Livin’ on the hedge: Farm girl runs billion-dollar hedge fund

Eight career lessons from Renée Haugerud

Photo credit: Matthew Furman for Barron’s

In the male-dominated world of Wall Street, one of the testosterone-heaviest areas of all is that of hedge funds. Women manage only three percent of the 9,000 hedge funds in the US. Yet in the last nine years, these women-led hedge funds have outperformed hedge funds run by men by 55 percent!

Renée Haugerud is one of those in the elite three percent. She runs Galtere Ltd, a New York based hedge fund company with more than $1 billion in assets under administration. Since 1999, her Galtere International Master Fund has delivered an annualized return of more than 12 percent (net of fees) compared to her benchmark’s less than three percent return.

Looking over Renée’s pioneering career, here are eight lessons we can all learn from this very golden girl.

1. Kids are never too young to learn about finances

   As a kid, Renée’s father would take her out to survey the family’s cornfield. Together they would fly over crops in Iowa in her pop’s single engine plane. When she asked why he would care about crops belonging to someone else, he used the opportunity to teach his daughter about the basics of supply and demand and how he would buy and sell corn in the futures market.

2. Follow your passions

   Renée studied forestry at the University of Montana, but when she went looking for a job, it was an agribusiness trading company that piqued her interest. With her early lessons from her father as inspiration, Renée traded corn and sunflower seeds at Cargill, then moved on to currencies and fixed-income products.

3. Be adventurous

   Before starting her own company, Renée chose to work at companies that would provide her with opportunities to live and work around the world. This gave her important experience that would benefit her throughout her career. She worked in Geneva, Melbourne, Minneapolis and Hong Kong.

4. Be yourself

   Renée never succumbed to the female stereotype of being demure or indirect. During her time at Cargill, Renee found herself at a staff party, dancing with her boss. She noticed he was struggling with the dance moves. She couldn’t help herself from pointing out the obvious: “You’re obviously having a problem here…why don’t you let me lead?”

5. If you don’t fit in, make your own spot

   Eventually, Renée found herself hitting a glass ceiling at Cargill. She felt that the way she analyzed markets was different than traditional (male) investors and that she needed space to do things her own way. In 1997, she founded Galtere. Unlike passive commodity index funds, Galtere International Fund actively trades in commodities, metals, currencies, fixed income and stocks.

6. Don’t burn your bridges

   In trying to raise money for her newfound company, Renée quickly learned just how tough it is, being a woman in a man’s game. She turned to her former employer Cargill and asked for an investment. Knowing her capabilities, they entrusted her with $60 million and more importantly, provided a signal to the other ‘big boys’ in the market that this was a woman worth dealing with – a woman who’s got game.

7. Learn from ALL your lessons

   In 2003, Renée told Forbes magazine: “Picking the right investment is much like cutting cattle…You herd the winners into the corral and cut the rest away. It’s precise, but with a good rider, it’s not complicated.”

8. Be a mentor

   Renée and her husband donated $1.5 million to the University of Tennessee for a program that teaches finance from a female perspective. “The chemistry and psychology of the male and female brain are different, so I think it is necessary to create a trading school that thinks and teaches outside the box, so that female students can be just as successful in the world of finance and business as men are,” Renée told the campus alumni magazine. “The finance center will focus on teaching trading from a right brain perspective, incorporating the best of emotional intelligence and IQ, so that all portfolio managers have the skill set to produce superior returns.”

Own your success

From farm to fund, Renée Haugerud proves that just because an industry may be male-dominated, that doesn’t make it impossible for a woman to succeed. You just have to believe in yourself and believe in what you do. As she told a University of Tennessee graduation class in 2009: “In the trading world, I always say pretend that billion dollars is yours - and take the risk and own it!”

 

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