Archives for May 2025

I met Baruch Herzfeld in the middle of the freezing New York winter. He’s the man behind many new e-bike charging stations in the city. The restaurant for meet up is this grungy Dominican-Cuban eatery next to the storage units along the Hudson River on the lower side of New York. The air is thick with fried oil, and $3.50 empanadas sit behind a fogged-up glass counter. The warped mirrors lining the walls make the cramped space feel bigger. Rice and beans and beef stews are served warm in cafeteria platters near the kitchen.

Baruch Herzfeld, 53, is already there when I arrive, hunched over a paper cup of coffee – mid-afternoon but still chasing a caffeine rush. Restless, wired, his eyes flick from the counter to the mirrors to the door, scanning, calculating, like he’s waiting for something to happen, or willing it to.

“Baruch! How are the triplets? They are 5 now right?” the girl behind the register asks, wiping down the table in front of him.

Herzfeld grins, and pulls out his phone, flipping to a picture. “Getting big! Too fast,” says Herzeld who also has an 11-year-old son. For a moment, he’s just a dad, proud and present. Then, just as quickly, he snaps back, nodding toward the outside. “Do you want to see the charging stations?”

PopWheels is his latest project to reshape New York’s future with micromobility. The company started as the city cracked down on lithium-ion battery fires in 2021, which have turned entire apartment buildings into smoke and rubble, after a spate of e-bike battery explosions in the last few years. 18 people have died as a result of the explosions in 2023, as delivery workers may charge their e-bikes in hallways, closets, and whatever outlets they can find. Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has launched the e-bike charging station program in 2024, and Herzfeld finds  himself as one of a few vendors offering a solution.

“This is gonna save lives,” he says without blinking. The battery fires, the makeshift home chargers, the landlords panicking over tenants burning their buildings down – it’s all preventable, he says.

As he leads me outside, he drains his coffee in a single motion, drops a few crumpled bills onto the table, and moves. Fast. By the time I catch up, he’s in front of a row of black and yellow boxes installed in the empty lot next door – four newest PopWheels charging stations, plugged in and just waiting for activation. “There’s gonna be over a thousand of these in the next couple of years,” he says.

[Read more…] about A hustler, or an e-bike charger hero who doesn’t wear a cape

Millennium Management, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, incurred a $900,000 loss due to index rebalancing on March 7, according to Bloomberg.

Index rebalancing involves betting on which companies enter or exit various stock indexes. It can be lucrative for giant multi-manager hedge funds like Millennium, without requiring complex new strategies, and is highly leveraged.

Millennium, which manages about $75 billion, was down less than 1% this year through February, even with the losses, although it contributed to the firm’s worst monthly performance in over six years in February.

“So many things can go wrong, so much risk tolerance is needed, so much craft goes into this conceptually simple trade, that very few teams can do it well,” Giuseppe “Gappy” Paleologo, the head of quantitative research at Balyasny, said on X the following day. He also suggested most descriptions of index rebalancing are akin to describing Marilyn Monroe as a bipedal mammal.

Glen Scheinberg runs the larger of the two index-rebalancing teams, a group known as SRBL, while Dubai-based Pratik Madhvani manages the other crew focused on the strategy. Scheinberg and Madhvani’s groups were both profitable last year, reaping billions of dollars for Millennium in the past.

Amid the drawdown, Hong Kong-based portfolio manager Jeremy Ma seemed to have left the fund, according to Bloomberg

The losses stand out in light of Millennium’s long record of consistently positive returns and sharp risk management.

This past February, multi-strategy firms with an equity market-neutral bias took some of the biggest hits. Those losses were driven by overcrowding in a small group of stocks, particularly in health care and technology.

Jain Global fell about 1%, Millennium lost 1.3%, and Citadel dipped 1.7%, according to Bloomberg.

As inflation rose more than expected and added another layer of uncertainty to equities, the market continued to be haunted by tariff risks, bringing volatility in late January into February.