Eric Vincent |
Eric Vincent, president of Dwight Anderson’s Ospraie Management, left the firm at the end of September after nearly eight years. Vincent joined Ospraie in early 2004 when Anderson spun the firm out of Tudor Investment Corp., which it had been a part of since 2000. Vincent, initially the firm’s general counsel and chief operating officer, was subsequently promoted to president.
In 2007, Vincent was elected chairman of the Managed Funds Association, the chief lobbying group for the hedge fund industry.
Vincent was instrumental in hiring Richard Baker, the former Republican congressman from Louisiana, as chief executive of the MFA and in pushing for more engagement with lawmakers.
Under Vincent’s leadership, the industry responded in a more unified way than it had previously to the then-seemingly inevitable promise of mandatory registration and other regulation.
He was able to get consensus from a diverse group of notoriously independent members in forging MFA support for registration, while managing to dodge such invasive regulations as the mandatory disclosure of short positions.
As one hedge fund executive involved in the MFA said at the time, “the financial crisis has caused everyone to get religion.” Vincent’s “prescience in pulling together industry leaders and motivating them to get more involved in the legislative process has been a tremendous asset to the entire industry,” Baker said in 2009.
Like the energy commodities and stocks that the firm traded, Ospraie’s rise was steep. The firm increased assets from $1.2 billion at midyear 2004 to $2.1 billion a year later, $4 billion in 2006,
$7 billion in 2007 and $9 billion at its peak in midyear 2008, according to AR’s Billion Dollar Club.
In 2005, Vincent engineered Ospraie’s 20% stake sale to Lehman Brothers, which Ospraie repurchased in 2009.
Anderson’s investments reportedly produced a net annualized return of about 15% from 2000 through 2007. In 2008, Ospraie’s flagship fund, which managed nearly half of the firm’s assets, suffered a fierce reversal when oil and other commodities fell dramatically that summer. After it had dropped 38.6% through August (with 27.72% of the losses taking place in that month alone), Anderson shut the fund.
That year, the firm also closed its hedge fund seeding platform, Ospraie Wingspan, which it had launched in 2005.
Vincent helped with the successful launch of two single-strategy hedge funds in 2009. Today, Ospraie manages $2.3 billion in assets, including $1.1 billion in hedge fund strategies and another $1.2 billion in private equity.
Jason Mraz, a co-founder of the firm, and Rich Puma, Ospraie’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer, will assume Vincent’s responsibilities. Vincent’s future plans could not be determined. A spokesman for Ospraie and Vincent confirmed his departure but declined to comment further.