By Reed Alexander and Bradley Saacks, Excerpt curated by BAM Team
In September 2020, BAM’s Director of Research, Bill Wappler, spoke to Business Insider about our firm’s Anthem L/S Equity Program, which was designed to give high-performing senior analysts a path to portfolio manager status.
Below we have copied a segment of the article subsequently published by Business Insider titled, “Inside $8.3 billion Balyasny's Anthem training program, where aspiring portfolio managers are handed hundreds of millions of dollars to prove they can cut it.” To read the full article, click here.
At Dmitry Balyasny's $8.3 billion hedge-fund manager, ambitious senior analysts from both within the firm and outside it have had a clear path to becoming a portfolio manager: the four-year-old Anthem program.
Run by Bill Wappler, the program — named after an Ayn Rand book — can run for anywhere from 12 months to two years. Only a select few participants have made the cut so far.
Just 10 people have graduated from the program since its first cohort of analysts in 2016; a total of 37 have entered, and 17 remain in the program, while 10 have left the Chicago-based firm altogether.
"They join the program for usually one reason: They aspire to have their own portfolio," said Wappler, the director of research for the firm who leads the Anthem program. He formerly worked for billionaire Steve Cohen's SAC Capital as associate director of research, handling analyst training and development.
Wappler sees the program as a success, having produced multiple graduates who are managing hundreds of millions in assets for the firm. What's more, each year since it started training analysts four years ago, the program has inducted progressively larger numbers of enrollees.
