The Ticker- Baruch students clamored into a packed classroom for the chance to heed the advice of two hedge fund veterans on Tuesday, Oct. 23. The Job$mart Career Hour featured Baruch alumnusLawrence Simon, a co-founder and the president of Ivy Asset Management Corp., and Bill Richards, the senior client relationship manager of hedge funds for UBS. Simon and Richards generously donatedtheir time to give a short overview of the hedge fund industry, inspiring personal histories and answered questions presented by Baruch students.
Simon embarked on his career as a self-declared “B-level” staff accountant. When his entrepreneurial spirit got the best of him, he co-founded Wall Street Concepts Inc., which provides computerizedinvestment securities record-keeping and performance measurement systems.
Simon ultimately sold the firm to McGraw-Hill. At that point, Simon founded Ivy Asset Management [named after a street he lived on] as a way to introduce wealthy investors to a diversified portfolioof managers that they normally would not have access to without an enormous amount of capital. The “fund of fund” concept took off. Ivy went from running $800,000 in 1984 to current assets undermanagement of $16 billion.
According to Simon, the typical day at a fund of funds involves tracking and analyzing managers. However, working for a fund of funds is not limited to being a trader or analyzing hedge funds.Numerous subdivisions such as accounting, I.T. and H.R. are necessary to facilitate Ivy’s success.
