Mr. Picard has 25+ years of hands-on experience on both the buy and sell side building 4 multi-billion dollar hedge fund platforms at The Carlyle Group/Rock Creek, Optima Fund Management, RBC Capital Markets, and InfraHedge/State Street. He has been performing due diligence on established and emerging hedge fund managers and strategies since 1997. He has visited over 1,000 hedge funds domestically and globally. He also developed and managed comprehensive due diligence teams implementing consistent policies and processes for detailed reviews of hedge fund managers including seed transactions.
Most recently, his firm, Rumson Ridge was hired by the Board of a Public Company, GlassBridge Enterprises to build the foundation for an innovative alternative investment business. Earlier, he was a leader at State Street, Lyxor Asset Management and Navigant Consulting’s Financial Institutions Restructuring and Solutions Team (FIRST).
Prior to founding the Rumson Ridge Group, he was Chief Investment Officer/Partner and Head of Research at Optima Fund Management overseeing USD $6.5 Billion of hedge fund investments. Prior to joining Optima, Mr. Picard was a Managing Director at The Carlyle Group. At Carlyle, Mr. Picard built and managed the process and portfolio of an innovative hedge fund business that provided a platform for Institutions investing in alternative investments. Prior to joining Carlyle, Mr. Picard was Managing Director at RBC Capital Risk Advisors, working with the same Global Equity Derivatives Group of Royal Bank of Canada for over 10 years. The Group actively managed more than US$10 billion of Royal Bank's proprietary assets through arbitrage trading, hedge fund investments and structured private equity investments. In the early 1990s, Mr. Picard worked as European Product Manager, Global Equity Derivatives for Kidder, Peabody in Europe and worked for Bank Nomura (Suisse) S.A. trading and selling multi-currency, Japanese and Southeast Asian convertible and warrant products.
Mr. Picard graduated from College de Genève and attended the University of Geneva School of Law. Mr. Picard speaks English, French, and German. Mr. Picard was Chairman of the 2007 GAIM Fund of Funds conference in New York and remained an advisor for the GAIM USA 2012 event. He has been a speaker at the Carlyle Groups Investor Conferences in Washington D.C. and Paris, The Optima Investor Conference in 2006 and a number of hedge fund industry events. He has been a Guest Lecturer at NYU Stern School of Business for the past 3 years on the topic of Hedge Fund Investing.
