Magnetar Capital

A hedge fund named after a neutron star sits in a suburb north of Chicago, not in Manhattan. Magnetar Capital opened in 2005 in Evanston, Illinois, and has grown into one of the largest alternative managers outside New York, with roughly $22 billion in assets under management as of September 30, 2025. Offices in New York, Austin, Menlo Park, and London feed the Evanston headquarters. The name is literal: a magnetar is a collapsed star with a magnetic field strong enough to scramble atoms, and the founders liked the science.

The firm's reputation was forged in 2006 and 2007, when it helped assemble collateralized debt obligations and simultaneously bought credit default swaps against them. Critics called it the Magnetar trade. When the CDOs collapsed, the banks and investors holding them absorbed the losses while Magnetar's hedges paid off. By 2010, 23 of the CDOs the firm had invested in were nearly worthless. The SEC examined multiple deals and never brought an enforcement action.

What Magnetar does now looks little like that business. It runs four broad pillars: alternative credit and fixed income, quantitative investing, venture capital, and fundamental event-driven equity. The venture arm backs technology and healthcare startups. Magnetar Financial LLC, the SEC-registered entity, reported 1,134 holdings worth about $10.96 billion in its most recent 13F. The firm also takes companies private and files public disclosures on UK-listed names such as Mitie Group.

Two threads define the current chapter. Magnetar has been an unusually eager adopter of artificial intelligence in the investment process, going so far as to plan a fund that replaces human analysts with AI agents. And it holds a large stake in AI cloud provider CoreWeave, which it has been steadily selling down through 2026. The public profile stays deliberately low: no consumer marketing, limited press, a website built for institutional investors. [edit]