Jacob Gottlieb’s birthplace is New York City. His parents come from Poland. Gottlieb’s father Max was an economics professor, whereas his mother Helena was a pediatrician. The professional background of his family influenced his interest in economics and healthcare. These interests guided his educational and career goals.
Mr. Gottlieb became interested in investing at a young age. As a 7th grader, he was the winner of his school’s stock picking contest. Since Gottlieb was a genius in investing, his father created a brokerage account for him. He graduated from Brown University with honors. As an undergraduate at Brown, Mr. Gottlieb studied economics. He got his medical degree from NYU School of Medicine. After completing a general medicine internship at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Gottlieb decided not to pursue medicine as a career. Instead, he wanted to be a Wall Street CFA.
In 1998, Jacob started his job as a buy-side analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. He focused on the global healthcare sector. Later on, Mr. Gottlieb became a healthcare portfolio manager at Merlin Biomed Group (MBG) for a short time. He took a position Balyasny Asset Management (BAM) in 2001. His big stock portfolio gains made him the highest earner at BAM. Gottlieb ended his career at BAM to establish Visium in November 2005. He had approximately $300 million in seed funding for the launching Visium Asset Management company. Mr. Gottlieb’s team of 20 investment professionals from BAM were also co-founders of Visium.
Mr. Gottlieb was involved in Visium’s formation. The goal of Visium was to offer high ROI’s to its investors. Participation in syndicate transactions was beneficial for portfolio managers. At it’s highest point, Visium was an $8 billion hedge fund. In June 2016, the company was dishonored because it was engaged in insider trading and mismarked bonds. Gottlieb has not been prosecuted for insider trading. Therefore, he was still the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of Visium as the firm was coming to an end.
The specialty of Visium’s professionals was fundamental long-short term equity strategies. Some of the notable employees at Visium were Joshua Brown, Stephen Ku, Ron Belldegrun, and Neetu Dhaliwal. The core values of Visium were honesty (i.e. intellectual and non-intellectual) and investment discipline.
Gottlieb held meetings with his new employees and created a long recruiting process to ensure that they were build to succeed. The purposes of these meetings were progress assessment and goal setting. Visium had a strong support system, which was helpful for the success of its portfolio managers.
In 2008, Jacob Gottlieb founded Altium Capital. As a boutique hedge fund, Altium Capital specializes in small growth companies. Mr. Gottlieb became the CEO of this firm in June 2018.
Jacob Gottlieb is a supporter of the following New York-based public service organizations: Covenant House, Math for America, and the Robbin Hood Foundation. He received his CFA charter from the Association for Investment Management and Research (AIMR) in 2001 and his PRM Designation from the Professional Risk Managers’ International Association (PRMIA) in 2010.
