Firm: Third Point Management
City: New York
2008 Age: 46
Loeb grew up in Santa Monica Canyon in California. One of three children, his father was an attorney and his mother a historian.
An astute trader from a young age, Loeb was already trading stocks in high school. After spending two years at the University of California, Berkeley, he moved to New York and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in economics.
Having graduated Loeb started his career at Warburg Pincus, LLC. – a leading firm in the private equity industry. In 1987 Loeb left Warburg Pincus taking a position at Island Records as director of corporate development. After Island, Loeb worked for the New York based hedge fund Lafter Equity Investors and later moved on to investment bank Jefferies and Co. to work as an analyst.
Before founding Third Point he gained further industry experience working at Citicorp as a junk bond salesman.
Third Point is an activist hedge fund – Loeb is notorious for writing letters filed publicly with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that complain of the management failures of companies he has invested in.
The letters that Loeb wrote to CEO’s of companies he viewed as poorly managed are normally attached to Schedule 13D’s – forms that firms owning 5% or more of a company’s outstanding stock are required to file with the SEC.
Loeb is rumoured to be associated with the alias Mr. Pink on SiliconInvestor.com website. Mr. Pink’s unabashed views on various companies have garnered much attention since the late 1990’s.
Loeb charges the hedge fund industry standard annual management fee of 2 percent and 20 percent of all profits.
A recruiting rivalry between Loeb and Chicago hedge fund manager Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group has been an area of controversy in the industry.
An avid surfer, Loeb named his firm after Third Point, the biggest break at Malibu Surfrider Beach. Among Loeb’s other passions are art collecting, yoga and music.
Dan Loeb married Margaret Munzer Loeb, a former yoga instructor, in 2004. The couple recently bought a $45 million full-floor penthouse on Central Park.