How to Read Form ADV Part 1 & 2

You can be the sharpest analyst come interview time and still never land a hedge fund job. Not because you can't make money for your future employer. Because you never bothered to relate.

Top hedge funds might open one seat every couple of years. One seat. That's it. If you want it, you better put in the work that other candidates won't.

The candidates who actually get offers at their dream funds aren't just technically sharp. They're likable. And the fastest way to become likable in an interview is simple: know the founder's story. Know the fund cold. Nobody teaches you this.

Let's fix that.

Why Hedge Fund Lineage Matters

Here's the thing most hedge fund aspirants miss: trace the lineage back far enough for every hedge fund that exists today, and you keep landing on the same handful of legendary shops.

Hedge fund founders don't invent their investment style from scratch. They learned how their boss invested. The geography or sector focus might differ. The core style usually doesn't.

If you understand who trained under who, you can walk into an interview asking better questions. You will be perceived to be the best fit, because your knowledge plants the idea in the interviewer's mind that you think alike and will consistently bring ideas they like. This is exactly I am building the fund deep dives to help you get to big hedge fund money faster.

Here are some of the biggest lineages:

• Tiger Management: Julian Robertson, Stephen Mandel, Lee Ainslie, John Griffin, Andreas Halvorsen, Chase Coleman, Philippe Laffont
• Goldman Sachs Risk Arbitrage: Event-driven; Robert Rubin, Farallon (Route One, Park Presidio, etc.), Eton Park (offshoots such as Darsana), Perry (Chris Hohn of TCI worked there), Taconic, TPG-Axon (Soroban)
• Macro: George Soros (Duquesne, Karsch, PointState), Paul Tudor Jones, Louis Bacon (Mane Global), Bruce Kovner, Brevan Howard (Rokos)
• Value: Seth Klarman, Leon Cooperman (Honeycomb, Glenview)
• Activist: Elliott Management (Aurelius, Irenic), Carl Icahn (Corvex, Sarissa)
• Multi-managers: From just these Big 4 pod shops (Citadel, Millennium, Point72, and Balyasny) alone, they've produced nearly 200 cubs, most of whom operate in low-net, event-driven trading. The high publicity ones: Woodline, Holocene, Candlestick, Melvin

Funds out of big lineages:

• Andor, out of Pequot, is growth style.
• Farallon started as event-driven (now multi-strat), same as Bob Rubin's playbook at Goldman Sachs
• Duquesne, Stan Druckenmiller's fund, does thematic investing with a macro overlay. PointState, founder Zach Schreiber worked for Druckenmiller, is similarly styled. And the lineage is Soros, who is the macro GOAT that even gave Julian Robertson imposter syndrome.
• Tiger Cubs came in flavors that resemble where the founder specialized when working for Julian Robertson:
  • Discovery, founded by Rob Citrone, does macro. That's exactly what Citrone did for Julian Robertson.
  • Impala, founded by Bob Bishop, specializes in cyclicals. Bishop ran basic industries at Tiger.
  • The most famous Tiger Cubs: Lone Pine, Tiger Global, Coatue, run long/short growth. That's what Julian Robertson pivoted Tiger toward in its later years.

See the pattern? A hedge fund's style almost always mirrors what the founder did at their former shop(s).

How To Research a Hedge Fund

Here are the bare minimums you need to do to know the process of a hedge fund and the story of its key decision makers (usually the founder). One big disclaimer: every source, whether human or written, has biases. Ultimately, trust your instinct.

Word of mouth is the gold standard. The best single source of truth is people who used to work at the fund you're targeting. They have no motive to sell the employer to you. They will tell you the intimate details you're looking for about the founder, firm culture, and if any toxic senior partners. The risk is they are usually disgruntled so the perception skews negative.

If you cannot access them, talk to people at funds that are similarly styled or in the same region.

If you got a job lead into a Dallas-based fund, cold email analysts working at other Dallas-based funds or talk to analysts work in either value or oil & gas focused funds. (I assume Dallas isn’t known for growth-styled funds)

One rule of thumb: if you hear the same thing about a fund or its founder from three or more separate sources, it's probably true. Always triangulate across multiple sources to sniff out key insights. In the case of hedge fund due diligence, you are trying to find the consensus, not a variant view.

A word of caution on LLMs. LLMs can give wrong information. And nobody will accept "the AI told me" as an excuse for blowing an interview. What LLMs are great for is pointing you to public sources that mention the founder and fund. Use them to find the sources. Then go read the actual documents yourself.

Stick to credible financial press. Bloomberg. Institutional Investor. Barron's. The Wall Street Journal. Financial Times. These are outlets with reporters who have their reputations on the line.

Wall Street Oasis. WSO has a hedge fund section where aspirants ask questions about culture, pay, processes about hedge funds and industry insiders will answer. You can pick up insights there that would otherwise take a dozen informational calls to dig up. Google the fund name plus "Wall Street Oasis" and see what surfaces. But again, everyone's experience is unique. It's only credible when most people are saying the same thing about the fund.

Just Google it. Take Holocene Advisors. Definitely look through the company website, but the language can be very generic. Google search "Holocene Advisors founder" and you get Brandon Haley. Check his LinkedIn. He was the Head of Global Equities at Citadel. That tells you something: chances are Holocene runs low-net (exposure) / market neutral, because that's the style Haley operated effectively under at Citadel. Not always true, but hedge fund cubs rarely stray far from their prior employer’s playbook.

Now go one layer deeper on Wall Street Oasis. You'll find people saying Holocene operates with sector heads, pays well, and expects 80-plus hour weeks. All public information, but most don't look or don't know where to look. You're the one who bothered to find it, and that effort shows.

Podcasts and interviews. Search for anything the founder has done publicly. You have zero excuse for not knowing it before you walk into the room. Dan Sundheim has appeared on Cheeky Pint, Invest Like the Best, and sat down with David Rubenstein. If you're interviewing at D1 Capital and act surprised when you didn’t know the key things he's said in those conversations, your candidacy just took a hit.

To save time, feed the podcast transcript / YouTube URL into NotebookLM and ask questions you want answer to.

Flip through the information you gathered, grab the key numbers and qualitative details, and move on to the next fund. Do this across your top targets and I guarantee you'll walk in more differentiated than every other candidate in the room. Guaranteed.

The Two Documents You Must Read

Beyond the 13-F, there are two documents every serious hedge fund candidate needs to read: Form ADV Part 1 and Part 2. Part 1 is a fill-in-the-blank form. Part 2 is a written document.