Boaz Weinstein’s audacious raid on the City’s sleepy £267 billion investment trust sector has rattled the Square Mile. But his aggression is in character. He is known on Wall Street for his love of high-stakes gambles and taking no prisoners.
A native New Yorker, the 52-year-old lives in a penthouse in the heart of Manhattan. The flat, bought for $25 million (£20 million) in 2012, was the residence of Huguette Clark, an eccentric, reclusive heiress whose multi-million dollar estate was the subject of an intense legal battle.
Saba Capital is nearby in the Chrysler Building. It’s logo is based on one of the Art Deco skyscraper’s chrome eagles.
Weinstein’s life is defined by calculation and risk. He was an early chess whizz, becoming a master at 16. He boasted last year of scraping a draw against the game’s current number one Magnus Carlsen and has also played against legendary grandmaster Garry Kasparov.
He has bragged about mastering the art of card counting in blackjack – a legal but controversial technique he says saw him banned from London’s Barracuda casino.
The avid poker player was invited to a tournament by investment guru Warren Buffett in 2005 and left with a Maserati.
In his professional life, Weinstein has profited handsomely from his risk-taking. After stints on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, he arrived at Deutsche Bank in 1998. He became one of only a few people trading credit default swaps, a financial product that pays out if a borrower fails to repay their loans.
Weinstein’s strategy proved lucrative for the bank, as did bets placed during many crises. These included the Russian debt default in 1998 and the collapse of energy trading firm Enron after a huge accounting scandal in 2001. This ability to make money out of the wreckage and misery of financial disasters proved rocket fuel for his career. He became one of Deutsche’s youngest ever managing directors in 2001 at the age of 27.
It was not all plain sailing. He is said by some to have lost Deutsche $1.8 billion in the 2008 crisis, though he has claimed the figure was ‘much lower’. He left in 2009 and hired 15 ex-colleagues to set up Saba.
The name, Hebrew for grandfather, is a tribute to his grandfather, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto in the Second World War. In 2012, just three years after setting up Saba, Weinstein is thought to have made $300 million betting against the so-called ‘London whale’. This was a massive loss incurred by investment bank JP Morgan through botched trades that ultimately cost the investment bank $6 billion.
Weinstein is now bringing his bellicose style to investment trusts in the UK. He has repeatedly lambasted the managers of the seven investment trusts on his hit list.
So far, he has not deigned to do so in person, but he wrote on the social network X that he would be in London in coming weeks. His tweet came after shareholders in the £1.3 billion Herald Investment Trust, his first target, decisively rejected his proposals to take over the firm.
More than 99 per cent of voting shares not controlled by Saba opposed its plans.
New York court filings suggest he is locked in another dispute – a divorce battle with Tali Farhadian, whom he separated from last autumn.
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