A mutual fund industry entrepreneur is building out the teams at two of his firms, and he's also looking for more asset manager allies.

Jerry Szilagyi, head of both Catalyst Funds [profile] and Strategy Shares, confirms that both firms are hiring and are hunting for subadvisors.

"We're looking at potentially bringing in some new subadvisors" at Catalyst," Szilagyi tells MFWire.

Catalyst specializes in liquid alternatives. When it comes to acquisitions and adoptions, Szilagyi is particularly interested in "alternative income strategies", as well as macro strategies, unique long-short equity strategies (like long-short international), and "risk premia systematic type strategies." Catalyst and two of its siblings, AlphaCentric Funds and the Rational Funds, have all done hedge fund conversions where Catalyst turns an existing hedge fund into a liquid alt open-end mutual fund or a closed-end interval fund and becomes the investment advisor to the fund. The fund then hires the old hedge fund shop as the subadvisor.

"We've found that to be a very effective way at building out alternative strategies," Szilagyi says. "We find a manager and a fund that already has a successful strategy and track record, a real money track record with a process in place."

"We have a couple things we're working on that could be signed by the end of the month," Szilagyi adds.

At Catalyst's fourth sibling, Strategy Shares, Szilagyi is "looking at expanding and launching new ETFs, both in-house but also as a private-label platform for other sponsors that want to be in the platform." Strategy Shares would be the advisor to those ETFs, but they're open to working with outside subadvisors interested in the ETF space.

Szilagyi confirms that he's "looking to expand the team" at Strategy Shares. He's also hiring at Catalyst, too.

"We've been expanding across the board," Szilagyi says. "We're probably looking to expand in risk management as well as operations. We've been expanding our marketing and sales team. We just brought in a technology marketing person, a web designer."

The four firms do have "some shared infrastructure," including a single compliance team, Szilagyi says. Yet they are "separate and distinct companies with different ownership, different distribution." Catalyst has more 60 people and more than $6 billion in AUM. AlphaCentric has about 30 people and about $1.5 billion in AUM. And Rational has about a dozen people and about $200 million in AUM. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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