collector with her own line of retro-styled threads, and a fervent supporter of one Senator Clinton’s current campaign.
At number two is Anne Dias Griffin, wife of Ken Griffin at Citadel – a Harvard alumna, who worked at Goldman Sachs in London before founding the $55m Aragon Global Management.
Next up is former social worker Margaret Munzer Loeb, wife of Daniel Loeb, head of the Third Point fund, who graduated Brown and NYU’s School of Social Work and is a former yoga instructor.
Rounding out the top six are Danielle Ganek, wife of David Ganek who runs Level Global, Gail Golden, who counts Carl Icahn as her other half, and Amy Robbins, wife of Larry Robbins of Glenview Capital Management.
Besides the Hello-mag style fluff, New York in its feature, asks “Isn’t it time you stopped pretending to understand what a hedge fund is?” before launching into a somewhat superficial attempt to brief its public on the subject, with such insights as:
“It can be really, really boring to work at a hedge fund,”
or
“Hedge funds sometimes get confused with private equity,”
and, bafflingly, on the same subject,
“You can think of them as products of the yin and yang of Wall Street’s traditional powerhouses.”
There’s also a ranking of the great and good of the industry – as opposed to their other halves – based on a poll of 10 industry insiders. Steve Cohen tops the Top Dogs ranking, James Simons at Renaissance leads the braniac quants pack, with Daniel Loeb (courtesy of that email exchange with a potential European recruit) number one of the Bad Boys.