Over my favourite Eggs Benedict on Lexington Avenue, I meet with Joe Pescatore. Now at sweet- spot, mid-tier investment bank Jefferies Asset Management the focus is a middle market hedge fund seeding platform. In fact he has been driving a major research initiative on seeding in conjunction with Boston –based CISDM, in response to investors’ requests for another measure to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. This is the first risk-adjusted systematic review of the business performance of funds at different levels of seeding intervention – versus no help at all. The results have showed clearly that those that have support perform better. “Investors need to know which ones are most likely to survive and why”.
Back on East 52nd Street I am delighted to catch up with one of the most experienced and successful veterans in the alternatives business Howard Berkowitz, MD, CEO of Blackrocks’s $22bn Fund of Funds business. I am sitting inches from one the eight original casts of Rodin’s “The Thinker” when Berkowitz tells me that low barriers to entry attract the best and worst managers means that ”Someone’s got to be the gatekeeper and do the ongoing due-diligence - the key is finding where the market inefficiencies lie and which is the best manager for the job”. He is hugely proud of his former role as Chairman of the influential Anti-Defamation League and now he is on the Executive Committee, Washington Institute for Near East Policy - committed to finding solutions to global terrorism that affects our world. I get up to go and he hands me a copy of “The Shia Revival“. ” If you want to know more about the most important movement that will affect the future of your children you must read this” he says.
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