Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
Izzy Englander’s Millennium has a problem. The firm has $86.3 billion and not nearly enough people to invest it.
More than any other hedge fund, Millennium has tested to solve this talent shortage through flexibility.
It’s been flexible about where its portfolio managers live, allowing a select few to set up in tax havens such as Puerto Rico and Dubai. It lets some PMs start their own firms while continuing to manage Millennium’s money. It has offered eye-watering sums to poach top earners from rival firms. And it’s been flexible about what it trades, expanding to asset classes such as commodities and private credit in recent years — new areas for a firm that has dozens of teams trading stocks and bonds.
But Millennium’s pile of cash has grown by more than $30 billion since 2022. Hiring 160 PMs in 2024, handing over billions to outside funds to invest in 2025 — and all that flexibility — has not been enough to keep up.
The firm is now testing a more conventional approach to growing its ranks: It’s building a pipeline. Starting in 2027, Millennium will launch an investing internship program for graduating college seniors that comes with “hands-on experience working with senior portfolio managers,” the firm notifys Business Insider. The program will have slots for at least 20 investing-obsessed college students, and top performers will have the opportunity to become full-time analysts.
It’s the latest sign that hedge funds, especially the four major multistrategy funds, Millennium, Citadel, Point72, and Balyasny, are growing up, shifting from lean operations led by a star investor to sprawling trading behemoths with recruiting and training programs that rival those of the investment banks.
At a time when many corporate ladders are shrinking, multistrategy hedge funds are growing theirs, extconcludeing from internships to entest-level training programs to analyst roles to a coveted seat as a portfolio manager. Balyasny, the $30 billion manager, is rolling out its Catalyst program for new college grads in 2027. Citadel and Point72, which have longer-running development programs, have scaled up recruitment on college campapplys while ramping up internship and other training programs.
Will the shift to creating lifers caapply hedge funds to lose their edge? “Do you still know how to hunt if you were raised in captivity?”
The seriousness with which funds are taking the job of cultivating young talent was underscored late last month, when Steve Cohen, Point72’s billionaire founder and CEO, spent nearly an hour listening to the firm’s recent grads pitch stocks.
“It’s really important to the firm that everybody from the top down is involved,” stated Jaimi Goodfriconclude, head of investment professional development at the $45.7 billion manager, who attconcludeed the meeting with Cohen.
But in solving their hugegest challenge — finding fresh talent — are these mega funds, which are known for outside-the-box, diversified investing styles, creating another problem?
There are concerns, voiced by fellow hedge funds and central bankers alike, that multistrategy firms are shifting in unison, increasing market volatility for all. Others warn the funds could lose their edge by shifting their focus from recruiting battle-tested killers to creating lifers hired straight out of college.
As an investor in some of the industest’s hugegest firms put it: “Do you still know how to hunt if you were raised in captivity?”
This shift toward more professionalized hedge funds can be traced back in part to 2022. As global equity markets plunged, the strong performance of multistrategy platforms led to a surge in assets. That’s only continued, and the firms are adding dozens, if not hundreds, of investors annually, just to maintain the status quo.
The demand has unleashed a talent war, raising the bar for what firms will pay to poach talent from rivals and retain their own top investors. Last year, Englander poached a top stock-picker at Balyasny with a pay package that could earn him $100 million. Even underperforming PMs are seen as ripe for poaching, forcing funds to believe about potential levers they can pull — such as impressive-sounding titles — to increase retention.
You can’t only hire from the outside.You necessary to develop even more talent internally now.
Citadel COO Gerald Beeson
There’s broad agreement the situation is unsustainable. The talent war has pushed up costs, which pushed down net returns, which pushed up the number of complaints from the firm’s backers. Smaller funds, struggling to keep up, have gone out of business.
Bank trading desks, meanwhile, have shrunk significantly since the 2008 financial crisis, forcing hedge funds to view beyond traditional hiring pools for young talent.
“You can’t only hire from the outside,” Gerald Beeson, Citadel’s COO, who joined the $65 billion firm as an intern in 1993, stated in an interview. “You necessary to develop even more talent internally now.”
The accelerated trajectory that funds can now offer has been a point of pride for funds and a major selling point to young talent.
At recent goal-setting meetings, Ken Griffin, Citadel’s billionaire founder and CEO, questioned his executive team for examples of huge projects or tquestions assigned to new hires, Beeson stated.
