- Balyasny Asset Management is a multi-strategy hedge fund that has used the cloud since 2017.
- The firm uses Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to handle most of its tech infrastructure.
- The firm’s chief information officer and chief data officer detail 4 tools it built on the cloud.
Balyasny Asset Management is deploying an arsenal of secret weapons that the $19.5 billion hedge fund has been building on the public cloud.
With about 75% of the firm’s tech infrastructure sitting on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, the Chicago-based firm’s tech division has stayed busy putting the cloud-based tools and services of Big Tech to work.
The firm, founded in 2001 by Dmitry Balyasny, Scott Schroeder, and Taylor O’Malley, has been putting tech on the cloud since 2017. That head start has given it an advantage, saving the hedge fund the hassle (and time and money) that comes with ripping out and replacing large networks of legacy tech.
“We’re not starting from a point with a huge heritage or legacy environment that requires us to go through a migration journey. I think being unshackled in that way has been helpful,” Michael Grimaldi, Balyasny’s chief information officer, told Insider.
The firm’s data, applications, and investment teams all operate on cloud-based technologies, added Grimaldi, who is a former managing director at both JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.
The explosion of the firm’s use of cloud — spend on the tech was up 130% in 2022 versus the prior year — comes at a time when the hedge fund’s front office pushes into new territory.
Balyasny’s bread and butter has always been as an equity long/short fundamental trading shop, but in recent years the firm has branched out from its core business. Such growth has meant the firm has had to scale its existing back-end technology to keep up with the front office, and in some cases build entirely new platforms from scratch.
In turn, the firm’s tech and data teams have doubled in size since 2021 to more than 450 people.
“As we have grown, the number of portfolio managers we have to support and the number of businesses and geographies has grown. We’re building more applications, and we’re taking existing things we do and saying how do we that on a scale of 10x or 100x,” Grimaldi said of the public cloud.
Grimaldi and Balyasny’s chief data officer, Carson Boneck, detailed four tools that the firm has built or significantly upgraded over the past year that are changing the way the hedge fund does business.
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