Big hedge funds keep moving to Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The list keeps growing. Millennium Management, Man Group, ExodusPoint, Balyasny, Rokos Capital, Verition, Davidson Kempner, and Arini have all set up shop there. So has a spinout from Tudor Investment.
Man Group is the world’s largest listed hedge fund manager. It’s now opening in Abu Dhabi’s ADGM. Millennium expanded there for a simple reason: its own staff wanted to live in the region. Dymon Asia Capital opened a Dubai office in 2023. It lost a top trader to a rival’s Dubai desk. The trader just wanted to live there. Verition recently extended its Dubai office lease by five years.
It’s not just offices anymore. Portfolio managers are now launching their own funds out of the UAE. Many are backed by the same Wall Street firms they used to work for. Nikolay Aleksandrov used to work at ExodusPoint and Millennium. He raised $500 million from Morgan Stanley to launch Continuum Capital. Omar Newera raised a similar amount from Schonfeld Strategic Advisors. He launched Insight Capital. Brummer & Partners backed its own fixed-income fund in the region too.
Gulf capital is showing up as well. Abu Dhabi’s investment arm put roughly $1 billion into macro fund Deem Global. That was before the fund closed to new money. Lunate is an alternatives manager. It took a stake in Brevan Howard. It also committed $2 billion to one of the firm’s platforms. Deals like this are drawing family offices and sovereign wealth funds deeper into hedge fund allocations across the Gulf.
Even when the Iran conflict rattled the region, firms didn’t pull back. Millennium reaffirmed its Dubai commitment internally. Man Group and Capital Group both pushed ahead with new Abu Dhabi launches at the same time.
The draw is simple. There’s zero personal income tax. The time zone bridges New York and Asia. And two regulators are competing for business. The DIFC and ADGM both want to host the next big fund. Each is building its own niche as a UAE finance hub. DIFC-linked assets alone are estimated at over $700 billion. That figure is growing near 50% a year.
Talent moved first. Firms followed. Now capital is following the firms straight into new launches.