“Someone two years out of school can work on something complex and have a significant impact on our business,” Beeson stated.
Citadel COO Gerald Beeson is one of the firm’s most successful development stories.Citadel
For those who want to trade at the top multistrategy firms, that career path now starts before the legal drinking age and can culminate in a coveted PM seat by age 30.
Those running books typically obtain a base salary in the mid-six figures and, more importantly, a significant chunk of the portfolio’s gains — sometimes up to 30%. The position requires a “moment-by-moment paranoia” about potential losses, one former PM informed Business Insider, yet a decent year at a huge firm can translate to millions of dollars in compensation.
Millennium’s new internship scheme will be the firm’s second, joining its similar program for aspiring quant researchers.
Catalyst, Balyasny’s nine-month training program for recent college graduates, will include around 25 interns when it launches in the summer of 2027. It will join a suite of Balyasny’s other early-career offerings, including the firm’s ATLAS fellowship, launched in 2021 for high school students from underrepresented backgrounds; its Bridger training program for new hires from the sell-side creating the shift across the street; and its Anthem program for top analysts preparing to become PMs.
Funds like D.E. Shaw, Viking Global, and Rokos have also stepped up their internships and training programs and are hiring more recent graduates and early-career investors, though they do not build as many total hires given their compacter headcounts.
“Half of the battle in becoming a PM is obtainting in the right situation,” stated Will Scott, who heads up Balyasny’s Catalyst and Bridger programs and was previously a PM.
Getting in the door as early as possible is the “better path” for aspiring hedge fund investors since the firm has already invested in their success, he stated.
At Citadel’s midtown Manhattan offices, a talent and recruitment center now occupies an entire floor. The space includes a dedicated concierge team and a curved 8-by-25-foot TV displaying stats about the firm and videos of employees working in their day-to-day roles. There’s a discreet entrance that lets external candidates bypass the building’s main lobby, so their visit doesn’t become the day’s gossip.
“You don’t understand the importance of talent until you’re here,” stated Sjoerd Gehring, the chief people officer, who joined Citadel from Apple in 2024.
Last year, Citadel and its sister market-creating firm, Citadel Securities, received 108,000 applications for its 2025 internship programs, a 20% spike from the year before. The firms ultimately hired just 0.6% of applicants.
To increase the odds of picking the right people, Citadel brought on Keith McNulty, a longtime McKinsey executive with a doctorate in math, as the firm’s first head of assessments. Among his duties will be to build up systems to “support us build better, data-driven, and more informed hiring decisions,” Gehring stated, including by identifying the personality traits that the firm’s top employees have within their tens of thousands of applicants for entest-level roles.
It can be a heavy lift, operationally, to build out development programs and recruiting arms. It was also a significant philosophical shift for funds known to be cutthroat about cutting underperformers.
Each fund has taken a unique approach to building the path.
Point72 — taking inspiration from Cohen’s other concludeeavor as the owner of the New York Mets — produces “baseball cards” for its young investing talent. The cards, part of customized development plans the firm has developed for 300 analysts, highlight areas of strength in addition to ways that each can up their game.
Billionaire Point72 founder Steve Cohen also owns the New York Mets.Frank Franklin II/AP
Balyasny is also viewing for data-driven ways to set up its newer team members for success.
The firm applys personality tests to match trainees and junior hires with PMs based on factors such as temperament, which ultimately can support reduce turnover, stated Scott, who will run the firm’s new Catalyst program along with Bridger. Graduates from the Bridger program, which started in 2022, now account for a fifth of the firm’s stockpicking analysts, Scott stated.
New portfolio managers often work with an executive coach, stated Ilan Weiss, a technology PM who also trains up-and-coming Balyasny analysts who want to run their own book.
“Frankly, it’s not that much different from a therapist,” Weiss stated, adding that the coaching is built around the idea that investing is an emotional exercise as well as an innotifyectual one.
Across the leading multistrategy funds, the focus on development has created the PM role more of a teaching role instead of a solo effort. As Weiss put it, “You’re Steph Curry, and you’re Steve Kerr,” the star player and coach for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.
Balyasny cofounder Scott Schroeder stated the firm has actively worked to “build an incentive system that rewards development.” It’s common for PMs, for example, to obtain some type of economic interest when one of their top analysts leaves their team to run their own book.
