FOIAengine: Decoding How a Hedge Fund Tracks FDA Requests
ExodusPoint burst onto the hedge fund scene in 2018 with the largest launch in history — raising $8.5 billion out of the gate — powered by institutional backing, an elite Wall Street pedigree, and high-profile defections from rival Millennium Management.
Founded by former Millennium heir-apparent Michael Gelband and equities head Hyung Lee, the firm not only secured billions from pension funds and global asset managers like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, but also pulled off one of the boldest talent raids in hedge fund history — drawing dozens of seasoned traders from competitors, including their former employer.
The very name “ExodusPoint” was a not-so-subtle signal: this was a breakaway, both in capital and in culture. ExodusPoint had to beat back multiple challenges – a lawsuit, an arbitration – to its talent raids.
Maybe call it the Art of the Steal.
With Gelband at the helm, the pirate ship took off. In the nearly eight years since, ExodusPoint has grown even bigger and generated impressive results. With $11 billion in assets under management, offices in global financial capitals, and 634 employees, ExodusPoint has been a standout performer so far this year, far outpacing its peers. Major investors include sovereign wealth funds and the Teacher Retirement System of Texas.
ExodusPoint’s 7.5 percent gain through the end of May was nearly double that of its competitor Point72, and its performance crushed Gelband’s former employer, Millennium, which was barely positive for the year.
What gives ExodusPoint its advantage?
They’re savvy traders, for sure. But ExodusPoint’s Freedom of Information Act strategy has also been on our radar almost from the inception of PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows. We’re always interested in how hedge funds use FOIA for early warnings. ExodusPoint’s requests to the Food and Drug Administration indicate that one or more analysts at the hedge fund are watching, tracking, and following up on requests previously made by others – a strategy unique to ExodusPoint among the other high-profile hedge funds that show up in FOIAengine.
By regularly submitting FOIA requests for documents previously sought by others, ExodusPoint taps into existing lines of regulatory or legal inquiry – allowing the firm to fast-track its due diligence on concerns like safety, manufacturing quality, litigation, or reputational issues. FOIA requests already made by others could presage regulatory enforcement impacts or risks.
In the summary logs made available by the FDA, ExodusPoint’s FOIA requests are opaque, appearing simply as a long list of numeric identifiers that must be unpacked and decoded. The ExodusPoint requester (the FDA doesn’t provide the person’s name) provides a list of agency FOIA identifiers and asks for whatever documents were previously released. ExodusPoint asks for the documents using the FDA’s FOIA identifier – just a number, nothing else. The companies targeted by ExodusPoint aren’t revealed in the public logs.
In our “Who’s Watching” world of FOIA signals, requests to the federal government can be an important early warning of bad publicity, litigation to come, or uncertainties to be hedged and gamed out. And in this case, decoding a long string of numbers from a prominent hedge fund provides a possible clue to ExodusPoint’s future investment decisions.
To know which companies were targeted by ExodusPoint, the string of FOIA numeric identifiers must be further researched. We’ve done that for the most recent ExodusPoint FOIA request to the FDA, filed two weeks ago. In that June 25 request, someone at ExodusPoint went after the same documents sought in 37 earlier FOIA requests. Since multiple companies or parties were named in almost all of those earlier requests, that single FOIA query from ExodusPoint is the equivalent of asking for records concerning well over a hundred discrete events. A single ExodusPoint request can be like a Russian nesting doll; open it and there are many more inside.
In the FDA’s logs, ExodusPoint’s solitary June 25 request appears as just one long numeric scramble. But in FOIAengine we can easily trace back to the companies referenced in the original requests. Here’s what we found:
ExodusPoint’s biggest equity play right now is in healthcare. The hedge fund dramatically increased its bets on that sector earlier this year, according to its most recent securities filing. It’s not only using FOIA to keep a close watch on those investments, but also to track the actions of two other organizations that actively monitor the healthcare sector: Fourteen of ExodusPoint’s FOIA requests directly replicated those submitted earlier by investigators at Capitol Forum; seven other ExodusPoint requests tracked recent queries from Redica Systems.
In summary, ExodusPoint’s June 25 FOIA request to the FDA, replicating more than three dozen earlier FOIA requests, sought various inspection records and adverse-event reports regarding 26 healthcare companies; 16 biotech, device, and testing companies; six food and animal health companies; and four physicians. ExodusPoint’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission reported investments in many of the targeted companies.
Here’s the complete list of companies, products, and individuals targeted in ExodusPoint’s June 25 FOIA request:
- Healthcare companies: Abbott Laboratories; Abbott Ireland; Ailex Pharmaceuticals; Alexion Pharmaceuticals; Braun Medical; Bausch & Lomb; Baxter Corporation; Baxter Healthcare Corporation; Cambrex Charles City; Church & Dwight Canada; CSL Plasma; Dermarite Industries; GE Healthcare; Glaukos Corporation; Hims & Hers; Intuitive Surgical; Krystal Biotech; Laurus Labs; Novo Nordisk; Owen Biosciences; Revance Therapeutics; Sanofi Shandong Luxi Pharmaceutical; Teva Women’s Health; United Therapeutics Corporation; WuXi AppTec; and WuXi AppTec Suzhou.
- Biotech, testing, and device companies: Bio-Rad Laboratories; Charles River Laboratories; Creative Essences; Evoqua Water Technologies; Foundation Medicine; Insightec; Insulet Corporation; Kaneka Corporation; Kaneka Medical Vietnam; Materialise N.V.; Medtronic; Philips Medical Systems; Philips Ultrasound; Remel; Stryker; and Thera Test Laboratories.
- Food and animal health companies: Bravo Packing; Goya Foods; Hanson Grain; Namil General Foods; Phibro Animal Health; and SuperCan Bully Sticks.
ExodusPoint also tailgated earlier FOIA requests about four physicians involved in clinical trials: Ashkan Pirouz; Matthew A. Cunningham; Michael D. Greenwood; and Naseem Jaffrani. Two other ExodusPoint targets, also cloning an earlier query from a different requester, were the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding and the Outsourcing Facilities Association. ExodusPoint was looking for information about FDA enforcement actions against distributors of semaglutide drugs compounded by outsourcing facilities.
FOIAengine access now is available for all professional members of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of journalism. IRE is the world’s oldest and largest association of investigative journalists. Following the federal government’s shutdown of FOIAonline.gov last year, FOIAengine is the only source for the most comprehensive, fully searchable archive of FOIA requests across dozens of federal departments and agencies. FOIAengine has more robust functionality and searching capabilities, and standardizes data from different agencies to make it easier to work with. PoliScio Analytics is proud to be partnering with IRE to provide this valuable content to investigative reporters worldwide.
To see all the requests mentioned in this article, log in or sign up to become a FOIAengine user.
Next: Private investigators using the Freedom of Information Act.
John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. His most recent book is The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.
