Israel Englander

Israel Englander (born 1948) is an American investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. In 1989, he founded his hedge fund, Millennium Management, with Ronald Shear. The fund was started with $35 million, and as of 2019 had $39.2 billion in assets under management. With a personal net worth of $6.6 billion in 2020, he is the 280th-richest person in the United States. In 2018 he was the 5th-highest earning hedge fund manager.

Israel "Izzy" Englander was born in 1948 and was raised in a Polish-Jewish family in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. He was raised in a religious home and attended yeshiva.

His father’s entire family was killed in the Holocaust.His Polish parents were deported to a Soviet labor camp after the war, where Englander's two older sisters were born. They then immigrated to the United States in 1947.

Always interested in the stock market, Englander began trading stocks while in high school. During college, he interned at Oppenheimer & Co. (where his future brother-in-law, Jack Nash, would eventually become president and chairman) and at the New York Stock Exchange. In 1970, he graduated from New York University with a B.S. in finance. His first full-time job was with the Wall Street firm Kaufmann, Alsberg & Co. He later enrolled in New York University's MBA program in the evenings but never completed the degree.

Early business career

At Kaufmann Alsberg, Englander focused on trading convertible securities and options. When the American Stock Exchange began to list options, he purchased a seat on the exchange.In 1977, he formed a floor brokerage house, I.A. Englander & Co.

In 1985, Englander and his partner John Mulheren Jr., started an investment firm called Jamie Securities Co. with a $75 million investment from the Belzberg family of Canada. Mulheren had previously worked as a trader for Ivan Boesky. In February 1988, when Boesky was later convicted of insider trading, and agreed to testify against Mulheren in a plea deal to receive a lesser sentence, Mulheren was arrested for carrying a loaded assault rifle, . convicted of orchestrating illegal stock trades for Boesky, but the ruling was later overturned. Although Englander was never implicated in the matter in any way, Jamie Securities was dissolved in 1988 due to the negative publicity in the aftermath of Mulheren's situation.

Millennium Management

In 1989, Englander started Millennium Management with Ronald Shear - whom he knew from his time at the American Stock Exchange - with $35 million in seed money (including $5 million from Englander himself and another $2 million from the Belzberg family). The firm got off to a rough start and Shear left in 1990. Since then, Englander has grown Millennium into a $39.2 billion dollar (under management) enterprise by using investment strategies like statistical arbitrage (quantitative analysis); fundamental long-short pairing; merger arbitrage (taking advantage of price differentials between a buy-out target company's stock price and bid price) and convertible arbitrage (taking advantage of price differentials between a company's stock price and convertible bond or stock warrant price). At any given time, Millennium holds thousands of investment positions and makes over 2 million trades on an average day. At the end of 2019, Millennium had 2,900 employees in more than 12 offices in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Englander is married to Caryl (née Schechter) Englander. They have three children. In 2014 he bought a duplex apartment on New York’s Park Avenue for $71.3 million, a record price for a Manhattan co-op.

In 2006, the Englander Foundation, headed by Englander and his wife, donated $20 million to mostly Jewish organizations and schools. Englander serves on the board of Weill Cornell Medical College and the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty. In March 2019, he was named one of the highest-earning hedge fund managers and traders by Forbes.