By Katya Wachtel
For Omega Advisors’ Steve Einhorn, the window of sleep-able hours is narrowing.
“One needs to know whats going on around the world. I turn in around midnight so I can monitor what’s going on in China and Japan,” Einhorn, vice chairman at Leon Cooperman’s $7billion fund, said at the Reuters Global Investment Summit last week. ”A decade ago, did I and most others focus on what’s going on in China? No. Now we wait for the November manufacturing index for China to come out. The day is longer because of that. I am up around 6 in the morning; I review what has gone on overnight in Asia and in Europe. I spend an hour in front of the machine at home, going through data and news releases” before he’s out the door.
This was undoubtedly the most common refrain when we asked some of Wall Street’s savviest money managers and investors how they begin their day, and with what must-read literature, during the week-long summit.
Jeff Kronthal, who was the head of Global Credit, Real Estate and Structured Products at Merrill Lynch and now runs investment firm KLS Diversified, is in the office no later than 7 am for that very reason. ”The world is working,” he said, and even though he manages 40 people now instead of 3,500, “there is so much going on overseas, that you need to know what’s going on in Europe, what the China numbers were” before it is possible to begin the day. “When I started at Solomon Brothers, it didn’t really matter what went on overseas,” Kronthal, who worked at Solomon for a decade until July 1988, said on Tuesday.
“You can tell by the bags under my eyes I agree with that sentiment,” said Teresa Heitsenrether, who runs JP Morgan’s Prime Brokerage. “It’s a 24/7 type of proposition.”
