Bracebridge Capital

Nancy Zimmerman built one of the largest hedge funds ever run by a woman, and did it almost entirely on fixed-income relative value, without much of a public profile. That combination, scale plus near-invisibility, is rare in the industry.

She co-founded Bracebridge in 1994 with Gabriel Sunshine, seeded by Farallon Capital and Yale's investment office. The Boston firm pursues fixed-income relative-value and absolute-return strategies designed to stay uncorrelated with equities, rates and currencies. Its backers read like a roll call of patient institutional money: the Yale and Princeton endowments, foundations and pensions, drawn to returns that do not track the broad markets.