27 year-old hedge fund manager: I live a pretty standard life

efinancialcareers.com:

The last time we spoke to Nikita Fadeev, he seemed a potential poster boy for premature burnout. Aged only 26, Fadeev was running Fasanara Digital, a quant crypto hedge fund with 13 employees and $150m of crypto assets under management and in doing so he was working all day and all night. One year later, the assets under management and employee numbers have shrunk (they’re down to $80m and 12 respectively) and so has Fadeev’s risk of burning out.

“Though most of my waking hours are devoted to my work, my definition of 'work' has evolved,” says Fadeev of his maturation. “I read a lot of books and watch documentaries, which some people might say is leisure, but I find invaluable analogies there about how teams go through challenging seasons and come back stronger. I’m looking at a lot of things like psychology and sport that might not seem related to trading, but they significantly inform my perspectives on efficiency, innovative decision-making and incremental improvement.”

The parallel between a challenging seasons in sport and running a crypto hedge fund in 2022-23 doesn’t need much elaboration. “Last year has been very difficult for the space,” admits Fadeev. “There were challenges from all directions, and a lot of firms were knocked out and wound down to zero.”

Despite being battered by the storm Fasanara Digital survived and just won best overall digital asset manager in Hedgeweek’s European Digital Assets Awards. “Despite the turbulences, we outperformed the market and the majority of our competitors both in absolute and relative terms,” says Fadeev. “We did pretty well.”

How does a 27 year-old come to run his own $80m hedge fund? The answer is that Fasanara Digital isn’t Fadeev’s own fund but a platform