Unlike many hedge fund managers, Israel Englander -- No. 164 on the Forbes Billionaires List -- doesn't obsess over individual investments but funnels money to money managers who have proven their mettle over time. Here, we'll talk about the history, investment strategy, career highlights, and influence of this famous investor.
Primary role
Israel Englander is founder, chairman, and CEO of Millennium Management, a New York-based hedge fund that manages $78 billion in assets.
Israel Englander's investment strategy
Englander has built Millennium into a leading hedge fund by focusing on substance rather than style. Working with more than 320 investment teams, Millennium imposes strict stop-loss requirements on its managers. A team that loses 5% of its capital has its allocation halved; a manager who loses 7.5% is usually fired.
The strategy has paid off in good times and bad times. During the dot-com bust in 2000, the S&P 500 index fell 10%, while Millennium reported a 35% return. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when the S&P plunged 38%, Millennium lost about 3.5%.
Since its creation in 1989, the fund has averaged a 14% annual return. While the approach has clearly been a success for the company, it's a major contributor to the company's high annual turnover of 15% to 20%.
Career highlights
The son of Polish immigrants, Israel Englander grew up in the Bronx, New York, and was trading stocks before graduating from high school. He studied finance and graduated in 1970 from New York University (where he would later take night classes for an MBA he never completed).
Englander began his career at the Wall Street firm of Kaufmann, Alsberg & Co., a trading, investment banking, and brokerage firm. After the American Stock Exchange began listing options, Englander decided to buy a seat on the exchange and launch his own firm in 1977, specializing in options.
At the time, the options market was new. Englander built his reputation by advising large proprietary trading desks, such as Goldman Sachs (GS +2.00%), about the business.
It turned out to be a very substantial business because at that time, the options market was in its infancy…and in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Englander and a partner, John Mulheren Jr., launched Jamie Securities Co. (an acronym of their initials) in 1985. However, the venture proved to be one of his least successful.
Mulheren, who had worked for convicted insider trader Ivan Boesky, was himself convicted in 1988 of making illegal trades for Boesky. Although the conviction was ultimately overturned, the firm was dissolved later that year due to the poor publicity.
You get beat up along the way, but you figure out ways to continue.
Englander laid the foundation for his multibillion-dollar fortune in 1989, when he created Millennium Management. He launched the hedge fund with $35 million, and it quickly gained steam through techniques such as quantitative analysis, convertible arbitrage, merger arbitrage, and fundamental analysis.
By mid-2025, Millennium had $78 billion in assets under management (AUM), with 6,300 employees in almost 150 locations making more than 13 million trades every day.
Millennium spun off the quantitative investment management firm WorldQuant in 2007, allowing WorldQuant to focus on statistical arbitrage. It has grown to manage roughly 15% of Millennium's assets, using data mining and artificial intelligence. It has a library of 4 million pieces of predictive code known as "alphas" that are based on data sets ranging from credit card receipts to parking lot traffic.
Millennium changed its fee structure in 2022, charging investors an annual fee of either 1% of assets or 20% of investment gains. Englander, who is the sole owner of the fund and has been described as "press-shy," has also begun taking steps to open up the fund to outside investors. Englander and Millennium employees own about $10 billion of the fund's assets.
Since its 1989 inception, Millennium has lost money in only one year: 2008. The fund took a $900 million hit in March 2025 due to a couple of missed bets on index rebalancing. The 1.3% loss, Millennium's first loss of more than 1% since 2018, would have been fairly humdrum for most hedge funds but was notable given the fund's lengthy record of positive returns.
In mid-2025, Millennium began expanding its reach beyond its traditional investors of sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and institutional investors. A Goldman Sachs-created special purpose vehicle (SPV) began offering equity stakes of 10% to 15% in Millennium to high-net-worth individuals, charging a 3% management fee and 30% carry fee on a minimum investment of $1 million with a five-year lockup period.
Englander was the top earner among hedge fund managers in 2024, according to Bloomberg, which reported that he made $2.4 billion through investment gains and $1.4 billion in fund performance fees.
Philosophy and legacy
Englander's approach to investing -- allocating capital to individual "pods" -- has highlighted the benefits of diversification and decentralizing risk, ensuring that no individual investment can significantly damage the entire portfolio.
In addition, Englander has demonstrated the advantages of using multiple tools to benefit investors. While a great deal of attention has been paid to his fund's use of algorithms and statistical analyses, Englander is known for keeping a careful eye on the fundamentals of businesses.
Related investing topics
Awards and honors
- Highest-earning hedge fund manager, 2024, Bloomberg
- Highest-earning hedge fund manager, 2024, Institutional Investor
- Top 200 Collectors, 2024, Art News
- Highest-earning hedge fund manager, 2020, Institutional Investor
- Recognized by Weill Cornell Medical Center with Englander Institute for Precision Medicine, Israel Englander Department of Dermatology and Israel Englander Department of Ophthalmology
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