The Big Win: Learning from the Legends to Become a More Successful Investor

Chapter 3

The Glass Ceiling of Performance

Renée Haugerud

Renée Haugerud is a different kind of investor.

It is not just the stellar performance generated over the 14-year life of her hedge fund management firm, Galtere Ltd.—performance marked by only one down year—that draws one to this conclusion.¹ And it is not just because she is a woman in a business still dominated by men. In fact, Haugerud’s Galtere Ltd. is one of the largest woman-owned-and-operated funds in the testosterone-fueled hedge fund management industry, and Haugerud, an avowed feminist (although she dislikes the word), is a proud exemplar and champion of what she sees as women’s natural affinity for trading. Indeed, to encourage more women to go into the business, Haugerud and her husband have endowed a center at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga that teaches finance from a woman’s perspective and that aims to demonstrate, as 85 Broad’s CEO Janet Hanson puts it, that “women are great traders.”

What really makes Renée Haugerud a different kind of investor is the perspective that informs her approach to the science and art of trading. It is a perspective shaped by her background in trading “just about every kind of commodity there is” and in her long and deep experience as a grain merchant. “I look at everything as a silo,” says Haugerud. “Is it in surplus or deficit, what is the global macro supply and demand, and what do I think will happen as a result? Then I see if there’s a trade to be made.”

Puts ...