The talent nexus: Building tomorrow's hedge fund leaders

Episode notes

What does it take to build the next generation of hedge fund leaders? The hedge fund industry is evolving — fast. In our latest InvestorExchange episode, Leslie Eisen joins host Chris Perret to explore how Wellington is redefining talent development, from mentorship and specialization to the skills needed to compete in this growing industry.

Listen to “The talent nexus: Building tomorrow’s hedge fund leaders.”

1:45 Leslie’s background and love of people

5:20 Getting portfolio manager from good to great

8:50 Example of helping a PM “see the ball”

10:10 Update on talent development at Wellington

14:30 Future of talent development

Transcript

Leslie Eisen: In order to be competitive in this market, you have to grow and develop talent organically. Not only does that create cultural match, but from a skillset perspective, once you learn what is successful here on this platform, you can recreate that.

Chris Perret: In performance driven industries, talent is everything. Whether it's auto racing, which requires knowledge of physics, mechanics, and engineering; or investing, which requires deep understanding of markets, economics, and human behavior.

Success hinges on expertise across multiple disciplines. And that’s getting harder and harder to find. Today, the hedge fund industry is at the epicenter of the race for talent. The rise of the platform model has only intensified the need for specialized teams of portfolio managers and analysts who can uncover alpha opportunities across geographies, asset classes and sectors. As Wellington’s CEO is known to say, our most valuable assets walk out the door every night. The importance of attracting, retaining and developing investment talent is more acute than ever. 

Hello and welcome to the Wellington InvestorExchange. My name is Chris Perret, platform leader for Wellington's hedge fund business. Joining me today is Leslie Eisen, head of the equity long/short business here on our platform. There is no better person to speak to on the topic of investment talent. Leslie has devoted her career to identifying and developing portfolio managers and analysts across multiple hedge fund organizations. And her passion and devotion to human capital is unmatched. Leslie, welcome to the show. It's great to have you.

Leslie Eisen: Thank you so much for having me. This is so exciting.

Chris Perret: So why don't we get started? Leslie, I'd love to hear about your background, your story. How did you come to Wellington? Let's get into it.

Leslie Eisen: So I have been a Wellington for three years. I started my career on the sell side as an analyst. And I transitioned into research management on the sell side. And, I managed the equity research associates. There was 120 of them. I had been an associate, became an analyst, and I met with all 120 associates and said, “how can I help you?” And they said, “I want to be an analyst, how did you do it?” And so my first task was to come up with a development program to train associates to become analysts. And for me, it was easy enough for me to go to my playbook and go to what I went through, what worked for me. I learned how to pitch to the salesforce and diligence companies and interview company management and carve out a niche of my own, and came up with this development program called the associate analyst program. I worked on this program and was recruited by SAC capital at the time, which is now Point72. And my first task at hand was to meet with the portfolio managers and to really understand their process, to be able to help them hire analysts. And once we had critical mass of this analyst population, we were able to focus more on development programs and teaching these analysts how to become senior idea generators and then eventually risk takers and portfolio managers. Fast forward ten years. I joined, former CPM and who wanted to launch a fund of his own, and he hired me as his COO. We launched April 1st, 2016, with a full team of 15 people, raised about $500 million. And it was great. But if you know anything about the energy cycle, you know how the story ends. And we eventually liquidated the fund. I got back on track to working at another large asset management firm who wanted me to focus on talent development. They had roughly 50 portfolio managers globally, and I was tasked to help each of them grow in scale and then help onboard new portfolio manager talent and help them do the same. Wellington found me through a recruiter. I actually didn't know one person here. And joined, as I mentioned three years ago, my first role here was as a director of research, where I oversaw a handful of investment professionals across a few sectors. And about a year ago, I joined the alternatives team overseeing the long/short equity business.

Chris Perret: So there's a lot of roles in this business. What has always gravitated you towards the people side of things?

Leslie Eisen: I self-reflected when I was an analyst and I knew I wasn't a great analyst, and I wasn't going to be a great PM. But I loved the business. I still love the business, I love stocks.

Chris Perret: And what do you love about it?

