Profile of Grant Wonders, Founder of Hedge Fund Voyager Global

At Viking Global Investors' annual investor day, people in the audience were smirking.

The source of their amusement? A baby-faced 25-year-old analyst named Grant Wonders was making the case for Netflix.

This was early 2016, and far from a consensus pick, the entertainment streaming company was getting torched by investors. Trading at just $90 a share, the stock was down 20% for the year — and 32% off the $133-a-share high it had just hit in December — as concerns mounted over the strength of its content library, its cash burn, and its lackluster subscriber growth after a global expansion. Hedge funds were betting billions against it, making it one of the most popular short positions on Wall Street.

But Wonders, an up-and-coming technology, media, and telecom analyst who cut his teeth at Blackstone, saw something others were missing. He believed Netflix's burgeoning budget for original content and geographic penetration, among other tailwinds, meant the company was poised for dramatic growth.

"This is why Netflix will be the largest media company in the world," Wonders said, according to a person who was in the room. To many of the hundreds of investors gathered in the ballroom, this seemed far-fetched, and they grilled him during the Q&A.

But Wonders was right. Netflix rapidly ascended, its market valuation soaring from $40 billion to over $150 billion within two years. Today, it is the largest media company.

"He had this ability to look out five to 10 years in the future, understand the trend, and then invest around that with tremendous conviction," a former Viking employee said of Wonders.

In spring, after a short but lucrative run as a portfolio manager at Viking, the 31-year-old Wonders launched his own fund, Voyager Global, raising over $1 billion. He's picked up where he left off at Viking, returning nearly 14% through August, according to people familiar with the performance.

Wonders' successful spinoff is no doubt in part because of his years at Viking Global, the $60 billion in assets behemoth that has become one of the most popular hunting grounds for investors looking to plow money into hedge-fund launches. Including Voyager, there've been six new funds spawned by Viking alums in the past two years, with one more on the way.

"For a new fund, what's really important to them is the DNA of where the person is coming from," Ilana Weinstein, the founder of the recruiting firm IDW Group, said.

"I think, in some ways, Viking carries some of the clout, in LPs' minds, that the top multistrategy funds do," Weinstein told Insider.

Representatives for both Viking and Voyager declined to comment for this story. Wonders declined to comment.

The DNA of Viking, which couples stellar returns and more autonomy for its stock pickers than rivals, helps in raising capital. And the auspicious 2018 launch of D1 Capital by Viking's former chief investment officer Dan Sundheim — who has already amassed $25 billion in assets and a track record of monster returns — has likely contributed to the trend as well.

But even among the upper-echelon portfolio managers who've come through the Viking stables, Wonders stands out as one of the most talented and promising, according to people who've worked with him.

Early calls like Netflix and an in-depth investment process helped Wonders become one of the most profitable analysts in Viking history, as he minted billions for Viking's coffers, according to people familiar with the matter.

People who've worked with Wonders describe him as a stock geek with a brilliant mind and thirst for adventure — and not just in finance. He comes across as a humble, strikingly placid risk-taker who is unfazed by Wall Street's high-stakes environment.

'Born without the fear gene'

Wonders hails from Michigan and attended Harvard College, majoring in economics and studying archaeology, one of his passions outside the markets.

He has a peculiar, almost obsessive fascination with compound interest, according to former classmates and colleagues, so much so that while at Harvard, he once memorized and recited over 1,600 decimal places of "e" — the mathematical constant discovered by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli that's central to the formula for continuous compounding.

In college, Wonders quickly gravitated toward investing, a natural outgrowth of that obsession. He wowed some of his classmates by earning a spot at the Charles River Growth Fund, a school investment club that manages student and alumni funds, as a freshman. Typically, only sophomore or junior applicants make the cut.

While others at the fund were more casual with their stock pitches, Wonders was rolling out advanced Excel models and drilling deep into a company's fundamentals, one classmate said.

"People were coming up with bullshit, but he took it very seriously with all the modeling and whatnot," the classmate said. "He was definitely a very passionate person from day one when it came to investments."

After graduating in 2012, he landed a coveted role in the Blackstone Group's private-equity unit. Even at such a prestigious, hypercompetitive institution, Wonders stood out as a cut above the other Ivy League aspirants, according to a former Blackstone colleague.

"His raw IQ is just crazy high, and he has this intellectual curiosity that is immediately apparent in talking to him," this person said.

On one occasion, Wonders' team was writing an investment-committee memo due the following day — often a frantic and important task. A nearby team in between assignments was passing the time by reading aloud brain teasers they found on the internet, which often involved complex math and statistics. Wonders overheard and joined in the fun — solving them with ease.

The principal running Wonders' team caught wind and chastised the other group for distracting Wonders.

"He couldn't help himself," a former colleague who was present said. "They knew how Grant was wired."

Despite the Wall Street stereotype, Wonders' self-confidence and intelligence don't manifest as cocky or aggressive behavior. And he isn't a flashy spender, either. He dresses plainly — for simplicity, he owns only one style of sock — doesn't have a car, and lives in the same one-bedroom Manhattan apartment he's had since he was a Viking analyst, sources told Insider.

His online presence is sparse for someone his age. Aside from a few professional accolades, it's limited to a LinkedIn profile and a video he did at Harvard about the archeological history of ancient Egypt.

