Magnetar Capital, a $9.2 billion multistrategy hedge fund firm based in Evanston, Illinois, has hired three new investment professionals to launch a credit strategy that will be part of the firm’s $1 billion global event-driven portfolio. Up until now the firm’s event-driven strategies have primarily concentrated on equities.
Leading the new credit strategy is Andrew Beckman, who joined Magnetar from Goldman Sachs this fall. Nicholas Heilbut and Scott Giardina have also been hired as part of the new team. All three will be based in New York.
Heilbut was previously a senior analyst at Serengeti Asset Management and a vice president in Goldman Sachs’ Special Situations Group, where he worked closely with Beckman. Giardina came to Magnetar from Mount Kellett Capital Management, where he was head of U.S. and European trading and a member of the global investment committee. Before that, he was a trader with Silver Point Capital.
Alec Litowitz, Magnetar’s co-founder, CEO and head of global event-driven strategies, said in a statement that the addition of the new credit team “rounds out our ability to deploy capital across all stages of the corporate life cycle.” Litowitz is the lead portfolio manager for the firm’s event-driven fund, which launched in 2010.
He co-founded Magnetar Capital with Ross Laser in 2005. Although he had decreased his involvement with day-to-day trading strategies before the financial crisis, Litowitz has since moved back into a more active role as a trader and portfolio manager. Today Magnetar focuses on three main areas of investment: event-driven, energy, and credit. Each of these businesses has a standalone fund, and the firm also has a multistrategy fund that invests across all three disciplines. While a significant proportion of firm’s assets are held in the fixed income division, Magnetar likes to engage in cross-firm investments.
Beckman was previously the co-head of multistrategy investing in Goldman Sachs’ special situations group, managing both a business and a portfolio that invested in loans and securities in special situations that included distressed corporate structures. Before joining Goldman in 2004, he worked for nearly six years at Investcorp International, a private equity firm. He began his financial career as an investment banker at Salomon Smith Barney.
