Bond Star Michael Hasenstab Has a Plan to Get Back on Top

“If I don’t get to the top,” Michael Hasenstab was telling himself, “I have to rename our fund.” Franklin Templeton’s star bond-fund manager found himself somewhere around 24,000 feet on Mount Everest when he became intimately familiar with the effects of oxygen deprivation.

An avid mountaineer who’d spent the preceding five years bagging peaks to train for the world’s tallest, Hasenstab knew to expect pain on the Lhotse Face. It was 40 degrees below zero, the numbing wind ripped across the mountain, and misery accompanied every step on the blue-ice slope. Yet he was still hours away from Camp Three, where he’d begin breathing bottled oxygen, and he found his mind was fixating on a flag stashed inside his pack, one emblazoned with the logo of his three-year-old hedge fund, Global Summits. “If I don’t get to the top, I have to rename our fund.” He found the thought funny, and it motivated him to keep going. “I am not changing the name,” he told himself. “It’s printed on the flag.”