By the time Financial News reported on the firm’s 2013 results, that early bet had compounded into one of the more durable alternative asset managers to come out of London’s post-2000 wave of independent fund launches.
The founding structure was unusual for its moment. Gabay, who had spent the previous decade in equity sales and investment banking at Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse First Boston, built Duet with co-founder Alain Schibl around a strategy-agnostic premise: back individuals with a demonstrated edge, then let the mandate follow the manager rather than forcing every hire into a fixed house strategy. “We’re building out funds based on individuals rather than the strategy itself,” Gabay told Euromoney as the firm expanded, a description that has held up as an accurate summary of how Duet grew for the next two decades.
2002–2003: A Different Kind of Start
Most new hedge fund platforms in the early 2000s launched with a single flagship strategy and scaled that one idea. Duet did the opposite. Starting from that initial $10 million fund, the firm added strategies one manager at a time, eventually building out equity special-situations funds, a global macro fund, a CTA fund and a long-only African tracker fund investing across ten countries. The firm later brought in Osman Semerci, Merrill Lynch’s former global head of fixed income, currencies and commodities, as chief executive, a hire that signaled the platform’s ambitions had outgrown its founding fund.
Support authors and subscribe to content
This is premium stuff. Subscribe to read the entire article.