Leslie Eisen: I love, investment process. I love being challenged every day. I love that it forces people to learn from mistakes on a daily basis, and you get a scorecard every day, and it's one of the hardest businesses that challenges people. It's intellectually interesting, it's dynamic and changing, and I love all of those pieces. I'm probably not a great risk taker, which is why I didn't go down the path of being a PM. But I can identify those who are, and I can identify those who are passionate about the same things. I fell into the research management role after giving up being an analyst, and the first task that I mentioned to you was this development program, and it blew me away, and it really did set the tone. What I said, in terms of what I want to do the rest of my career.

Chris Perret: So you mentioned you have an eye for talent. What makes a good PM and or analyst and especially in today's environment?

Leslie Eisen: Yeah, great question and interesting how you ask it, because I would celebrate awesome analysts. I would celebrate career analysts who make amazing analysts. And there is so much pressure or thought around analysts having to become PMs. But the truth is the best analysts are those who are comfortable doing that. That's not to say analysts can’t be great portfolio managers. Of course they can. 

Chris Perret: Different skill set in a lot of ways, right?

Leslie Eisen: Totally different skill set risk manager versus doing the analytical deep dives. The best teams are those who have both excellent portfolio managers and excellent analysts. And your question was, how do I identify solid talent? And it has evolved over the years. But there are some consistent themes. Those who can fail and get back up quickly, those who can re-underwrite a process, a stock, a thought, a theme, who are unemotional about making these decisions. They're stocks, not emotions or people. Those who have a repeatable process that is scalable, those who can learn, have a deep intellectual curiosity of learning. And those things have not changed over time. What has changed in my time in this business is back in the good old days, you could invest in stocks and companies that were fundamentally changing for the better, and you could short stocks that had poor business models. Now, that is one of many pieces of a mosaic in terms of making investment decisions. There are technicals and there are sentiment issues, and there are factors to consider. And those who are able to be nimble enough, who are humble enough to change constantly are those who are most successful. 

Chris Perret: Let's talk about talent development. Something you're really passionate about. What's the key to success there? How do you get a PM or analyst from good to great.

Leslie Eisen: I get that question all the time. My first answer is always you can't call it investment talent. You have to call it human development because so much of what goes into developing talent is around mental health and thinking through process. And are you thinking clearly? Are you seeing the ball? What resources do you need? How are you spending your time? Are you glued to the screen? Things that sounds so obvious, but I don't sit down with portfolio managers and tell them how to risk-manage differently. What I do is I ask questions about how you're seeing the ball, and that can inform a portfolio manager and their level of conviction. They appreciate being able to talk about the process out loud and being challenged, and holes being poked into their process, as opposed to teaching them how to be a better portfolio manager. I am a part of it, but I can't take full responsibility into the ecosystem we have here at Wellington in terms of helping portfolio managers. We have strategists. We have macro investors that inform equity investors. We have risk tools, we have systems. We have data vendors, corporate access, the research team and the engine of the firm as a centralized resource. All of these things are at the fingertips of portfolio managers and analysts here in the hedge fund group. And it's my job to direct the team members on accessing those resources appropriately.

Chris Perret: Leslie, I love this concept of you helping PMs see the ball. Can you share an example of how you've done that in the past?

Leslie Eisen: Sure. So many. I can think of one portfolio manager who was going through a drawdown, and you really never know how good a portfolio manager is until you see them go through a drawdown. And the portfolio manager came into my office, had three analysts, and said, I don't know what to do, but I was going through a drawdown and was essentially paralyzed and wasn't looking for me to push back on the portfolio, but was looking for help on being able to reengage. I spoke about reconnecting with his analysts, and the best way to do that was to underwrite every position in the portfolio. It sounds like a tedious task at hand, but what that did solve is reconnect him with his analysts, who he had shut out of his office and process because he was paralyzed. And, he reconnected with an analyst, gained conviction in the names that he wanted to express and cut the positions that the team had didn't have any conviction in. And it was a slow grind. But the benefit that came out of that conversation was reengaging with the analysts a., and pulling out of the drawdown.

Chris Perret: That's great. So you started getting into telling us a little bit about what we're building here at Wellington talent wise. So how are those efforts going?

Leslie Eisen: Great. We have an amazing team of portfolio managers and analysts within the hedge fund group who have been here for some time. We're also in the process of hiring new portfolio managers from the outside. I've interviewed probably hundreds since I've been in the seat, and I'm excited to bring on, and we've hired a handful of new PMs who are in the process of starting, and our story seems to be resonating with them.

Chris Perret: So what do PMS find surprising when they come to Wellington?

