Hedge-fund manager Lee Slonimsky has at least two alter egos: One writes sonnets, and another drinks blood.
“It’s the first time he’s been ashamed to be a vampire,” said his wife, Carol Goodman.
Goodman is the award-winning author of “The Seduction of Water,” “The Sonnet Lover” and other novels.
She’s co-authoring with her husband a trilogy of urban-fantasy novels, beginning with “Black Swan Rising,” due out in July 2010.
Slonimsky’s part involves channeling a character named Will Hughes, who is a hedge-fund manager and a vampire.
“Despite being a vampire for over 400 years and having hung out with many other vampires over the centuries,” said Goodman, “Will reports that he’s never before seen the sort of bloodsucking that has gone on in the predatory credit practices of the past 20 years.”
Slonimsky’s vampire doesn’t suck the life out of clients. Instead, a long memory of history makes him a finance master.
The character’s name actually dates back to William Shakespeare, who addressed a book of sonnets to someone with the initials W.H., sparking centuries of scholarly conjecture over W.H.’s identity.
Oscar Wilde, in “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” a novella he completed in 1893, speculated it was Will Hughes, a boy actor in Shakespeare’s plays, born around 1580.
Slonimsky keeps the character alive using the vampire as a path to immortality and the hedge-fund manager as a road to riches amid the historically reliable folly of the market.
“Will recalls all the great panics of U.S. financial history — 1873, 1893, 1907 and 1929 in particular,” Slonimsky said. “. . . He wonders why everyone has forgotten Adam Smith’s fundamental criticism of the corporation: that people would never be as careful with other people’s money as they are with their own.”
Slonimsky, 57, is a risk-averse quant — a conservative investor who trades according to mathematical models and recurring trading patterns. His company, New York-based hedge fund Ocean Capital Partners LLC, manages about $80 million and holds 75 percent cash and short positions in large money-center banks.
I met Slonimsky in July 2007 after he published “Pythagoras in Love,” a book of sonnets. He grew up in Manhattan, the son of a bookkeeper who worked for a firm that shorted stocks.
Slonimsky said his fund lost 8 percent in 2008 — almost enviable amid one of the worst years ever for the Dow Jones industrial average.
Slonimsky’s struggles as a money manager and his fear of a looming depression inspire his verse. He writes sonnets about bubbles and the Wall Street denizens who blow them.
“Will Hughes knows . . . that the actual creation of the home mortgage was not on Mount Sinai,” he said. “And the development of unsecured credit cards came in the 1960s. These are both incredibly risky instruments to build a banking system around.”
Few mortals pause to ask: What happens to all this debt if unemployment keeps rising? What happens if real-estate prices continue plunging? And what happens if our government is not too big to fail?
It’s enough to scare the fangs off a vampire.
Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com. Read Al’s blog at .
