George Iacobescu’s footprint on London

One scoop to start: Can you trade the markets without the help of the ubiquitous Bloomberg terminal? Abrdn seems to think so. The UK asset manager is trialling alternatives to the Bloomberg terminals that make up the backbone of the investment industry, as part of a broader drive to slash about £150mn in costs. Abrdn cts BBrg?

‘We didn’t build buildings. We built a city’

When George Iacobescu first visited Canary Wharf in the 1980s, dispatched on a scouting mission by Olympia & York boss Paul Reichmann, it was an unlikely spot for a financial district. 

His account of the history of the site takes in William the Conqueror, Henry VIII and William Pitt the Younger — who moved the docks there around 1800. The bananas being unloaded from the Canary Islands gave the place its name. 

By the 1980s, the area had been desolate for decades. Iacobescu, who had not visited London before, got lost as he walked for over two hours to reach Canary Wharf. “What am I doing here? Are you kidding me?” he recalls thinking. He told Reichmann: “Don’t touch it.” The rest, of course, is history.

This is just one of many fascinating anecdotes in a delightful Lunch with the FT interview with Iacobescu, conducted by my colleague Joshua Oliver. 

Iacobescu, 78, has come a long way since his childhood in communist Romania in the decades after the second world war, and has the joie de vivre of someone for whom luxury has been hard earned. 

For more than three decades, he has been the driving force behind Canary Wharf Group, owned since 2015 by Canadian giant Brookfield and the Qatar Investment Authority. 

From the desolate ex-docklands he first visited in 1987, Iacobescu conjured a glittering city of dozens of skyscrapers, much of it built on water. Few individuals since Christopher Wren in the 17th century or John Nash at the turn of the 19th have left such a personal footprint on the map of London.

Over tagliatelle with truffle at the Mayfair Arts Club, Iacobescu shares with Josh his observations on everything from Campari soda (“like life — sweet and bitter) and Leonard Cohen (“there is nothing better in the world”) to the war in Gaza (“there is no other solution but a two-state solution”) and the UK government’s dealings with business (“the fact is that nobody has the courage”).  

I first met Iacobescu back in 2016 for a FTWeekend magazine cover story I was writing on how the City of London had changed in the 30 years since Big Bang. When I asked him to describe himself in three words, he responded: “anything is possible.”

‘Meme-lord’ Litquidity reveals his true identity

When Litquidity, the lord of the so-called “fin-memes,” sat down for a Lunch with the FT interview with my colleague Madison Darbyshire at Le Bernardin in New York last year, he made the reservation under the pseudonym Hank Paulson. 

His real name is Hank Medina, the 32-year-old Miami native and graduate of Cornell University told Madison in an exclusive interview, breaking his silence about his true identity for the first time. 

The identity of Lit — the anonymous Wall Street insider who built a cult following with caustic jokes on social media — has remained a mystery to both his followers and the Wall Streeters he satirises on his Instagram account. 

Posting biting memes anonymously from the bathroom of his investment bank, he built up 800,000 followers. (Remember that Goldman Sachs slide deck that went viral after he published it during the pandemic, created by disgruntled analysts at the investment bank complaining of burnout?) 

Litquidity represents comedic cocaine: hoovered up by those who love Wall Street and by those who love to hate it. A former junior banker at Deutsche Bank and Jefferies, he chose to break his anonymity to be able to tell his story on his own terms.

The real Litquidity is quiet, soft spoken and polite, the opposite of the account’s Patrick Bateman-esque persona. 

Being friends with Hank can be a dangerous game. He is always quietly looking for content — and even your attire could turn you into a viral meme. “I don’t think you’d ever know that it was him behind Litquidity, even if you met him or he told you point blank. To the point of it being comedy,” said friend Waylon Chin, whose $1,000 beige Loro Piana loafers Medina skewered last summer in a post titled “The ‘Fourth of July in the Hamptons’ Starter Pack”.

Medina has turned funny memes mocking investment bankers into a fully fledged, profitable business, with more than 30 investments in early stage startups. He is a partner in Bond, a private members club focused on padel and wellness that will open in the Hamptons this summer. He has described it as “where the social element of Soho House meets the fitness of an Equinox . . . ”

Medina now looks for inspiration to figures such as Jimmy Buffett, the late singer-songwriter turned business tycoon, and musician-investor DJ Kygo, both of whom he credits with leveraging a “cultish” following into a portfolio of businesses.

