After sweating some tough audience questions last year at a hedge fund conference where he was a panelist, Benjamin Shoval, managing director of marketing and investor relations at $260 million Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania–based Ambit Funding, vowed to find a comedy class to help him learn how to bring humor to tense situations. Shoval found that the more jokes he told, the less stress he felt. Now he takes lessons from a drop-in comedy coach at Ambit’s Manhattan offices and does stand-up at open-mic nights in New York with hedge fund barbs: “No one understands hedge funds. They’re like the Björk of the investment world,” and, “We’re the Barry Bonds of investments. Barry goes to Mexico for his stuff. We go to the Cayman Islands.” Humor is hardly the only stress-reduction medicine. Avalon Fund Aktiv, a New York–based hedge fund with $250 million in assets under management, pays for massages and spa days for employees in addition to encouraging them to meditate. “During relaxation time people have a chance to get their thoughts in order and become more organized,” says senior managing director Ethan Gray, who oversees off-exchange trading operations for European and Asian portfolios. At D.E. Shaw & Co., a $39 billion New York–based firm, stress remedies include lunchtime yoga classes, after-hours wine tastings and book clubs that focus on finance-related bestsellers.
Peter Kuperman, manager of tiny San Francisco–based QED Benchmark Fund ($9 million in assets under management), practices Bikram yoga and swing dancing each week. His favorite way to relax is to prepare an elaborate dinner, a skill he learned last summer when he took 24 cooking classes in ten weeks to impress a now-ex-girlfriend. Employees of $150 million-in-assets Portal Capital are encouraged to participate in flag football, volleyball, running and bodybuilding. The Tualatin, Oregon, office has a basketball hoop on the premises, where, says operations manager Forest Nesbitt, “I’ll oftentimes take a ‘recess’ and just head back there and shoot some hoops.”
The key isn’t what you do to blow off steam, but that you do it, says New York–based psychiatrist and author Ari Kiev, who works with finance types on stress-reduction techniques. “Any kind of recreational activity that gives you a chance to get a break and reenergize is important,” says Kiev, whose clients include Steven Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors. “What works can vary from person to person.”
