When a hedge fund analyst’s persuasive presentation prompts pandemonium

When you’re an analyst in a hedge fund, you’re not directly investing money yourself. You’re producing an endless list of exciting investment ideas for portfolio managers who may or may not decide that your ideas are worth following through. If they do, and the ideas make money, you will hopefully get paid. 

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On this basis, one analyst at Andurand Asset Management, the hedge fund run by 48-year-old French commodities trader Pierre Andurand, will surely earn nothing at all. Thanks to this analyst, Bloomberg notes that Andurand Asset Management lost 57% of its assets under management in the year through to early June. 

Andurand Asset Management is known for wild peaks and troughs, but the most recent trough began with a presentation the analyst made to Andurand in January 2024. Speaking last year, Pierre said one of his analysts gave a “really good” and “really interesting” presentation on the fundamentals of the cocoa market. On the basis of this presentation, Pierre was persuaded to invest an undisclosed enormous amount of money, much of which now seems to have been lost.

The analyst’s thesis was fundamentally that it takes 85 years to plant a cocoa tree and that climate change and disease mean cocoa supply is fixed or declining, while cocoa demand is price inelastic and keeps rising. “Basically we have a massive supply shortage this year,” said Andurand last year.  “….If we have the production going back up roughly 10% from this year to next year, we still have a deficit of 300,000 tons or so next year.”

Andurand was all-in. Now, he’s all-out again. Bloomberg reports that he’s sold his cocoa investments after mistiming trades amidst price gyrations prompted partly by Trump’s tariffs. It’s a warning for hedge fund managers not to be too credulous about their analysts’ claims – Pierre is an experienced oil trader; he admitted he knew nothing about cocoa before the alluring presentation. 

His error underscores the difference between PowerPoints and experience. Hedge fund analysts can be comparatively junior –  Andurand was advertising for an analyst with 3-5 years’ research experience back in March ’25. Analysts can put a persuasive PowerPoint together, but reality may disagree. Writing on LinkedIn, Martijin Bron, the former global head of cocoa trading at Cargill, says cocoa is a tourist “trap;” Pierre Andurand found out the hard way that cocoa futures live in their own bubble, says Bron. It was a good presentation, though.

Separately, if you work for Goldman Sachs, your children may someday be in a pool with the children of other ex-Goldman colleagues. 

Business Insider reports that former employees at Goldman Sachs regularly hang out together, including in poolside situations. 

One such situation occurs at the house of Prabir Adarkar, the president of DoorDash, who previously spent eight years working in technology banking for Goldman in San Francisco. Adarkar holds an annual summer barbecue, and says “50% of the people there are ex-Goldman or current Goldman” employees. They include parents from his kids’ school. “The kids are in the pool, and the grownups are people that I know through my time at Goldman.”

Goldman itself fans these connections through its revamped alumni network, run by Alison Mass, the firm’s chairman of investment banking. Business Insider says the alumni network runs its own “elite gatherings.”

If you want to get a job at Goldman, it’s conceivable that having a parent at these elite gatherings might be helpful. Networking in the toddler pool is where your career begins.

Meanwhile….

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta offered Matt Deite, a dropout from the computer science doctoral program at the University of Washington, $125m over four years. Deite refused. Meta doubled that to $250m. Deite accepted. (New York Post) 

Mark Zuckerberg offered Andrew Tulloch, an “extreme genius” and leading researcher and co-founder at OpenAI, $1.5bn over six years. Tulloch turned him down. (WSJ) 

Deite’s research work is listed here. Much is focused on using AI to read three-dimensional models. (Research Gate) 

Was Jane Street simply engaging in arbitrage trades in India, or was it manipulating the market? Jane Street says it was engaged in basic index arbitrage trading as it sought to bring prices of stocks and options in line with each other. Key factors to determine manipulation typically include whether the activity impacted market prices in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise or didn’t have an economic purpose other than making profits. (Bloomberg) 

Schroders has grown its sales team but is cutting elsewhere. “We’ve hired people right the way across the business in areas where we feel we need to scale. We’ve also increased the bench strength we’ve got from a leadership perspective. It’s about putting us in a fighting state going forward.” (Financial News) 

Perella Weinberg acquired Devon Park Advisors, a secondary advisory firm. It employs 15 people who will now run Perella’s secondary fund advisory business. (WSJ) 

Michael Arougheti, head of private credit fund Ares, says dealmaking is back thanks to tax and tariff clarity. “Now that you’ve got certainty on the tax bill and enough clarity on the tariff outcomes and constructive capital markets . . . you’ll see people pick up the pen again.” (Financial Times) 

Good luck looking for a job. Jennifer Smith, 46 years old, says she has applied for 900 jobs since being laid off last September from a financial-services provider in the Tampa, Fla., area, where she led the user-experience department. She has landed just one interview and no offers. (WSJ) 

Recent graduates are struggling. “Out of 70-plus job applications, I had three job interviews, and out of those three, I got ghosted from two of them.” (CNBC) 

There’s a crisis at McKinsey & Co, where headcount has already fallen from 45,000 people in 2023 to 40,000 through layoffs and attrition. Now it’s rolled out 12,000 AI agents and jobs might be cut further. In the past, a strategy project might require a project leader—plus 14 consultants. Today, it still needs a project leader plus two or three consultants, alongside a few AI agents and access to “deep research” capabilities. (WSJ) 

Donald Trump calls Howard Lutnick at 1am. They talk about tariffs and sport. (FT) 

Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who was fired by Trump produced data in recent months showing that inflation was tame and which the White House cheered. (Bloomberg)  

Friday’s report showed unusually large downward revisions to the May and June employment figures. The president alleged that the data had been “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”. (Financial Times) 

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