But of achieving an 800,000-strong Instagram following, he said: “That’s like eight Ohio State University football stadiums. And I’m just standing in the middle of the field, making jokes to them. It makes me feel so tiny. I try not to think about it.”

Chart of the week

Star stockpickers used to rule the roost in the world of hedge funds, but their influence is waning. 

Our hedge correspondent Costas Mourselas reports that, over the past five years, investors have pulled almost $150bn from long/short equity funds — the first known hedge fund strategy — where managers buy stocks they think will do well and bet against companies they see as overvalued. 

The biggest names in hedge fund land used to be names such as Tiger Management’s late founder Julian Robertson, Lansdowne Partners’s Pete Davies or Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn. But now star stockpickers have taken a back seat to the likes of Ken Griffin’s Citadel and Izzy Englander’s Millennium Management, who run large diversified hedge funds trading across all markets, including equities. 

Managers say that a prolonged period of central banks propping up markets and keeping rates low has led to an endless bullrun which is tough to keep up with. Low rates have enabled poorer quality companies to keep themselves afloat with cheap financing, making short bets particularly tough. 

London’s market seems to have been hit particularly hard, with Adelphi Capital closing in 2022, investors fleeing Pelham Capital in 2023, and Lansdowne’s hedge fund business now a shell of its former self. 

Hedge fund managers say that Europe has less dynamic capital markets compared to the US and that the lack of high-growth companies may have played a role in dampening returns for those that invest in Europe. 

Is the party over for stockpickers, or are they due a return to form? Email me: harriet.agnew@ft.com

Five unmissable stories this week

After a bungled succession at private equity pioneer Carlyle, former Goldman Sachs banker Harvey Schwartz is a year into his bid to rejuvenate the US group. But can he succeed? Last week he laid out new targets for Carlyle’s growth and profitability. Meanwhile deputy editor Patrick Jenkins contemplates the “thinking barbarians,” arguing that the private equity cannot always be caricatured as short-termist, debt-addicted asset-strippers. 

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is bringing high-speed traders and some hedge funds under direct supervision in the $26tn Treasury bond market, enacting a rule meant to bolster its stability following a series of crises. It will force high-speed traders and some hedge funds in the market to register with the agency as dealers.

Bill Ackman, the founder of Pershing Square Capital Management has told investors he plans to raise tens of billions of dollars through two new funds, including one that has not been previously disclosed, even as he faced questions about whether his increased activism via X is a distraction. The billionaire hedge fund manager has used the social media platform to campaign against several university leaders over their handling of antisemitism on campuses and Business Insider over its coverage of alleged plagiarism by his wife, Neri Oxman.

A group of global institutional investors with a collective $77tn of assets under management, among them Norges Bank Investment Management, Calpers and AustralianSuper, are warning that a proposed overhaul of listing rules to attract more growth companies to the UK market will erode shareholder rights, undermine the country’s reputation for corporate governance and harm its attractiveness as a financial centre. Our columnist John Plender warns the UK government that diluting corporate governance has consequences.

Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager, is the latest mainstream investment group to target the fast-growing alternatives sector. It has struck a €350mn deal to buy Alpha Associates, a Zurich-based company that manages €8.5bn of assets across funds of funds investing in private debt, infrastructure and private equity strategies.   

And finally

To Jaipur, the city of romantic pink palaces (painted the colour of hospitality at the Majarah’s request in preparation for a visit by The Prince of Wales in 1876), block prints, and the Jaipur Literature Festival — dubbed “The Mahabharata of Literary Festivals” by Air Mail magazine. From its inaugural gathering in 2006, featuring 18 writers and around 100 attendees, some of whom “appeared to be tourists who had simply got lost,” according to the event’s indefatigable co-founder, author William Dalrymple, it has grown into a global phenomenon. Highlights for me were Roger Cohen and Anjan Sundaram on writing war; Jonathan Freedland speaking about his book The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World; Patrick Radden Keefe on the Sackler empire, and Katherine Rundell and Ben Macintyre discussing the art of biography. And of course the evening soirées held in a succession of magnificent palaces. If you’re thinking of going to Jaipur, don’t miss these travel tips published in Cabana magazine.