Hitting 80 isn’t usually the signal for a career change, but for George Zweig it is.
The 78-year-old physicist by trade is starting a hedge fund, because “life can be very boring” without work, Zweig told the Wall Street Journal. Zweig and his two partners, 40-year-old Shane Haas and 49-year-old Ravi Chander, are launching Signition as a quantitative hedge fund late this year. Zweig knows he’s an old geezer in a land of young bucks. Last year more than 1,000 hedge funds were opened, and 864 closed.
At this point, Zweig seems to have done it all. As a young Jewish boy, he immigrated from Moscow to the U.S. soon before World War II. At 26, he discovered the quark, a fundamental building block of matter. He did covert work for the military during the Vietnam War, and helped design one of the first cochlear implants.
Zweig became familiar with hedge funds as an investor, while he tried to create a fund for his disabled daughter, before joining quant-fund Renaissance Technologies in 2003. He signed a non-compete barring him from hedge funds for four years after his 2010 departure. Haas pitched his quant fund idea to Zweig the day after his four years expired.
Quantitative strategies took a hit in 2007, but have seen some revival in recent years. Steven Cohen and Ray Dalio have both added to the quant teams in their hedge funds. Zweig says he’s excited about creating new strategies.
He has other motivation as well, writes the Wall Street Journal.
He wants to keep working as a way of honoring those in his generation who didn’t survive World War II. “It’s a kind of survivor’s guilt,” he said. “I was fortunate enough to be given this opportunity to work, so I feel a special responsibility to not waste it.”
Photo: APS Physics