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Man Group, the world’s largest publicly listed hedge fund, is retiring the GLG brand and merging some of the firm’s teams as it advances into credit markets, in the first big changes made by its new chief executive.
The firm is dropping the brand, one of the best known in the industry, and creating a discretionary investing division that will include staff from other teams. Discretionary investing involves managers using their expertise in markets to buy and sell assets selected to make money for investors.
GLG manages about $28.6bn in assets, according to figures updated last September, and offers investors long-only and hedge fund-style strategies in equity, bonds and other assets in markets around the world.
Long-only strategies involve investing in assets to beat a market benchmark, while those in a hedge fund style generally try to deliver regardless of market conditions. Man Group managed about $161bn in assets as of September.
Man Group acquired US private credit manager Varagon last year, and its team will join the widened discretionary division, along with the firm’s separate private markets business, Man GPM.
Founded as a unit of Lehman Brothers in 1995, GLG was eventually spun out independently in 2000. It expanded into areas including emerging markets and credit before listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2007. Man Group acquired the firm in 2010 and its division has until now been known as Man GLG.
Before acquiring GLG, Man Group specialised in quantitative strategies that involve trading based on market signals and that usually track vast amounts of data.
The move to drop the GLG brand and combine teams is the first reorganisation led by Robyn Grew, who took over from the previous chief executive, Luke Ellis, last September.
Credit has become a greater area of focus for Man, with the non-bank lending market growing faster than the wider hedge fund industry in recent years.
As part of the reorganisation, Man GLG chief Teun Johnston left the company, sources told the Financial Times. Johnston’s departure and the dropping of GLG were first reported by Bloomberg.
“The discretionary business is quite fragmented with various teams, including GLG,” said a source with knowledge of the matter. “All of the teams overlap in places and credit is a main theme.”
Man Group reports its results for the full year of 2023 on February 29.
