Angelo Gordon is a global alternative investment manager founded in November 1988 by John M. Angelo and Michael L. Gordon who together ran the arbitrage department of L.F. Rothschild in the 1980s. The firm is 100% employee-owned, SEC-registered, and has nearly 450 employees and more than 170 investment professionals. Angelo Gordon focuses on four main investment disciplines: credit, real estate, private equity, and multi-strategy. Within those broad categories, the firm offers products in distressed debt and non-investment grade corporate credit, convertible and merger arbitrage, residential and consumer debt, energy direct lending, real estate private equity, real estate debt and lending, net lease real estate, private equity, multi-strategy, and middle market direct lending. Angelo Gordon offers two types of investment structures: open-ended hedge fund products and closed-ended private equity-style products. The firm is headquartered in New York City with additional offices worldwide including in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Washington, D.C., London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Seoul, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Singapore.
History
John Angelo and Michael Gordon founded the firm on strategies with which they had 15 years prior experience: distressed securities, risk arbitrage, and convertible arbitrage. The multi-strategy platform was added in 1993 as a way to offer investors a single fund which captured many of Angelo Gordon’s investment strategies and which could tactically allocate as markets shifted. In 1998, the leveraged loan business was added as an extension of the distressed debt business.
The firm began buying real estate as early as 1990 through investments in the distressed debt of bankrupt real estate companies. In 1993, as real estate markets buckled under the weight of too much debt, the firm launched its opportunistic real estate strategy investments with the goal of improving and repositioning the property by increasing operating income.
In early 2002, the company added core plus real estate to its real estate strategies as it was able to benefit from its operating partner network, and purchase high quality real estate. Since 2005, the firm has expanded its real estate offerings through a dedicated opportunistic Asian real estate strategy. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the European banking crisis of 2011, Angelo Gordon added European real estate to its strategies as prices were depressed and liquidity was severely curtailed in the region. Net Lease real estate strategy was established in 2005 to focus on below investment grade tenants. Angelo Gordon further expanded into the intersections of real estate and credit with the addition of real estate debt in 2006 and residential and consumer debt in 2008.
The firm took advantage of the post-2008 financial crisis contraction in bank lending to smaller companies through senior secure direct lending to energy companies in 2013 and to middle market borrowers in the private equity sponsor community in 2014. In October 2013, Larry Schloss became the president of Angelo Gordon. In March 2016, Mr. Schloss left the firm. Co-founder John M Angelo died in 2016.
Mr. Josh Baumgarten; Co-CIO and Head of Credit Co-Portfolio Manager, Multi-Strategy
Mr. Adam Schwartz; Co-CIO and Head of Real Estate
Awards and recognition
Angelo Gordon’s portfolio managers have in recent years been noted for top performance in their investment strategies. Angelo Gordon’s CMBS fund and the non-investment grade corporate credit fund were recognized by Bloomberg for Best Performance for Directional Fixed Income The RMBS/ABS fund appeared in Barron’s Top 100 Hedge Funds in 2013 and in 2014. Angelo Gordon’s flagship multistrategy fund appeared in Business Insider’s 100 Most Successful Hedge Funds in 2012, Bloomberg ‘s 100 Top Performing Large Hedge Funds in 2013 and won the award for CreditFlux Best Credit Multistrategy in 2014.
Investments
Angelo Gordon operates three basic types of investment vehicles:
Illiquid strategies — include a variety of investment strategies: distressed securities, private equity, triple net lease and real estate.
Liquid strategies — credit opportunities, convertible arbitrage and risk arbitrage.
Multi-strategy — takes advantage of attractive alternative investment opportunities from a range of the firm's disciplines.