Kenneth Griffin, founder of one of the largest and most successful hedge fund firms in the world, has his own take on time.
His vision for the now $13 billion business stretches well beyond the time horizons of those of most of his hedge fund peers, who typically measure performance in years, not decades. That’s because running Citadel Investment Group is the only job the 41-year-old Griffin has ever had.
“This was not something that I started when I was 55 as a second career after Wall Street,” he explains, sitting in a conference room on the 37th floor of Citadel’s Chicago headquarters on a recent overcast autumn day. “This is something I started when I was 21. So from day one, I’ve always had a very different perspective on time and what time means and what the end goal might be.”
For much of the first two decades of Citadel’s existence, the end goal was simple: to build one of the preeminent alternative-asset management firms in the world. Griffin, who famously began his investment career trading convertible bonds from his dorm room at Harvard University, did just that. By early 2008 he was overseeing an army of more than 1,200 at Citadel, whose flagship Kensington and Wellington multistrategy funds had delivered net annualized returns of about 28 percent, soundly beating the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, which was up 11.4 percent a year during the same period. ....