Episode 48: Dmitry Balyasny - Managing Partner and CIO of Balyasny Asset Management

**Amir Fischer** (0:00)
This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Dmitry Balyasny, founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of Balyasny Asset Management, one of the most respected multi-strategy hedge funds in the world. Dmitry immigrated to the United States from Kiev, Ukraine at age 7, speaking no English. He worked as a door to door salesman at 12, became a stockbroker in college, and started his trading career at Schonfeld Securities in 1994 In 2001, he co-founded Balyasny Asset Management, which has grown to over $30 billion in assets under management with 2,300 employees across 23 global offices. Beyond building one of the industry's leading multi-manager platforms, Dmitry is the only founder among the big four multi-strat funds who still actively manages a book. He's also deeply committed to expanding opportunity, founding Atlas Fellows in 2021 to provide under-resourced young people with pathways into finance and investing. In our conversation, we talked about immigrating to America and learning to trade. The formative impact of Atlas shrugged, losing everything his first year as a broker and why he persisted, what he learned at Schonfeld about building great hedge funds, the critical decisions that shaped BAM's evolution, what separates great analysts from great PMs, how culture translates into returns, the changing nature of edge, and much more. If you enjoy this episode, please follow the podcast and rate it a 5 stars on Spotify, subscribe on YouTube, and share it to anyone who you think might find it valuable.
I really enjoyed recording this with Dmitry, and I hope you guys enjoyed listening. Thank you. Thanks, Dmitry, for joining me. It's been a long time in the making. I really appreciate it.

**Dmitry Balyasny** (1:32)
Thanks, Amir. Nice to be here.

**Amir Fischer** (1:34)
Well, I want to start where I always do, the beginning. You immigrated from the United States to Kiev when you were seven, I believe.

**Dmitry Balyasny** (1:40)
The other way around.

**Amir Fischer** (1:40)
Oh, Kiev to the United States when you were seven.

**Dmitry Balyasny** (1:42)
You don't want to immigrate the other way.

**Amir Fischer** (1:44)
Speaking no English, tell me a little bit about your childhood, how you think the experience shaped you, what it was like growing up.

**Dmitry Balyasny** (1:53)
Sure. It was tough for me, but it was really tough for my parents, and they're the ones that certainly get all the credit for having the courage to make the move. Just to give some perspective for folks who might not know what's involved, or at least what was involved at the time, when you submitted your papers to leave the country and immigrate, in the former Soviet Union, you were immediately ostracized and were persona non grata in the country. My parents immediately lost their jobs and had to live off of meager savings and gradually selling off your personal possessions as you try to sort out everything you need to make the move.
Today, we have such a preponderance of information about everything with the Internet and AI. At the time, it was just like a void. You had really no idea besides hearsay of what was outside of the Soviet borders.
They really took a leap of faith and fortunately worked out. So we immigrated to Chicago and I grew up there. My parents had never driven a car, had to figure out how to get a driver's license, had to figure out how to learn English and start over in very menial jobs, like going from working as a professor or working as an engineer to working cleaning motel rooms until they got their feet under them. And we slowly made our way out of the city, into the suburbs and et cetera. And for me personally, it was strange. On the one hand, it was amazingly exciting because you saw all these things that you had never seen before, whether it was flying on an airplane, which my kids can't believe that I'd never flown an airplane before that, or really driving cars, which didn't really happen very often, to go into a grocery store and actually having it like filled with stuff that you could just buy. You know, these are all kind of very novel experiences. But from a kind of personal standpoint, on the other side, starting over like with no English, you know, I came when I was about seven, going to be eight soon. I was put into third grade. I couldn't speak any English and after six months in third grade, they moved me down to second grade. Then the following year, I kind of got the hang of English a little bit and got caught up. And then I went to fourth grade. So I still never really finished third grade. So if I say anything really dumb during the podcast, that's the reason.