Hwang earned an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a master’s in business administration from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
In the early 1990s, he was an institutional stock salesman at Hyundai Securities Co., where he dealt with Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management LLC.
Assets Cut
Robertson, a pioneer and mentor in the hedge-fund industry, hired him in 1995 after Hwang won an annual prize awarded to the person outside of Tiger who had contributed most to the fund’s success.
Robertson built Tiger Management into one of the world’s largest hedge funds by generating average annual returns of 32 percent, lifting his assets under management to $22 billion by mid-1998. After customer defections and losses cut Tiger’s assets to $6 billion two years later, Robertson decided to return money to clients and employ Tiger Management to invest his own fortune in hedge-fund managers, taking a share of profits in exchange.
Tiger Management has employed at least 40 portfolio managers and analysts who subsequently formed their own firms and became known as Tiger cubs. Those he seeded after 2000 with his own capital are known as “grand cubs.”