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Meet the hedge fund billionaire who kickstarted Wall Street's newest tax dodge. illustration by philip smith for forbes ByJohn Hyatt, Forbes Staff. John Hyatt is a NYC-based Forbes staff writer covering Wall Street. Aug 31, 2026, 06:30am EDT After helping AQR pioneer a novel tax avoidance investment strategy, accounting PhD Hoon Kim left to start Quantinno. Thanks to thousands of wealth managers and their ultra-rich clients, assets have swelled from $2 billion to $70 billion in three years. The long-running stock bull market has left America's wealthiest with a tax problem: too many investment gains with too few losses. With major indexes marching ever higher, and as founders and early employees of tech firms accumulate fortunes in concentrated stock positions, it's become harder and harder for wealthy folks to identify losers that they can use to "harvest" losses to offset their capital gains. A fast-growing strategy designed to fix this problem has become the toast of the investment industry, from the Wall Street hedge funds crafting the products to the independent advisors hawking them to clients. In the so-called long-short tax-aware strategy, an investor uses leverage to make hundreds, even thousands, of additional bets on stocks - some that they own, and some that they short. (Shorting is betting that a stock will fall: you borrow shares, sell them and later buy them back, preferably at a lower price). The novel formula deliberately creates plenty of losses, on either its long or short positions, which investors can harvest to strategically offset gains elsewhere, while keeping most of their money invested in the rising stock market. Today, the assets committed to long-short tax aware strategies are fast approaching $200 billion, up from just a few billion five years ago. With an estimated $260 billion under management Greenwich-based AQR Capital Management, a 1,000-person hedge fund and asset manager, is well known as a pioneer of this trading strategy. Its success has prompted blue chip copycats from asset management giants like BlackRock, Nuveen, and Franklin Templeton to fellow quant hedge funds like Two Sigma and WorldQuant. All have recently launched or are exploring similar "long-short tax aware" offerings. However, AQR's biggest rival is a little known New York City-based firm called Quantinno Capital Management. In fact Quantinno's founder, a 57-year-old accounting PhD named Hoon Kim, actually helped create one of AQR's first long-short funds during his 12-year run at AQR. As of March 2026 Quantinno's assets were reported to be $48.4 billion across 10,600 individual accounts, up from less than $300 million five years ago, according to its website and public filings. This net assets figure has since been removed from Quantinno's website, but in less than six months assets have further ballooned to around $70 billion, says one wealth advisor familiar with the firm's numbers. "I would call their success remarkable. I've actually never seen anything like it," says Brent Sullivan, a tax analyst and founder of the blog Tax Alpha Insider. Become a member and unlock unlimited access, expert analysis and exclusive member benefits. Already a member? Digital Membership Billed monthly LESS THAN $2/WEEK Digital Membership Billed annually Digital Membership Billed biennially Premium access to exclusive events, thought-provoking conversations with global leaders and more, all available on-demand. Elevated browsing experience with fewer ads and unlimited article saving power an enhanced reading experience. ByJohn Hyatt John Hyatt is a staff writer who covers finance, investments and billionaire dealmakers. Contact Hyatt with suggestions, tips and scoops at +1-720-951-2080 (Signal) or [email protected]. Read our community guidelines.

AI-Powered 'vishing' attacks reportedly targeted top hedge funds. Turns out rogue AI isn't the only cybersecurity threat to be worried about. By Webb Wright Published August 5, 2026, 3:39 pm ET Reading time 2 minutes Amid all the recent reports of AI systems autonomously going off the rails and hacking into third-party organizations, it's almost easy to forget that human hackers are still out there, experimenting with AI in all kinds of nefarious ways. A new report from Bloomberg, however, is a reminder of just how quickly AI-enabled cybercrime is evolving - and how unprepared the world is to deal with it. According to the report, a litany of high-profile hedge funds, including Citadel and Two Sigma, were targeted by recent voice phishing, or "vishing," attacks, in which AI is used to simulate the voices of actual humans in an attempt to skirt security systems. Several private equity firms were also reportedly targeted. Two Sigma told Bloomberg it caught the attack in time before any of its internal systems were compromised. Citadel declined Gizmodo's request for comment. Point72, another hedge fund included in the attack, did not immediately respond to a comment request. IT experts have been warning for years that the proliferation of cheap, easy-to-use AI tools that mimic human speech or generate other kinds of deepfake content will escalate both the severity of scam attempts and the rate at which they occur. The world got a taste of this in 2024, when an employee at the Hong Kong branch of a multinational company was duped into wiring more than $25.5 million to scammers who had instructed her to do so using AI-generated deepfakes of company employees, including its chief financial officer. AI scams are also being deployed to tip political scales. Last summer, for example, someone (or a group of people working together) used AI to recreate the voice of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and then sent voice messages to foreign diplomats and federal officials. OpenAI also said in a June report that a fleet of scammers, all of whom appear to have been backed by the Chinese government, had been illicitly using ChatGPT to generate inflammatory social media content aimed at fueling Americans' resentment towards data centers, the power cells of the United States' AI industry. All the while, the market pressures of the AI race - combined with a total lack of federal regulation - have been pushing tech developers to build increasingly capable models, including ones designed to imitate human speech. (Such tools are often promoted as "companions" that can alleviate loneliness, even though research has indicated they can sometimes have the opposite effect.) OpenAI's latest voice model, GPT-Live-1, is engineered to imitate subtle nuances of human speech, and, in theory, make interacting with AI feel less awkwardly mechanical. By design, OpenAI's model cannot imitate the voices of real people; that was a lesson OpenAI had to learn the hard way after it received earlier public blowback for releasing a voice model that, to many people's ears, sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson. This is all to say: Nobody should be surprised that vishing attacks are on the rise. Technologically-enabled scam artistry is a tale as old as time, and AI is arguably the most enabling tool ever invented in that regard. The real mystery is why more isn't being done to build actually effective safeguards into AI systems to prevent them from happening in the first place.

