Donald Sussman

Selwyn Donald Sussman (born June 8, 1946) is an American billionaire hedge fund manager who is the founder and chief investment officer of the Paloma Funds. Sussman has served on the boards of a large number of organizations and is considered a "heavy hitter" donor.

Sussman was born to a Jewish family in June 1946, the son of Beatrice (née Zimmerman) and William Sussman. His father was a real estate developer. He was raised in Miami, Florida and attended high school at Windsor Mountain School, a boarding school in Lenox, Massachusetts. He then attended Columbia College before continuing on to New York University, from which he earned B.S. and M.B.A. degrees.

Sussman's career in finance began in 1958, when, at the age of 12, he made a sixfold return on a $300 investment in the stock of Michigan Sugar, by correctly predicting that the Cuban Revolution would disrupt sugar supplies and drive up the price of sugar commodities. After school, he served as vice president and chief financial officer of the Titan Industrial Corporation, a privately held trading firm, and then managed money for the partners of a New York law firm, Gelberg & Abrams.

In 1981, Sussman founded Paloma Partners, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based hedge fund with mostly institutional clients. A number of affiliated funds were established for both for U.S. investors (Paloma Partners Institutional Investors, Capital Preservation Partners, and European Merger Fund) and non-U.S. investors (Paloma International Fund, Capital Preservation Partners Limited, and European Merger Fund Limited for non-U.S. persons). As a money manager, Sussman sought to keep fund strategies and management targeted rather than sprawling. Paloma's culture was risk-averse, and Sussman sought to insulate the funds from market volatility. Sussman pioneered the approach of minimizing risk by "dividing assets among independent investment professionals and demanding absolute transparency of their holdings." Paloma achieved a profit in 15 out of its first 18 years. Among Paloma's traders was Nicholas Maounis, who later formed Amaranth Advisors, to which Sussman provided seed money.

Paloma's middle and back-office operations were acquired by JPMorgan Worldwide Securities Services in February 2006 for an undisclosed sum.

Following the sale to JPMorgan, Sussman has acted as a serial investor and backer of new hedge funds such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Empirica Capital and David Shaw's D.E. Shaw & Co. In 2009, Paloma Partners backed LMR Partners. In 2013, Paloma Partners agreed to back Rhodium Capital Advisors, LLC. Rhodium Capital, based in London, is a long-short European credit fund founded by Ifftikhar Ali and Jeffrey Tirman.

In addition to the Paloma funds, Sussman is the founder of Trust Asset Management and New China Capital Management LLC.

In 2012, Sussman invested approximately $3.3 million in MaineToday Media through Maine Values LLC to provide the Maine newspaper company with much-needed working capital. MaineToday Media is the owner of the Kennebec Journal, the Morning Sentinel, the Coastal Journal, the Portland Press Herald and several digital media properties.^{[citation needed]} The investment, originally made as a loan, was restructured as a purchase of equity and resulted in Maine Values owning 75% of MaineToday Media. In 2015, Sussman sold MaineToday to Reade Brower, a Maine printer and newspaper owner.