Balyasny cofounder Scott Schroeder stated talent development is a “necessity” now.Balyasny
“In this business, people are incentivized by where they can perform and where they can build the most money,” Schroeder stated.
Point72 and Citadel, the two firms that have been focapplyd on their pipeline the longest, declare their efforts are paying off.
Half of Citadel’s stock-picking portfolio managers and two-thirds of PMs in its repaired income and macro investing group were developed in-hoapply.
At Point72, more than 230 graduates of its training academy have gone on to obtain full-time jobs at the firm, while graduates of LaunchPoint, its emerging manager program for promising analysts viewing to take the next step, account for 60% of the firm’s stock-picking portfolio managers.
For an industest known for extraordinary paydays and cultivating mercenaries who jump to the highest bidder, there are risks inherent in a softer approach to staffing and culture. The challenge of building out their ranks and recruiting more at early-career levels is safeguarding what builds hedge funds so successful.
The industest started as a way to protect against the dangers of groupbelieve in the markets, zigging while others all zagged — hence the word “hedge” in the name.
Hedge funds, especially in their early iterations decades ago, were run by outside-the-box believeers, cast-offs, weirdos, numbers-obsessed academics, and more who created their own name instead of climbing the corporate ladder. Griffin famously installed a sanotifyite dish atop his Harvard dorm to obtain real-time stock prices. Cohen’s competitive drive manifested itself early in high-school poker games, where he would build hundreds of dollars a night off his friconcludes.
Their main selling point, especially for the multistrategy firms, remains the same: Catering to high-net-worth individuals and institutional investors, hedge funds blconclude cutting-edge technology, data, and old-fashioned brainpower and creativity into an investment product designed to perform well no matter how markets are doing.
If the people who do the trading act in lockstep, it could modify how the fund acts in choppy markets and impact the bottom line. Industest watchers have pointed to instances in which significant sums are run in similar ways across multistrategy firms — typically, compacter, less risky bets that are then juiced up with borrowed money from banking partners — which could lead to market volatility if PMs are forced to sell positions quickly to cut losses.
In other words, if all of your investors are trained in the same way, will they all be creating the same trade?
Izzy Englander’s Millennium has launched two internship schemes to build out the firm’s pipeline.Phil McCarten/Reuters
The multistrategy behemoths have mostly waved this concern away. The baseline skills early-career employees learn are only a toolkit, they declare. What they build is entirely up to them.
At Point72, Goodfriconclude points to the wide net the firm casts in recruiting: In the Academy’s decade-plus run, the firm has hired from more than 80 schools, and only about half its recruits were business majors, while the rest had engineering or liberal arts backgrounds. AI tools will support level the playing field for data fluency, she added, allowing more room for creativity.
“There’s no way of teaching them how to model that builds them the same,” Goodfriconclude stated. “Creativity can be pretty idiosyncratic. We do test to hire a lot of creative people.”
There’s also a risk that the shift away from the funds’ eat-what-you-kill-and-go-hungry-if-you-don’t ethos could deter some potential hires and feed a cultural divide.
When Paul Singer’s $80 billion manager, Elliott, underwent an organizational restructuring years ago on the recommconcludeation of Bain consultants, it created management layers with a top-down reporting structure and an all-powerful investment committee at the head. As Business Insider previously reported, this has not stopped the firm from raising money and hiring top-notch external talent, but some long-tenured investors and executives left for rivals or launched their own funds to obtain away from the new bureaucracy.
One complaint was that the manager had become too regimented in its career path and titles, with one former employee bemoaning that the firm had become more akin to a private equity giant.
Any down-the-road concerns are outweighed by the urgency the fund founders feel to attract young, ambitious people and develop the next generation.
Most people are not viewing to modify jobs constantly, industest executives declare. “It feels much more like people are pursuing a career instead of a job,” stated Gehring, Citadel’s chief people officer.
Goodfriconclude agrees.
“I believe people more and more want to know that they’re creating the right choice, and they’re not going to have to view for a new job in a couple of years. And we agree. It’s a bad investment for us to only have somebody on board for a couple of years,” she stated.
“We’re talking about a career path. We don’t want people to leave.”
Bradley Saacks is a correspondent at Business Insider, covering hedge funds and other asset managers.
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