Many of you have probably read “When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management” (LTCM) which chronicles the collapse of LTCM in 1998. LTCM was a hedge fund that was over-leveraged and when liquidity dried up worldwide in 1998, LTCM got crushed when it couldn’t unload its positions.
From the ashes of LTCM rose a new company - GlobeOp. 4 out of the 5 founders of GlobeOp came from LTCM. GlobeOp is a middle and back-office for financial firms such as hedge funds and asset management companies.
A buddy of mine just forward me a copy of the Stanford case study on them and it’s a great peek into how the company came to be and how they got some lucky breaks. But, more then anything it shows they went through some tough times and made it to where they are today. Had some of the same issues as any startup - sellout early and make some coin or roll the dice for a better offer and make bank - hopefully.
One of the people mentioned in the case study is Nandini Sankar, she runs the India operations for GlobeOp. I had a chance to meet her a year back and can say she has done an amazing job of getting the India operations humming. For all the press about LTCM it’s rarely mentioned that some good actually came out of the LTCM collapse.
1 response so far ↓
1 Kaushik // Jul 26, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Manish, thanks for the link.
Interesting to see their thought process on choosing India.
“From a time zone and work flow
standpoint, India was very attractive. When workers in India walked into their offices, closing prices and position data from New York would be available to reconcile P&L, investigate fails and breaks, and perform many of GlobeOp’s other operational functions.”
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