Hedge Funders Band Together for Charity

At Hedge Fund Rocktoberfest, fund managers take up guitars instead of portfolios and finance takes a backseat to the benefit concert

by Burt Helm

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It's Thursday night at B.B. King's in New York City's Times Square, and the place is rockin'. A nine-member band is onstage, complete with brass, bongos, the works. Women, some in stylish form-fitting tunics, others in black dresses, dance by the stage with men in checked button-down oxfords tucked into pleated khakis, some with suits and no ties.

It's Hedge Fund Rocktoberfest—an annual concert featuring bands and soloists from the hedge fund investment community. The band The Subscribers are onstage, featuring members of Octagon Asset Management, Lazard Asset Management (LAZ), Brownstone Asset Management, Société Générale Asset Management, and three other firms. They're belting out These Boots Are Made for Walkin'.

The song choice is peculiar. That's because behind them on projector screens, interspersed between the logos of the event's corporate sponsors, are images of Indian children with club feet and prosthetic legs.

That's because the hedge funders are throwing the event to raise money for some of the most disadvantaged people in the world: poor children who have been born with deformed limbs or had their limbs amputated. Mead Welles, founder of Octagon Asset Management, started the charity in 1999 after a trip overseas to identify investment targets for his fledgling fund brought him into direct contact with the children's plight.

Funds for Prosthetics

For the last few years, the charity has sponsored benefit events catering to the hedge fund community, including Hedge Fund Polo tournaments and a Hedge Fund "Hunks" date auction. (Welles insists he wasn't aware this was planned, though he did go for $1,200 in the auction. He's now engaged.) The charity uses the money to help doctors in the developing world fit impoverished children with the prosthetics they need.

So far, 311 children have registered to receive prosthetics and 157 children have received them, all through the work of the three-year-old charity. He calls the organization "A Leg to Stand On." Now, for the third year, he and bandmate Chris Heasman of Lazard Asset Management have organized Hedge Fund Rocktoberfest. It continues to grow each year, and this year was attended by 1,040 people and raised $250,000 for the charity.

How else could you get yourself onstage in one of the best venues in Manhattan, in front of a thousand people? You make yourself the benefit concert. Get your lucrative financial-services firm to kick in a sponsorship—$10,000 for the "Gold" level that includes 10 tickets for the firm and any clients. Then tell your broker, your lawyer, your accountant, or anybody else who depends on you and your mountains of cash for their livelihood to kick in and buy some tickets themselves, too—for needy children!

Capital Crowd

Then buy a bunch of tickets yourself for your buddies. You've got enough to rent out all of B.B. King's for six hours in no time, complete with a full open bar, plenty of hors d'oeuvres, and a buffet. Not to mention a ton of money left over for the kids. Getting slotted to perform, says Welles, depends on how much money the band can commit to raise for A Leg to Stand On, as well as on how well they play. About 60% of the tickets sold are bought as large blocks, usually by the sponsoring firms, he says.

The result is a packed house of portfolio managers, analysts, traders, investment bankers, lawyers, auditors, and more than a few blondes. Everybody yaks loudly by the back bar of the main room, jerkily nodding their heads to the music and taking pictures of the band with their cell-phone cameras in the front of the room next to the stage. Some drift over to chat quietly at Lucille's Restaurant, the smaller concert stage where the acoustic acts play.