Bobby Jain on hedge fund Jain Global now: "Small town feel, big town resources"

Bobby Jain, founder of hedge fund Jain Global, has done another podcast. It's well over an hour long and involves Bobby talking to Bloomberg journalist Nishant Kumar about his thoughts, of which he has many.

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Jain Global agreed to manage money exclusively for Millennium in April and has been doing so since September. Talking to Kumar, Bobby said Millennium is now "a separate business [to Jain Global], with a common investor base." There are information barriers between the two firms, he added. 

Jain Global is hiring. Bobby said the fund has hired 20 portfolio managers since the deal with Millennium took place. He's spending a lot of time growing the platform, he said. The Millennium deal has facilitated this. 

But why would you join Jain Global now, instead of - say - Millennium, whose money Jain Global is exclusively managing anyway? Bobby said Jain Global has a special culture. "The message of small town feel big town resources is resonating," he elaborated.

At some firms the "product is autonomy," said Bobby. Jain Global can do autonomy. But it can also offer a "collaborative environment." People want to "feel that their partners or bosses are in the trenches with them." They want to see that all resources are being leveraged. 

This is the small town vibe. Jain Global's 'big town resources' are coming from Millennium, where Bobby himself worked for seven years before going it alone. He says the recent move to manage money exclusively for Millennium came after a dinner with some former Millennium colleagues. "I think it’s fair to say that Millennium didn’t realise the breadth of activities that we had and the return on deployed capital…," he said. When he mentioned that he was planning to raise more money for the "second phase of our development," Jain said Millennium wanted in. Jain Global generated gross returns on called capital of 41% in its first two years of operation.  

Millennium's resources include its big town AI investments. Bobby said he'd been able to build Jain Global's own technology infrastructure relatively quickly using AI. But gaining access to things like compute, data, and the system and expertise to make the most of AI is a different matter. This could take up to five years, said Jain. For this reason, he thinks AI will drive consolidation across the hedge fund industry as a whole.

Millennium's AI is "powerful," said Bobby. When he saw just how powerful, he said he could see how it would catapult Jain Global's own development into the future. This seems to have been a major reason for the Millennium deal from Bobby's perspective.

Now that Bobby Jain is able to spend more time being a CIO than a CEO, he said he's particularly focused on "talent acceleration." The best portfolio managers don't just like picking stocks and attending investor days but know know how to construct portfolios and how to deal with drawdowns, said Jain. "Izzy likes to say 'Everyone can buy, not everyone can sell',” Bobby recalled.

Bobby Jain is in his mid-50s. When he did his last major podcast in February, he said that his parents taught him that life goes in cycles: "They taught us from the age of 5 to 20, focus on education, 20 to 35, focus on career, 35 to 50, focus on family, 50 to 65 on service, 65 to 80 on philanthropy, 80 to 95 on spiritualism." In the latest podcast, he implied he might work for another 20 years. 

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