This French hedge fund is on a growth tear. Defying industry norms is part of its secret sauce.

• Capital Fund Management has been connected a blistery streak successful caller years, increasing amid beardown returns.

• The steadfast fosters an open, malleable civilization that's catnip to PhDs but diverges from galore peers.

• It's not hypersecretive. It doesn't prosecute armies of PMs. And it isn't fixated connected winning astatine each costs.

In caller years, multistrategy hedge funds person been connected a tear, hoovering up hundreds of billions successful assets from investors and watching their unit rosters balloon.

One dilemma specified firms face: How bash you support a accordant institution civilization successful the look of a maturation spurt?

The answer, says Philippe Jordan, president of French hedge money elephantine : You don't.

Culture is often mythologized, but, successful Jordan's view, it is the elemental byproduct of past shared experiences astatine its core, and helium warns against the impulse to lionize "the bully aged days."

"Nostalgia turns a civilization into an artifact, and our civilization is dynamic," Jordan told Business Insider successful an interview.

CFM, a Paris-based quantitative multistrategy fund, has been connected a maturation teardrop of its own. Assets climbed astir 25% from the commencement of this twelvemonth to $21 cardinal arsenic of September. Five years ago, the steadfast managed conscionable $6.5 billion.

Head number has surged arsenic well, from 260 employees astatine the extremity of 2020 to astir 450 today. CFM's New York bureau has doubled successful size successful caller years to 40 people, including 15 researchers.

The 35-year-old steadfast doesn't acceptable neatly into the hedge-fund typology, rejecting galore of the norms that person travel to specify the industry. CFM has nary larger-than-life laminitis that reigns supreme; instead, it's governed by a five-member board. It doesn't prosecute armies of autarkic portfolio managers. Unlike astir of its quant brethren, it isn't obsessed with secrecy. And it doesn't espouse a ruthless, zero-sum mentality.

Compared with multimanagers that predominate today's hedge-fund landscape, which employment scores of siloed pods, CFM is "at the utmost different extremity of the spectrum," Jordan said. "Lots of collaboration, unfastened environments successful which radical consciousness escaped to communicate, talk, and beryllium funny astir different people's businesses."

CFM was an aboriginal practitioner of the collegial, world ethos exemplary that's present communal astatine galore quant trading firms. Cofounder Jean-Pierre Aguillar, an technologist and machine scientist, launched CFM successful 1991 and helped specify the firm's civilization earlier his decease successful a gliding mishap successful 2009.

While collaboration and intelligence rigor is prized, the steadfast isn't "throwing spaghetti astatine the walls." Performance matters — arsenic evidenced by CFM's beardown tally successful caller years.