Cliff Asness, the founder of quantitative investment firm AQR Capital, is backing a new ‘niche’ multistrategy hedge fund launched by former employee Brian Hurst and Goldman Sachs Group alumnus Elisha Wiesel, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Cliff Asness, the founder of quantitative investment firm AQR Capital, is backing a new ‘niche’ multistrategy hedge fund launched by former employee Brian Hurst and Goldman Sachs Group alumnus Elisha Wiesel, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Hurst who spent 21 years with AQR, and Wiesel, a 25-year Goldman Sachs veteran, began trading with Niche Plus – multi-manager platform ClearAlpha Technologies’ first fund – on Thursday with commitments of several hundred million dollars from Asness, Stable Asset Management and other institutional investors.
The fund, which as its name suggest will focus on niche strategies including temperature arbitrage, expects to have $1 billion within a year to deploy across 13 teams running 20 different strategies.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Hurst said: “We’re focusing on what we call niche alpha strategies, which are going to be off the beaten path.”
