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New York and then Columbia University Graduate School of Business. Tepper went to the University of Pittsburgh and then on to Carnegie Mellon Business School. Sussman received his undergraduate and MBA degrees from New York University. As mentioned before, Kingdon received his MBA from Harvard and Rajaratnam from Wharton.

OPPORTUNISTIC VERSUS CORE COMPETENCY

Most of the managers describe their portfolio optimization as opportunistic—they allocate capital where the opportunities are. There is no predetermined commitment to a given investment category, though there are often limits to sector and position allocations. This is the case with Ainslie, Kovner, Och, Singer, Stark, Sussman, and Tepper.

These managers view the world as having rapidly shifting opportunities. Singer's initial focus was convertible arbitrage (the simultaneous purchase of convertible securities and the selling of the underlying securities of the same issuer), but after the crash of 1987 he found it too correlated to the stock market and too difficult to hedge. He now focuses on distressed securities and arbitrage while approaching convertibles in an opportunistic manner. (Distressed securities is an event-driven strategy. Managers invest in companies in financial distress or bankruptcy.) Griffin's initial focus was convertible arbitrage. He said that to survive and find opportunities as the market changed, he had to add new strategies and products. Relative value and event driven are the primary trading focus. Kovner has expanded opportunistically as well from futures, commodities, and currencies in the early days of his career.

Others have been opportunistic on a much more cautions basis. Stark originally traded convertible arbitrage and then risk arbitrage. In the past few years, he has added private placements and is incubating other arbitrage strategies including high-yield arbitrage and convertible structure arbitrage. (High-yield arbitrage refers to arbitrage between low-grade fixed-income securities of companies that have upside potential.) Similarly, Och's original core businesses were merger arbitrage, convertible arbitrage, and event-driven restructuring. He added distressed credits in 1999.

A few have stayed within a general area and move around within that category. For example, Rajaratnam's focus is technology. Within that theme, he has added biotechnology, Internet sector, communica-