Singapore-based hedge fund manager Jimmy Lim will stop running money for Millennium Management LLC after more than eight years, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
By mutual agreement, Lim’s Modular Asset Management and Millennium will terminate their partnership at the end of the year. Modular has been managing about $600 million for Millennium founder Izzy Englander’s multistrategy giant through a separate account.
For Modular, the move reduces reliance on a single large backer, which once represented a third of its asset base. The firm has since diversified its investor pool and now oversees about $1.6 billion, according to a recent investor newsletter seen by Bloomberg — only $100 million below its size four months earlier. Lim declined to comment, and Millennium did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The partnership began in early 2020 when Modular spun out of Millennium, where Lim had previously worked for about two and a half years. Despite the upcoming split, Modular has delivered steady results: the fund has not posted an annual loss since its launch in January 2020, with returns in 81% of months and a maximum drawdown of just under 2.7%. Through August this year, the hedge fund was up nearly 6%.
The broader hedge fund landscape underscores the significance of such partnerships. Roughly 55 multistrategy hedge funds worldwide nearly tripled their assets over six years through mid-2023, according to Goldman Sachs data. Firms like Millennium and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors have been key sources of seed capital for emerging hedge fund managers.
Millennium’s own assets have doubled since 2019 to reach $79 billion, with the firm aggressively backing external managers in Asia. It has allocated $1.5 billion to Robert Tau’s Aeonea Ltd., $1.2 billion to Thomas Wong’s Optimas Capital, and about $1 billion to former Goldman Sachs trader Qin Xiao’s commodities venture. Many of these deals initially required managers to run money exclusively for Millennium.
The exit of Lim marks a recalibration rather than a retreat. While Millennium continues to expand its roster of external managers in Asia, Modular has strengthened its independence, positioning itself among a handful of regional macro hedge funds that have weathered market volatility and delivered consistent gains.
