- Bridgewater's legal battle with the small systematic-macro shop Tekmerion Capital spilled out into the public eye recently because Tekmerion's lawyer is suing Bridgewater for attorney's fees.
- The unsealed filings show how Bridgewater tried to stop Tekmerion, founded in 2017 by Bridgewater alumni Lawrence Minicone and Zach Squire, with allegations of intellectual-property theft and broken confidentiality contracts.
- One of the biggest focuses for Bridgewater in a 2017 arbitration filing was that Tekmerion's 53-page pitch deck for prospective investors "closely resembled" Bridgewater's.
- Business Insider pulled out the five slides from the pitch deck Bridgewater highlighted in the 2017 filing.
- Bridgewater has since been found by an arbitration court to have "manufactured false evidence" in its pursuit against the small fund and is appealing an order for the firm to pay Minicone and Squire's legal fees.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Bridgewater's inner workings are an object of fascination within the finance industry and other fields, thanks to billionaire founder Ray Dalio's "radical transparency" concepts of being directly honest in the workplace and with coworkers.
But the world's biggest hedge fund is also known for strict confidentiality contracts with former employees, and recently unsealed documents from a yearslong legal battle with the small macro fund Tekmerion Capital Management show how aggressive the firm can be.
Tekmerion, founded by Bridgewater alumni Lawrence Minicone and Zach Squire and backed by former Goldman Sachs partner Michael Novogratz, was almost immediately on Bridgewater's legal radar once the fund went live in 2017, according to a recent Institutional Investor story.
Minicone and Squire were investment analysts at Bridgewater but never ran their own portfolios.
One of the biggest cruxes of Bridgewater's arbitration case against Tekmerion — named for Aristotle's definition of the Greek word from his work "On Rhetoric" as an irrefutable sign or signal — was that the pitch deck the young firm used to market to prospective investors "closely resembled" Bridgewater's, according to the filings. Bridgewater, however, declined to submit its own pitch deck into evidence to compare during the arbitration proceedings, according to a statement from Aaron Zeisler, a lawyer for Minicone and Squire.
Out of Tekmerion's 53-page pitch deck, five slides were highlighted by Bridgewater's legal team in a November 2017 arbitration filing that was recently made public. Business Insider pulled the five slides below and added Bridgewater's allegations from the filing. The finding from the arbitrators can be found here.
An arbitration court found that Bridgewater "manufactured false evidence" in bringing its claim against the young fund and its cofounders, and awarded legal fees to the two founders of Tekmerion.
The hedge fund told Business Insider it was appealing the arbitrators' decision that the fund has to pay for Minicone and Squire's legal fees and pointed to the opinion of the one arbitrator who dissented from the case. That arbitrator said the majority's findings were an "incomplete, inaccurate and one-sided summary of the evidentiary record."
Zeisler, the lawyer for Minicone and Squire, said in a statement to Business Insider that "the panel of arbitrators found as a matter of fact that 'Bridgewater refused to produce a copy of its marketing materials — its deck — but Jensen testified that TCM's deck was 'generally not the same' as Bridgewater's.' Bridgewater's latest legal filing does not contest any of these factual findings from the panel's final, binding award, which denied all of Bridgewater's claims."
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