‘Elegant Animals’
MSI looks for members who are “driven, motivated and excel in everything they have done,” James Brower, who was on the team until 2010, said at a University of Pennsylvania panel on banking and the liberal arts sponsored by Goldman Sachs in 2006.
The team’s traders “should be market-savvy, enjoy a quick pace, dislike long-term projects and have a risk appetite,” Brower said, according to a transcript. They look across many asset classes, he said, investing “hedge-fund style.”
Brower is now an analyst at Serengeti Asset Management LP, a New York-based hedge fund founded by Jody LaNasa, who ran MSI from 2002 to 2006. LaNasa named his firm after the African region because of his admiration for leopards, “elegant animals who hunt by themselves,” he said in a 2012 interview with the Harvard Law Bulletin. MSI managed more than $4 billion when he was in charge, LaNasa said.
Treasury Medal
Other former members refer to the team as a hedge fund. G. David Bednar, now a managing director at Ladder Capital Finance LLC, worked in SSG’s “proprietary multi-strategy hedge fund” until 2006, according to his LinkedIn profile. Cevdet Samikoglu was at MSI’s predecessor, Special Situations Investing, a “proprietary internal hedge fund,” before he left in 2003 and joined Greywolf Capital Management LP, filings show.
Another MSI veteran, David N. Miller, became chief investment officer of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which rescued U.S. banks during the 2008 financial crisis. He was awarded the Treasury Medal by Secretary Timothy F. Geithner when he left and is now CEO of a real-estate investment trust.
Miller, LaNasa, Bednar and Brower declined to comment. Samikoglu didn’t respond to two phone messages.
Ocwen, Cemex
MSI investments last year included shares of Ocwen Financial Corp., a West Palm Beach, Florida-based mortgage servicer, according to two former team members.