Leslie Eisen: Right. The first question I get is, oh, I didn't know Wellington has long short equity. And so it's an education of our history and the story of how long we've had hedge funds, which, as you know, has been over 30 years, and educating them on what, what we're building and what we're looking for. And after the education, they get very excited about our ecosystem. Today's environment is very competitive around talent. And there are many fabulous firms out there that have hired many people and who have many portfolio managers. What we're offering is just something different. We aren't competing necessarily with the exact offering of some of the other firms. We have our own pitch, and it seems, again, to be resonating with candidates.

Chris Perret: So I'm sure you've perfected the pitch at this point. What's the what's the Wellington pitch in terms of PMs or analysts that you're speaking with?

Leslie Eisen: The one thing that seems to be resonating most with candidates is our duration. The pitch is to come here for duration, duration of capital as well as well as duration of career. So leading with that conclusion gets them interested. We also appreciate portfolio managers to be investors again, to take risk, to take tilts and to leverage all of the skills they've grown up as, as investors to collaborate with an incredible ecosystem to come in and day one, have access to a research engine, as well as plug in to our corporate access and to plug into our research tools is attractive, while also offering an entrepreneurial offering to help build and grow a business 

Chris Perret: So let's switch gears now. What asset classes and strategies are seeing increased demand? And how is Wellington addressing those shifts?

Leslie Eisen: Low-net long-short equity is a very competitive and attractive market right now for many reasons. We're playing that same game as well. And many of the people that we have hired and are looking to hire fall into that asset class. I don't want the pitch to just be qualitative. It's actually economic.

Chris Perret: So Leslie, one thing that's very apparent, we see it every day is just the compensation piece as it relates to, the talent mosaic and having a competitive offering. How are we addressing that piece.

Leslie Eisen: My very first conversation with any candidate is explaining to them who we are and who were not. And our model is not looking to pay incredibly large packages to someone for one, two, three years. Going back to the duration, we're looking for someone to come here for the next 15, 20 years the rest of their career. And economically, I would argue we are extremely competitive over the duration of the time a portfolio manager is here in different ways. And we do that not only through direct compensation and a competitive payout on the product, but there are other levers to pull as a portfolio manager here and to be able to be paid with multiple economic streams. Additionally, we are a private partnership, and the path to being a partner here is part of the pitch for economics. We're looking for people who want to be part of our collaborative culture. And becoming a partner is not just an economic thing, it is someone identifying people who want to be part of the dialog and who truly want to help build something and make the firm a better place.

Chris Perret: I think the entrepreneurial piece is huge, especially in a world where you really in some cases don't have that option because a lot of these firms are, at this point, really growing.

Leslie Eisen: It's a good point. The candidates I'm speaking with who have tried to run their own funds are those who are most excited about making that switch because they still can be an entrepreneur. Come here, still build a business, but have the resources available to them to help grow, their own business the way they were hoping to be able to do that on their own.

Chris Perret: So what are your thoughts on the future of talent, both from a development, from a recruiting perspective? Where does this go?

Leslie Eisen: In order to be competitive in this market, you have to grow and develop talent organically. Not only does that create cultural match, but from a skill set perspective, once you learn, what is successful here on this platform, you can recreate that. We have an emerging manager program.  And that is a program that works on developing talent by allowing them to incubate. So they are actually running a portfolio with a small amount of capital and have a curriculum to sit with risk managers to sit with other portfolio managers, have a mentor, have a chance to present to the board on an annual basis, and that is something I'm really excited about doing.

Chris Perret: So. So, Leslie, one more question as we wrap up. You you've experienced a lot. You've seen a lot in this industry based on that, if you could go back into, your college days and, and take some more class and something, what would that be?

Leslie Eisen: I wish I took more classes in psychology. In fact, I wish I went to graduate school for psychology. So much of trading is around psychology, and I've spent many hours with portfolio managers and trying to help where I can. If I could go back and get a degree in psychology, I would only be better.

Chris Perret: That's great, Leslie, thank you for your time today. This has been incredibly insightful. Again, your experience and knowledge and insights on talent, you know, and what is a huge topic in this industry I know will be very beneficial for our listeners. So thank you again. It's been great having you on the show.

Leslie Eisen: Thank you for having me.

Views expressed are those of the speaker(s) and are subject to change. Other teams may hold different views and make different investment decisions. For  professional/institutional investors only. Your capital may be at risk. Podcast produced November 2025.

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