Rubric Capital Management is raising money for a new fund. The hedge fund firm headed by David Rosen, a Point72 Asset Management alum, is seeking capital for Rubric Long Term Opportunities Onshore Fund and an offshore equivalent, according to a regulatory filing. Rubric declined to comment.
The new fund was created to try to capitalize on the less-liquid opportunities Rubric encounters in the normal course of managing its core strategies, according to someone familiar with the launch. It will be a concentrated portfolio of typically longer-duration investments, the source notes. The fund has the flexibility to invest in equities and credit. It is expected to start with at least $150 million, the source says.
Rosen launched Rubric Capital as a division of SAC Capital, headed at the time by Steven Cohen. The deep-value portfolio was staked with $150 million, which ballooned to $3.5 billion while Rubric was at SAC. “Rubric was a mechanism for retaining my team by creating our own fund while still being a part of SAC,” Rosen told II when he was named an Institutional Investor Hedge Fund Rising Star in 2018.
Rubric was disbanded at the end of 2015. Rosen retained the name when he launched his own independent firm, Rubric Capital Management, in October 2016.
Today Rubric manages $3.1 billion. Its hedge fund was up about 30 percent in the first half of 2024. It was down 90 basis points in 2023 but had surged about 38 percent in 2022, when the major market stock indices tanked. At the end of the first quarter, Rubric’s three largest U.S.-listed longs were all pharmaceuticals companies: Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Viatris, and Roivant Sciences.
“We are deep-value investors,” Rosen told II two years ago in a phone interview, after the firm disclosed it was the fourth-largest shareholder in Hertz Global Holdings, which had recently reorganized after being financially devastated in the early days of the pandemic. “To do that, we must look far and wide. We go across geographies and will do distressed equities and debt.”
Rubric sat on Hertz’s equity committee during the reorganization process, which ultimately resulted in the company’s purchase by an investor group led by Knighthead Capital Management, Certares Opportunities Fund, and certain funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Capital Management.
Under the deal, Hertz’s new investor group provided more than $5.9 billion in new equity capital. Shareholders received cash, stock, and warrants valued at $7 to $8 per share, according to a report from law firm White & Case at the time. “We got a very attractive price,” Rosen said in the interview.