Matt Levine, Columnist

Hedge-Fund Names and Trader Fibs

Also analyst fatigue, M&A oral history, deferred comp and Dow 22,000.

August 2, 2017 at 1:32 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Hedge funds.

One big problem in the hedge fund industry is that every imaginable figure from Greco-Roman mythology has already been pressed into service as a hedge fund name, so what are you going to call your fund? Just opening to a random page in Graves, or even Harrison, will no longer get you a unique name that conveys the seriousness, power and historical heft of your fund. Many other ancient traditions -- Hindu, Egyptian, Norse, Babylonian, Akkadian and of course Elvish -- have also been mined extensively for financial-company names. If you want to name a fund these days, you're pretty much stuck with your street address.