
Taking the plunge
Joining ‘The Firm’
HBK was founded in the early 1990s as a convertible arbitrage
shop. Harlan Korenvaes had used his connections from heading
the convertibles group at Merrill Lynch to raise money for his own
venture. Since inception, the returns had been excellent. After the
early days of focusing on one area, the firm had quickly expanded into
others such as fixed-income arbitrage, merger arbitrage, emerging-
markets fixed-income, and special situations. When I joined in July
1999 the firm was managing around $1.5 billion in assets, on its way
to managing double-digit billions five