In a first for $21 billion Balyasny, a star PM will start building his own internal equities unit this month

Peter Goodwin’s new equities fund is launching as an internal exclusive at Balyasny. It’s called “Longaeva,” a tree famed for being the oldest and longest-living species.

Balyasny Asset Management has been on a hiring tear of late, but few additions will likely prove more consequential than that of former Point72 portfolio manager Peter Goodwin.

Equities, where it all began for Dmitry Balyasny’s $21 billion firm nearly 25 years ago, is and always will be in the spotlight at the fund, even as the multistrategy giant grows ever larger and more diverse in its investments.

But the division, an underperformer in 2023, has been overhauled over the past year, culling PMs and parting ways with global head Jeff Runnfeldt and COO Gustav Rydbeck. The hiring of Goodwin earlier this year was seen as a marquee leadership reinforcement.

Goodwin, however, won’t just be bolstering leadership in the 400-person stock-trading operation, he’ll also be starting a business of his own. This month, he’ll start building a long-short equity division called Longaeva Partners inside Balyasny and exclusively managing the multistrategy hedge fund’s capital, according to people familiar with the matter. Longaeva — which is a type of tree famed for being Earth’s oldest and longest-living species — won’t begin trading until early 2025.

The move is straight out of the playbook of rival Millennium Management. But it’s a first for Balyasny. The multimanager firm launched a separate equities division in 2022 called Corbets — which has a roster of stock-picking PMs that operate independently — and it has seeded one external fund. But it’s never built a fresh fund around a single PM inside its walls.

Balyasny’s backing of Longaeva is a reflection the state of the multimanager talent war as well as Goodwin’s stature as an investor. For in-demand PMs, dangling millions in guaranteed compensation is a requirement, but it’s not necessarily enough. An ambitious manager with dreams of running his own fund may not feel satisfied simply running a pod, especially if they’ve already had that experience.

Goodwin, who came up through Point72’s PM incubator and traded equities at the fund for eight years, did not come cheap. He was offered more than $50 million in compensation to join, according to one report. Three hedge-fund industry professionals tracking PM moves told B-17 the deal was closer to $80 million. (A Balyasny representative declined to comment on Goodwin’s pay.)

Such deal packages are nuanced, typically including guaranteed cash to buy out a PM’s deferred comp, but also performance incentives and money to hire a team.

Longaeva is expected to eventually scale up to a dozen teams under Goodwin, according to people familiar with the matter.

A rising star within Point72

Goodwin may well be worth the money, according to people familiar with his track record. He has a reputation as an intense but well-liked leader who became one of Point72’s top-performing portfolio managers.

“Peter is extremely intense, which is helpful, but he plays nice in the sandbox,” said a former colleague, who asked to remain anonymous as they work in the industry for a competitor.

The Goodwin family is steeped in finance. Peter’s grandfather worked in executive recruiting for financial institutions, including Korn Ferry and JPMorgan, and his father was an investment banking MD at JPMorgan. He has two brothers in hedge funds, including Scott Goodwin, the cofounder of multibillion-dollar credit firm Diameter Capital.

Peter Goodwin, 39, started out on Wall Street at Lehman Brothers as the storied investment bank was going up in flames. He transitioned to hedge funds in 2010, working as an analyst first at D.E. Shaw and then Och-Ziff Capital.

In 2016, Perry Boyle, then Point72’s equities chief, recruited Goodwin for what is now the LaunchPoint program — a farm system for developing promising stock analysts and sector heads into PMs.

Upon arriving, Goodwin made a point in his first month of reaching out to constituents across the firm to build rapport and ensure he was taking advantage of all the data, technology, and other resources available to him, said the ex-colleague.

“He was very coachable and progressed at a much faster rate than a lot of other, newer portfolio managers,” Boyle said.

Goodwin started out trading healthcare stocks and incrementally expanded, eventually running a multibillion-dollar book and overseeing roughly a dozen analysts, the ex-colleague said. Even as he managed more money and diversified his stock universe, his returns kept pace — something that “rarely happens,” this person said. He became one of the top-performing equities PMs.

A Point72 representative declined to comment.

Goodwin was decisive and avoided common PM pitfalls, Boyle observed, like overtrading, poor hedging, and reluctance to sell a favored idea.

“Peter was good at keeping his emotions out of his portfolio,” Boyle said.

A popular manager

Also key to Goodwin’s success — and his future prospects as a fund manager — was his ability to remain skeptical as an investor while still trusting and delegating to his team.

“I know a lot of PMs who are terrible people managers who nobody wants to work for,” Boyle said. “Peter is the opposite. People want to work for him because he’s successful, and he will mentor them.”

“He’s just a really good guy, too. There’s a whole bunch of jerks in this industry,” the other source familiar with Goodwin said. “He’s intense, but he’s not a jerk.”

At Balyasny, Goodwin will effectively have his own unit, though he’ll be under the flagship Atlas Enhanced umbrella and operate on BAM’s platform, including access to its technology, risk management, hiring, and human resources capabilities. The allure of such a setup is more time to spend on investing, which Longaeva will do exclusively with Balyasny money for now.

Longaeva will start out small, trading a few sectors, but it will eventually broaden out to as many as a dozen teams across all sectors.