Israel Englander founded the hedge fund firm Millennium Management in 1989 and has been its chief executive since.
Israel Englander founded the hedge fund firm Millennium Management in 1989 and has been its chief executive since.
Englander was born in 1948 and raised in a Polish-Jewish family in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York; his parents had immigrated to the United States in 1947. He began trading stocks in high school, interned at Oppenheimer & Co. and the New York Stock Exchange during college, and graduated from New York University in 1970 with a bachelor's degree in finance.
His first full-time job was at Kaufmann, Alsberg & Co., where he traded convertible securities and options. He bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange and in 1977 formed a floor brokerage, I.A. Englander & Co. In 1985 he and John Mulheren Jr. started Jamie Securities Co., which was dissolved in 1988 after Mulheren was caught up in the Ivan Boesky affair; Englander was not implicated.
In 1989 he started Millennium with Ronald Shear and $35 million in seed money; Shear left in 1990. Millennium uses strategies including statistical arbitrage, fundamental long-short investing, merger arbitrage and convertible arbitrage, and holds thousands of positions at a time. Wikipedia put its staff at more than 6,800 people in 18 primary offices across the United States, Europe and Asia as of July 2026. Its Form ADV lists Englander as chief executive officer since June 1989.
Sources · written 23 October 2026