BOAZ WEINSTEIN

Weinstein was a child prodigy in chess. He became a Life Master at 15 — one of the youngest in American history at the time.

He then went to the University of Michigan and somehow decided that credit derivatives were even more fun than competitive chess.

He joined Deutsche Bank at 23 and became one of the youngest managing directors in the bank’s history at 27. He ran their credit trading desk and proprietary trading operations, generating huge profits through the mid-2000s.

In 2008, his proprietary trading positions blew up during the financial crisis, losing nearly $2 billion for Deutsche Bank. He left the bank.

In 2009, he launched Saba Capital Management with about $140 million. The fund specializes in credit and volatility trading.

It was his London Whale trade in 2012 that really put him on the map — he correctly bet against the massive credit derivative positions that JPMorgan’s Bruno Iksil had accumulated. While JPMorgan lost $6 billion, Saba made hundreds of millions.

More recently, Saba has become known for activist campaigns against closed-end funds, buying them at discounts and pressuring boards to narrow the gap.

Saba Capital Management is his baby. Founded in 2009 after his departure from Deutsche Bank, it manages around $5 billion.

The fund specializes in credit, convertible bonds, and volatility strategies. The name comes from the Hebrew word for grandfather — a tribute to his family.

At Deutsche Bank, he ran their proprietary credit trading desk. It was one of the most profitable desks on Wall Street until the 2008 crisis turned it into one of the most expensive.

The loss was about $1.8 billion, which is the kind of number that gets you a meeting with the CEO and then a meeting with HR.

Weinstein is a relative value trader in credit markets. He looks for situations where two similar things are priced differently and bets on the gap closing.

It’s like finding the same shoe priced at $100 in one store and $50 in another — except the shoes are corporate bonds and the stores are global capital markets.

His edge is in complex credit instruments — credit default swaps, convertible bonds, credit indices. These are areas where most investors either don’t understand the math or aren’t willing to do the work.

Weinstein does both.

More recently, he’s become an activist in the closed-end fund space, buying funds trading at discounts to their net asset value and then agitating for changes that close the gap. It’s a different game but the same instinct — find a price discrepancy and exploit it.

The London Whale trade in 2012. JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office had accumulated a massive position in credit default swap indices — so big that it was moving the market.

A trader named Bruno Iksil, nicknamed the London Whale, had built positions so large they couldn’t be unwound without catastrophic losses.

Weinstein saw the distortion in the market and bet against it. He bought the other side of the trade.

When JPMorgan’s position imploded — eventually costing the bank $6.2 billion — Saba Capital made hundreds of millions. Weinstein basically saw a whale stranded on the beach and knew it couldn’t get back to the ocean.

The 2008 Deutsche Bank disaster. Weinstein’s proprietary credit positions lost approximately $1.8 billion during the financial crisis.

He’d been incredibly profitable in the years leading up to it, but the positions were too large and too concentrated for the magnitude of the crisis.

The loss ended his career at Deutsche Bank. He was 35 years old, had been a managing director since 27, and suddenly he was out.

To his credit, he started Saba Capital less than a year later and turned the experience into a better risk framework. But $1.8 billion is the kind of tuition fee that’s hard to forget.

Weinstein believes that credit markets are systematically less efficient than equity markets because fewer people analyze them. Most investors focus on stocks.

Credit derivatives, convertible bonds, and structured products are a relative ghost town when it comes to analytical coverage. That’s where the opportunities live.

He also believes in the chess principle of position. Every move should improve your position even if it doesn’t directly attack.

In investing, that means building optionality — owning positions that benefit from multiple scenarios, not just one.

Weinstein lives in New York with his family. He’s relatively private about his personal life compared to his public persona in finance and chess.

He’s been open about his passion for chess being something that grounds him outside of markets — a game where the rules are fixed and nobody can change the regulatory framework on you mid-match.

University of Michigan, where he studied philosophy. Not finance, not math — philosophy.

He credits the analytical thinking from philosophy with helping him approach markets differently than people with traditional finance backgrounds. The chess master turned philosopher turned derivatives trader pipeline is about as unusual as it gets on Wall Street.

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