Where Hedge Fund Investors Are Based — and Why New York Is Still King

• A review of regulatory filings of the biggest multimanagers reveals New York’s continued supremacy.
• Managers like Citadel and Balyasny have most of their PMs in New York, even if they are headquartered elsewhere.
• Despite interest in places like Miami, investing talent remains in established locales.

This week, the $4.5 trillion hedge fund industry is gathered in Miami for iConnections’ annual Global Alts conference. Nearly all of them will leave the Magic City after the conference concludes.

While some big names have fled high-tax cities like New York and Chicago for sunny spots like Miami and West Palm Beach, especially amid the pandemic-era buzz over Wall Street South, the data show that New York is still the place to be for money-managing talent.

Regulatory filings for the industry’s largest multimanagers, including Citadel, Millennium, and Point72, show that a vast majority of those who “perform investment advisory functions” work from the Big Apple. Including the three aforementioned managers as well as Balyasny, Schonfeld, ExodusPoint, Verition, Walleye, and Hudson Bay, more than 75% of investing talent works in New York, a Business Insider review of ADVs and internal metrics from certain funds show.

(Story continues after graphic. The ADVs, while updated throughout the year, show a snapshot of the investing head count for each firm from March, so the data reflects firms’ staffing from last spring.)

Even managers not based in New York — such as Citadel, Point72, Verition, Hudson Bay, and Balyasny — have more investing talent in Gotham than their respective headquarters in Florida, Connecticut, and Illinois. Walleye, which was once based in Minnesota and still has 21 investors in Minneapolis, moved its headquarters to New York at the end of 2023 and now has dozens more traders there than any other office.

“It’s an apprenticeship business,” Adam Kahn, founder of headhunter firm Odyssey Search Partners, told Business Insider. “For the most part, the opportunity to surround yourself with the best people is going to be in major money centers.”

“If you want to sit next to your PM, you need to be where your PM is,” he said. And while there are senior leaders who have decamped to sunnier, cheaper spots around the country, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco still have a significant concentration of people.

Greenwich and Stamford, a pair of bedroom communities of the New York metro, have also continued to be important centers of gravity for hedge funds, which have become a part of the social fabric of these Connecticut towns.

Citadel’s talent breakdown, according to its ADV showing data from last March, is interesting given the firm’s billionaire founder’s preference for Miami. Ken Griffin, who is originally from Florida, moved his firm’s headquarters south from Chicago in 2022 and has commented that one day, the city could surpass New York as a financial center — though he still referred to Manhattan as the…