Hedge-fund traders band together for charity

Chris Heasman says he graduated from the School of Hard Knocks. Not so hard, though, that he can”™t enjoy the view of Central Park from the window of his 59^th floor Rockefeller Center office, where he is a hedge-fund director. Those hard knocks, actually, weren”™t really that hard, and began when he was just out of high school in his native Australia and started a small business importing men”™s neckties from Italy.

Heasman would go around to local factories during lunch hour and take orders for the neckties and other men”™s fashion items. “I thought I was making good money,” he said, until he discovered “I was making more money than I should have.” The reason was that “I was buying in lira and selling in Australian dollars,” which was depreciating against the lira. “I would end up paying less in dollars for the goods, so rather than go through the hassle of actually running the inventory and selling the ties, I wanted to find out how currency markets worked,” he said. “Why pummel myself with physical stock? That”™s how I ended up getting into the markets.”

Heasman began investigating how currency markets function, visiting merchant banks “and asking a bunch of questions” until he landed a position as a trader at one of the banks in 1979. “I initially traded the short end of the yield curve, and from there, a whole bunch of other things ”“ pretty much anything that moved,” he said. “The markets in Australia in those days weren”™t deep like the American markets. It was a small market, and you had to understand how lots of different markets worked to understand how they interacted with each other.”

A year later he moved to a trading company and got involved in the interest-rate-futures market, then “did a bunch of things in the market for a number of years and ended up being transferred to New York with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce as vice president or something in 1992.”

Heasman worked for the bank for a half dozen years, then was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug again and decided to strike out on his own. “I did an Internet thing, which was a spectacular flop.” His idea was to create a job search site “sort of like Monster.com,” but “my timing was a little bit off, I didn”™t capitalize it the way it needed to be, and it was just the wrong time.” The venture “cost a ton of money,” he said.

After admitting defeat, he joined J.P. Morgan as a vice president in its fund-to-fund business until Chase took it over in 2000, and he became a hedge-fund director at Lazard Asset Management, where he remains ”“ on the 59^th floor, overlooking Central Park. But about four years ago, he bumped into a hedge-fund trader who had a set of drums in his office, and Heasman”™s leisure time took a curious twist.

Silly little party

“I always wanted to play guitar,” Heasman said by way of explaining how he became involved with a group of, shall we say, aging rock ”˜n rollers who eschewed the bar scene in order to raise money for local charities. These weren”™t fresh-faced high schoolers belting out cover songs in a garage, but button-downed hedge-fund traders with some years under their collective belts. Heasman, for example, admits to being “on the wrong side of 40.”

The trader with the set of drums in his office ”“ his name was Mead Welles and he could have them in his office because he was the chief executive officer of a couple of hedge-fund trading firms ”“ had also started a charity he called A Leg to Stand On (www.altso.org), which provides prosthetic limbs and remedial surgery for children in developing countries.

Welles asked Heasman if he wanted to jam together sometime, Welles on the drums, Heasman on guitar. Heasman explained that he really didn”™t know what he was doing on the thing, that after recovering from neck and elbow injuries he received while playing ice hockey ”“ that”™s another story ”“ “I decided to pick up guitar” and began taking lessons from Al Ferrante at Fairfield Guitar. “When I asked him for advice on how to keep up with the lessons, he said to find people and play,” Heasman said.

So when Welles suggested they play together despite Heasman”™s lack of experience, the fledgling guitarist went along and “did this periodically over the course of a year,” he said. “A few people heard about what we were doing and began sitting in and the thing kind of evolved.” In fact, things evolved to the point where the group began to think it was time to perform “and we decided to do a fundraiser to help Mead” raise money for the charity.

The band members invited friends to sponsor them “like walking a marathon, and we really cobbled this band together,” Heasman said. “I played guitar, other chaps played bass and lead guitar, and a buddy of mine flew over from London.” They invited 100 people “and all of them amazingly turned up” at a night club underneath the Chelsea Hotel, he said, because “the band always sounds better the more the audience drinks.”

The result was almost astonishing. “We raised about $15,000 for the charity through a silly little party,” Heasman said. “What happened was, Mead and I said that if we could make this little thing a success without much effort, we could probably make it a bigger success, and we decided to rent Planet Hollywood in Times Square.”

Fun with music

The Planet Hollywood fundraiser featured a half dozen bands after “we sent out a call to instruments in the hedge-fund industry and a bunch of people came back and we had five or six bands,” Heasman said. Not only that, but 700 people showed up and the event raised a quarter of a million dollars for A Leg to Stand On. “Then it started to take on a life of its own,” he said. “We started off small and it just got bigger each year.”

The band flew down to Memphis for a Friday night fundraiser, then drove to Clarksdale, Miss., to record 13 songs for a CD the band sells at its concerts. “All the proceeds from that CD go to A Leg to Stand On,” he said.

Two years ago The Subscribers rented out B B King”™s main performance room, “and we had a number of people approach us to help them with their event,” he said. “We actually started playing for other charities,” including MFY Legal Services, The Water Keeper Alliance, Taste of NFL for the Jets and Teach for America. “This year we were approached by even more people to help out, and our last gig of the year was for the Stamford Hospital Foundation in the Tulley Center in Stamford,” he said. In fact, “we have more demand than we can satisfy, so we”™re going to have to ration our performances.” And the band is in the process of turning itself into a 501(c) (3), becoming a charity to “enable us to work more efficiently with charities.”

So far the fundraisers have generated about $6 million, about $2 million of that directly from The Subscribers efforts. “We”™re looking at different ways to take on more events,” Heasman said, but “we”™re just a bunch of people whose only agenda is to have fun with music and give what we can to charities.”