In a way, Tekmerion Capital is a throwback to an earlier era of hedge funds.
Before mega funds like Millennium and Citadel shifted the $5.2 trillion industry toward more institutional “skill factories,” hedge funds were dominated by quirky characters trading niche markets and esoteric instruments.
Zachary Squire certainly fits that bill. The chief investment officer of Tekmerion Capital, which will spin out of Brevan Howard next month with $1 billion in assets, Squire has the investing bona fides — with stops at D.E. Shaw, Bridgewater, and HBK — that would catch any allocator’s eye.
Even in the eccentric world of macro investors, though, Squire stands out. A Princeton valedictorian who majored in Latin and ancient Greek, he’s turning his undergraduate thesis — a deep dive into property rights in the works of Roman philosopher Cicero — into a book. He sang opera as a child growing up in New York City.
Squire and his partner, Reed Morrissey, the firm’s CEO, are now pitching to new backers. The pair is in South Beach this week for the annual iConnections conference to meet with potential investors — and to add to his many conversation starters, Squire drove from New York to Miami.
Tekmerion counts multimanager quant fund, Engineers Gate, and Galaxy Digital CEO Michael Novogratz as investors and is positioning itself as a diversifier for institutions heavily exposed to US stocks, driven by differentiated macro research.
“There’s an opportunity right now where macro is hot and en vogue, and we want to be out there fundraising,” said Squire in an interview last week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Balcony Lounge restaurant.
“We want investors who understand what macro is, we want investors who understand hedge funds,” he added.
‘I still don’t know how they found me’
Squire initially had no interest in money management. He was set to pursue a Master’s in philosophy at Cambridge University when a cold email from legendary fund D.E. Shaw changed his trajectory.
“I still don’t know how they found me,” he said. He joined the firm’s entry-level rotational associates program, in part because Cambridge allowed him to defer his enrollment for a year.
D.E. Shaw is known for its focus on talent that, at first glance, doesn’t fit the typical Wall Street mold. Squire said the pitch was basically “everything in the finance industry is learning.” Winning, for asset managers, requires “sheer intellectual horsepower.”
He spent the bulk of his two years there on risk management, where he was exposed to the entire catalogue of markets, asset classes, and instruments the firm trades. He then joined Bridgewater, the Ray Dalio-founded firm that holds the title of largest hedge fund in the world, researching and trading global rates and currencies. An internal trading game — where employees could invest part of their pay in ideas they believed in — ultimately helped Tekmerion come about.
His strong performance in the game “gave me confidence I could do something like this,” Squire said.
Adding to his macro toolkit, Squire spent the next three years in London for credit investor HBK, focused on emerging markets.
The Tekmerion framework began to emerge, in large part thanks to Morrissey, a childhood friend who majored in international relations at Georgetown and worked in Malawi during his Fulbright scholarship.
Morrissey “saw the vision before I did,” Squire said, and soon the pair, along with a fellow Bridgewater alum, Lawrence Minicone, set out to raise money for the new venture. A mutual connection living in Puerto Rico brought them into Novogratz’s orbit, who backed them.
Tekmerion — a Greek word that, in academic texts, means irrefutable proof but in everyday language translates to “boundary stone” or a marker to delineate two sides — was launched in early 2017 with a small team and a relative pittance of capital.
Then Bridgewater sued.
Battling Bridgewater
The firm’s launch quickly caught the attention of the executive team at Bridgewater, including Dalio. Bridgewater’s legal team kept its complaints in private arbitration, where the mega fund alleged Tekmerion had run amok of past employee agreements thanks to a “misappropriation of trade secrets, breaches of contract, and unfair competition.”
Tekmerion eventually won a positive ruling from the panel, which found that Bridgewater had “manufactured false evidence.” The case spilled into public view in 2020 because Tekmerion sued Bridgewater to recover millions in legal fees, though that case was settled in August 2020.
Bridgewater declined to comment. Despite the frustration with Bridgewater and its legal strategy, Squire appreciates his former employer’s focus on publishing research, something Tekmerion has continued.
In that stressful time for the young fund, Minicone stepped away from the fund to work at RB Venture Partners as a private market investor.
In the years following the pandemic, the fund began to gain traction, delivering returns of nearly 30% in 2022, when global equity markets tanked, and 9.3% in 2023, outperforming larger macro players like Rokos Capital and Bridgewater. The manager caught the eye of billionaire Brevan Howard cofounder Alan Howard, who personally backed the young fund.
That relationship kicked off a relationship between not just Tekmerion and Howard, but also his firm. In 2024, the manager merged into the Brevan platform, where they continued to manage their own branded fund under Brevan’s umbrella of strategies.
Spinning out and staying true
Squire and Morrissey are excited to be back on their own again, though with a bigger team and much more capital. An undisclosed number of Brevan employees who worked under them are a part of the relaunch team. While Howard and Brevan are not investors in the relaunch, the firm retains the right to invest later and gets a share of Tekmerion’s revenue going forward.
The firm’s main partnership is now Engineers Gate, the multimanager systematic firm run by Greg Eisner. The fund will work from Engineers Gate’s midtown Manhattan offices in a building that also houses multistrategy giant Balyasny. (They eventually hope to find their own space downtown, closer to the Chinatown neighborhood Squire and Morrissey call home).
With many operational headaches settled thanks to the Engineers Gate relationship, the focus can now be on research and the firm’s models more than ever. Despite being a systematic macro manager, Squire said, “We don’t like to be called a quant.”
Tekmerion’s process starts with discretionary macro research to determine which investment signals and data inputs are worth weighing more heavily than others in an algorithm. Because of the slow frequency of many macro datasets, the firm typically holds positions for weeks at a time, Morrissey said.
Squire and Morrissey believe the firm’s nowcasting — their projection of what the macro environment is in the moment, since many economic data points are produced on a delay, such as the unemployment rate — is a key part of the pitch for potential LPs, which would get access to both the research and the fund’s returns.
In the meantime, the pair keep their history and shared background top of mind. When Miles Johnson, a student from their old high school, reached out in 2022 with a passion for the classics but uncertainty about his career path, the firm brought him on as an intern. They said he’s been a “rockstar” for the manager as he’s matriculated at Columbia and continues doing research for the manager.
“Talent doesn’t have a blueprint,” Morrissey said.
“You don’t need the same degree or background; people are people, and it’s their grit and drive that we’re interested in.”
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