Little-known hedge fund boss joins Steve Cohen, Ken Griffin as Wall Street’s top earners

Little-known hedge fund manager Said Haidar reportedly joined heavyweights like Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and Mets owner Steve Cohen on the list of Wall Street’s top earners last year after his firm secured a massive 193% return.

The Haidar Capital Management boss earned $859 million through gains on his personal investments and the share of his firm’s performance, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The huge windfall placed him sixth on the outlet’s ranking of the top-earning hedge fund managers of 2022.

Haidar, a former Lehman Brothers traders who launched his hedge fund more than 25 years ago, earned the windfall by correctly betting that decades-high inflation would force the Federal Reserve and other central banks to steadily hike interest rates.

He used a method known as leveraged rates trading to benefit from the policy tightening trend to amass assets worth $63 billion – despite starting the year overseeing just $1.2 billion.

“For the last year, investors have been prematurely anticipating an early end to central bank rate hikes, followed by rate cuts almost immediately thereafter,” Haidar wrote in a letter to clients last September, according to Bloomberg. “But as inflation globally has proven stickier than originally thought, central banks have become more forceful in countering this narrative.” 

The Fed implemented seven straight rate hikes last year, including several supercharged increases, as policymakers aimed to cool the economy and bring down prices. More rate hikes are expected this year.

Citadel’s Griffin still ranked as Wall Street’s top-earning hedge fund boss, with personal earnings estimated at $4.1 billion last year. He has a personal net worth of $30.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Cohen, who runs Point72, came in second place with $1.9 billion. He is worth an estimated $12.9 billion.

On a percentage basis, Haidar Capital Management’s 193% return outpaced Citadel’s 38.1% rise and Point72’s 11.8% increase.

Rounding out the top five were Millennium’s Izzy Englander, Renaissance Technology’s Jim Simons and D.E. Shaw’s David Shaw.

The top 15 hedge fund earners brought in $13.8 billion in total – the lowest figure since the outlet began its annual rankings in 2019, according to Bloomberg.

Tech investors were the biggest losers on Wall Street in 2022 following years of banner performance during the pandemic-era stock market boom. The tech sector experienced a major downturn last year as recession fears and the higher cost of borrowing fueled a stock selloff.

Tiger Global Management’s Chase Coleman took the biggest individual hit, losing more than $1.6 billion. The loss came just two years after Coleman was the list’s top earner with a $3 billion bonanza.

TCI Fund Management’s Chris Sohn ranked second with losses of more than $1.2 billion, followed by D1 Capital’s Dan Sundheim, Lone Pine Capital’s Stephen Mandel and Viking Global Investors’ Andreas Halvorsen.