People who worked with him described him as passionate yet friendly and humble — and the rare Blackstone analyst who never seemed overwhelmed by the notoriously taxing job.

"He's incredibly humble and self-aware. But he has zero fear. He just never got stressed," one source said. "He was born without the fear gene."

Wonders' composure in situations that would spark an adrenaline rush in most people likely helps when he's making gutsy wagers on stocks. It may also help explain his adventurous streak outside the office.

He's a travel enthusiast, his colleagues said, and not in the manner of a typical millennial flocking to Montauk, New York; Tulum, Mexico; or Bali, Indonesia. Wonders instead often ventures to places with rich archaeological merits, such as Saudi Arabia and Chile's Easter Island.

He once traveled to the island nation of Nauru in the South Pacific, one of the smallest and most remote countries, with a population of fewer than 11,000. He devoured information about the country — once one of the wealthiest on Earth per capita, thanks to rich phosphate deposits, which have been depleted. And in part because Nauru receives so few tourists, he was able to arrange a tête-à-tête with its president at the time, Baron Waqa, according to a former colleague.

"Some people want a relaxing week in Positano. He has no interest in that," the colleague said, referring to the buzzy Italian hotspot.

His fearlessness and love of travel, on occasion, have gotten him into dicey situations. While at Blackstone, he was staffed on an energy deal in Honduras, and the archaeology buff arrived days before the rest of the team to check out museums and see the famed hieroglyphic stairway in Copan.

At the time, San Pedro Sula was considered the most violent city in the world, with homicide rates eclipsed only in war zones. He walked the streets and stepped into an archaeology museum, blissfully unconcerned — that is, until an employee approached Wonders and told him that he should not be there and that he was in danger.

As he exited and started walking back to his hotel, he noticed several men appeared to be following him, according to a former colleague who heard Wonders tell the story. He started sprinting and the men gave chase. He darted through alleys and streets until he made it safely to his hotel.

A star stock picker at Viking

In 2014, Wonders' budding reputation thrust him onto the radar of Sundheim, then the chief investment officer at Viking Global. He skated through interviews and wound up as an analyst on the technology, media, and telecommunications team.

Viking's culture encourages staff to manage portfolios early on in their careers, giving even analysts credit lines and profit attribution for top ideas. Wonders wasted little time getting in on the action, making winning bets at first on telecom companies like China Mobile and T-Mobile.

But eventually, his universe expanded to include some sexier and more explosive internet companies, including not just the home-run Netflix bet but also calls on Facebook and Google.

His performance is the stuff of legend within Viking. He is understood to have produced some of the highest — if not the highest — profits in absolute dollars of any analyst in the company's history, according to people familiar with the matter.

To the extent he faced criticism, it was that he was too bullish, consistently running his portfolio net long, a former Viking portfolio manager said, though his short bets, while smaller, also frequently proved to be winners. Another ex-Viking colleague countered that in terms of absolute return, given how rapidly companies he covered were growing profits, it was the right approach.

He wasn't content to simply pick long-term winners, keeping a disciplined eye on valuation and trimming or adding to positions depending on the market conditions.

"He was able to add incremental alpha by timing trades, and he was good at figuring out when specific companies would beat their quarterly earnings," the former Viking portfolio manager said.

He also lived for the minutiae, even as a portfolio manager with a team of analysts.

"He was in every single model. He didn't delegate anything. He built it himself, underwrote the assumptions," another former Viking employee said. "He can't not be in the weeds. He has to be because that's how he gets comfort with the sizing and conviction."

Not every idea of his got the green light.

Wonders was early to recognize the vaping giant Juul would be a blockbuster, and he secured an opportunity to invest in the company's funding round years before Altria bought a stake in the firm in 2018 at a monster $38 billion valuation.

But Viking founder Andreas Halvorsen demurred, according to accounts from two former employees, quipping that he'd consider the investment only if Wonders smoked 50 Juul pods. Wonders declined.

"I think he didn't want to be associated with a company that is very addictive and, theoretically, bad for society," a former employee said of Halvorsen. "Andreas was probably prescient to understand there were risks."

Indeed, while Juul exploded initially, and vaping became a cultural phenomenon, Altria has since written off billions on its investment amid a regulatory crackdown on the e-cigarette industry.

The Voyager mission

Now, it's Wonders name on the door, and it's his turn to call the shots.

Voyager Global started trading in spring, raising over $1 billion in assets, according to a source familiar with the matter. The fund's name is a reference to NASA's Voyager mission, which launched two space probes in 1977 that remain the farthest man-made objects sent from Earth in the universe.

Early performance has been strong, if not stratospheric. In its first six months through August, the tech-focused firm was up nearly 14%, according to a person directly familiar with the performance. Voyager's long bets have propelled the performance, while its short book dragged slightly, this person said.

Hedge funds in aggregate were up 10% in 2021 through August, according to data from Hedge Fund Research.

It's a small sample size that could still fizzle, a fate that's befallen many hotshot hedge-fund managers before Wonders. But among those who've known Wonders for years, his success has always felt like a fait accompli.

"Grant would've been the one person I picked who would've become a finance wizard," Wonders' Harvard classmate said.

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Profile of Grant Wonders, Founder of Hedge Fund Voyager Global

'Born without the fear gene'

A star stock picker at Viking

The Voyager mission