Shortly after Kenneth Brody launched Sutton Square Partners in 2016 — three years after retiring from Taconic Capital, the hedge fund firm he co-founded with fellow Goldman Sachs partner Frank Brosens — the then 70-year-old told Institutional Investor, “I flunked retirement.”
“I thought I would be pretty actively engaged,” Brody recalled in the 2017 interview. He said that he had managed to play a lot of tennis while working on a couple of nonprofits he had founded, including one designed to help develop future tennis champions.
But he admitted that he missed the excitement and attention that comes from working in investment management, so he decided to jump back into the hedge fund fire, choosing this time around to specialize in long-short equity to avoid competing with Taconic.
But in August 2018, just two years after the launch, Brody was reluctantly forced to shutter Sutton Square Partners after he received “very negative medical news,” according to an interview at the time with Sutton Square portfolio manager Victor Holater.
On March 26, Brody died after a five-year battle battle with multiple system atrophy, a rare neurodegenerative disease, according to his published obituary. He was 79.
Brody was a hedge fund industry pioneer from the previous millennium, co-launching Taconic, an event-driven multistrategy firm, in 1999. He spent 15 years with Taconic, focusing primarily on management and risk control.
He and Brosens had met at Goldman, where Brody spent 20 years. He founded and headed the firm’s high-technology investment banking group, oversaw the real-estate investment banking group, and co-headed Goldman’s principal investment activities. He resigned in 1993 to become president and chairman of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, where he worked until 1996.
Brody earned a B.S. in electrical engineering with high honors from the University of Maryland, then attended Harvard Business School, where he graduated as a Baker Scholar.
He was the founder of the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Maryland, and his son, Charlie, was an NCAA All-American tennis player at Kenyon College. “Ken felt strongly that tennis could be a vehicle to change lives and provide a pathway for scholarships to top colleges and universities,” his obituary stated.
Brody was also an avid and accomplished chess, poker, and backgammon player, and he loved playing “pickup” chess games in Washington Square Park in New York and Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. He was also a car and cigar aficionado, as well as an avid mystery book reader and a lover of classic movies.