Point72, Citadel among hedge funds hit by AI vishing attacks. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin. Photo by: Paul Elledge, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Hackers used AI voice cloning to target Point72, Citadel, Millennium and other major money managers on Wall Street. AUG 05, 2026 Point72 Asset Management, Millennium Management, Two Sigma Investments, and Citadel were all targeted in a coordinated wave of cyberattacks in recent days, with attackers using AI-powered voice phishing to attempt to extract sensitive data from employees of the Wall Street money managers. According to a Bloomberg report on Wednesday, Point72 informed investors it had been attacked, though the firm's initial review found no client information was stolen. The firm told investors it was still reviewing the incident. Spokespeople for Millennium, Point72, and Citadel declined to comment to Bloomberg. Two Sigma, which manages $75 billion in assets, told Bloomberg it successfully blocked the attempt. The voice fraud is known as "vishing" in cybersecurity terms. "Our security team responded quickly to an attempted vishing campaign targeting Two Sigma and other investment managers, and we have no indication of any impact to our data or our systems," a Two Sigma spokesperson said in a statement. "We continue to monitor the situation closely." Vishing attacks use technology to clone or mimic voices in phone calls, tricking employees into surrendering credentials or granting system access. FINRA has been in contact with member firms about the attempted breaches, according to a person with knowledge of the matter cited by Bloomberg. The regulator launched its Financial Intelligence Fusion Center in March 2026, a secure portal designed to help member firms share fraud threat intelligence and coordinate responses. Several private equity firms were also targeted as part of the same assault, Bloomberg reported. AI lowers the cost of attack The incidents reflect a broader shift in the threat landscape confronting financial services firms. Vinod Paul, president of Align Managed Services, a cybersecurity and IT firm specializing in hedge fund clients, told Bloomberg that AI tools have dramatically lowered the barrier to launching large-scale targeted attacks. "Before they could attack 50 entities in a targeted attack, now they can do 1,000," Paul said. "Hackers can also listen into a phone call and mimic the voice, tone and phrasings of the speakers to create fake calls." Will Wilson, chief executive of Antithesis - a software firm backed by Jane Street - told Bloomberg the AI has restructured cyber attacks. "The terrifying thing about modern-day AI systems is that they have commoditized this and made it possible to execute attacks at scale," Wilson said. "Everybody will have to seriously level up. Otherwise they are going to be in big trouble." In June 2026, Google's cybersecurity unit published a blog post flagging a similar vishing wave targeting law firms and professional services companies, in some cases involving individuals who physically entered corporate offices posing as IT workers. The recent attack on hedge funds unfolded as US authorities were also working to contain separate cyberattacks on water systems in several states, though officials have not confirmed any connection between the two. The attacks add to a string of cybersecurity incidents hitting wealth management and financial advice firms this year. Cyberattacks on RIAs have accelerated throughout 2026 with AI-powered social engineering targeting advisory firms of all sizes. Mega-RIA Mariner recently disclosed a cloud breach impacting nearly 9,000 individuals, and Mercer has faced class action litigation following a separate breach linked to the ShinyHunters attack group earlier this year. Firms targeted in cyber attacks this year have also included Hightower Advisors, Edelman Financial Engines, Beacon Pointe, CW Advisors, Betterment, Pathstone, EP Wealth, Cetera and Ameriprise.