Boaz Weinstein: the hedge fund ‘vulture’ swooping on the City

Saba Capital founder Boaz Weinstein’s campaign to take over and transform “the Miserable Seven” London-based investment trusts has been routed – for now. The fight isn’t over yet, says Jane Lewis

Boaz Weinstein, founder and chief investment officer of Saba Capital Management, during the Bloomberg Invest event
Boaz Weinstein is the founder and chief investment officer of Saba Capital Management.
(Image credit: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Elon Musk isn’t the only American business leader who relishes telling Brits how absolutely rubbish they are,” observed The Times in January. One New Yorker adding “his own unique contribution to the special transatlantic relationship” is Boaz Weinstein, the hedge-fund chief who has spent much of the year laying siege to seven London-listed investment trusts he dubs “the Miserable Seven”. Still, his three-month campaign hasn’t turned out quite as planned.

“I love punching a bully in the nose,” the Wall Street trader behind Saba Capital told the Financial Times. “That’s what I think I’m doing with closed-end funds.” When he landed with a bang in the UK – taking simultaneous stakes in a clutch of funds – he proposed ousting their boards, installing his own nominees and unlocking value for investors (and himself) by reducing the discount at which the shares trade relative to their assets.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.