Billionaire Rokos Tightens Reins at $9 Billion Hedge Fund

(Bloomberg) -- Billionaire Chris Rokos is back to calling all the shots at his $9 billion eponymous hedge fund firm.

London-based Rokos Capital Management is merging the portfolios previously run by individual traders into a single pool of money, allowing it to place bigger bets, Alan Kilkenny, a spokesman for the firm, said in an emailed statement.

“Rather than being responsible for individual capital allocations across a series of smaller trading books, product specialists will work within a core portfolio team led by Chris Rokos,” Kilkenny said on Friday.

Even before concentrating decision-making, Rokos managed about 70% of the risk taken by his firm, Kilkenny said. The fund returned about 6.6% through September this year, surpassing the HFRI Macro Discretionary Thematic Index gain of 4.3%.

With this move, Rokos, whose wealth is estimated at $1.4 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is resuming the role he played when he started the firm in 2015. Investors such as Blackstone Group Inc. poured cash into the hedge fund, lured by the reputation for macro trading that Rokos built as a co-founder of Brevan Howard Asset Management.

As Rokos Capital continued to raise money in the years that followed, it expanded its investment team in areas such as credit trading, energy and oil markets. Hires this year include former Brevan Howard partner Stephane Nicolas and Jason Feasey, a former BlueCrest Capital Management credit portfolio manager.

Core Portfolio

When Rokos started the fund, he told investors that he would personally take the majority of the risk, according to a presentation to investors at the time. Now he’s resuming that role: all investment decisions will be made by the core portfolio team with guidance from the portfolio managers.

The move marks a growing trend in the $3 trillion hedge fund industry, where star managers are taking matters back into their own hands. In 2016, billionaire macro trader Paul Tudor Jones told his investors that he would manage a larger chunk of their money himself. A year later, Alan Howard started to raise money for a new hedge fund which he would oversee personally.

Rokos co-founded Brevan Howard and made $4 billion for the firm from 2004 to 2012. He raced ahead of Brevan Howard in terms of assets under management last year.

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.