20-Year-Old Preps Global Macro/Stat. Arb Hedge Fund

Date: Thursday, April 24, 2008
Author: FINalternatives

You’re probably familiar with Tim Sykes, the 26-year-old hedge fund manager named as one of the industry's most promising young stars by Trader Monthly two years ago, or maybe even Evan Vaughan, who at the ripe old age of 24 launched his first hedge fund last January.

But 20-year-old Kirill Evseev aims to beat both: The rookie hedge fund manager is launching a global macro and statistical arbitrage fund next month dubbed Bank Street Global Advisors, and is in current talks with seeding firms to get his fund off the ground.

Evseev, along with his partner Josh Hirsch, a 34-year-old hedge fund rookie, worked for a private trading firm for a few years and ran a group of traders before entering the profitable world of hedge funds. What’s even more unconventional about Evseev’s pedigree is the fact that he skipped college and started trading straight out of high school.

The new fund will be evenly split between global macro and statistical arbitrage, according to Evseev, who added that the fund is also investing in emerging markets and international equities, options, commodities.

Evseev said the sectors that have outperformed in the first quarter will “continue to be the market leaders” including natural gas, oil drillers and exploration, chemicals, and coal companies.

“We specifically like Apache Corp. in the natural gas arena, and Arch Coal as a pure coal play,” he said. “The fertilizer and chemical companies have had quite a run lately, but we still believe there is tremendous room for growth in these names.”

On the international front, he said that markets look “quite healthy” and the significant pullback in the Asian markets have made the price-earnings ratios for some companies very attractive. He likes companies such as China Mobile, which recently posted a 37% rise in quarterly net profit on strong subscriber growth.

He also thinks that the credit crisis is going to take as least a year to “flush through the system” and said the firm will continue to focus on commodity and inflation bets, “which we believe are in the seventh inning of a decade long bull market.”