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Sandra Manzke
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Sandra Manzke is something of a legend in the hedge fund industry. The founder of Tremont Capital Management, she was an influential figure from the outset, with the knack of spotting talented managers such as Peter Lynch, founder of the Magellan fund, before they became famous.
Tremont was the first major investment consultancy to focus on hedge funds, making its first investment 20 years ago. Under Manzke, it developed the first market-cap-weighted hedge fund index.
Tremont?s history of doing things differently seems to be a direct reflection of Manzke?s somewhat iconoclastic character. There cannot be many investment consultants who joined the industry straight from film school nor could there have been many film students in the 1960s who worked their way through university on Wall Street.
?The creativity developed from going through arts school has always been a positive,? says Manzke. ?Tremont was the first to do many different things and they?ve taken on a life of their own.?
Another of Tremont?s firsts was setting up the Minority Equity Trust in 1990 which, backed by Bankers Trust and Chrysler, became the first fund of hedge funds made up exclusively of funds managed by women and ethnic minorities.
?Female fund managers and minorities have often had to work harder to get to where they are than others,? says Manzke, ?and people from different backgrounds bring with them a different perspective. If they can look at things from a different perspective then maybe that will help them to outperform.?
When Manzke started her career with Scudder Stevens & Clark in 1969 she helped to develop their performance measurement and reporting techniques at a time when ?rate of return? was a new concept. In the early 1970s, Scudder?s women employees were among the first on Wall Street to demand ? and get ? equal pay.
Manzke is not a woman you want to mess with. On her farm in Vermont she slaughters her own chickens. She also castrates and slaughters the pigs, though presumably not while wearing her white Chanel suit. ?There?s nothing better than eating a home-grown chicken,? she says.
She clearly has a fun side too. She plays piano and guitar, and can sing along to Tom Jones with the best of them. ?We used to joke at Tremont that you couldn?t get a job at the firm unless you could dance,? she says. ?Everyone at Tremont can dance, you should see our office Christmas parties. We?re all big singers too.?
In 1974 Manzke left Scudder Stevens & Clark to join Bernstein Macauley, where she worked as an independent consultant reviewing the firm?s investment products. In 1976 she moved to Rogers, Casey & Barksdale, a pension fund consulting firm.
When Manzke set up Tremont in 1984 in Rye, New York, she had planned to build a traditional investment consultancy. But her first client?s needs pointed her towards hedge funds. ?He was a high-net-worth individual who had just sold a $100 million real-estate portfolio and needed to get used to living off investment returns instead of rental income,? she says. ?I recommended a look at absolute return managers and it was then and there that we made our first investment in hedge funds.?
Since then expertise in hedge fund investing has blossomed, and Tremont now oversees $11 billion-worth of assets.