The Fortress Investment Group is located in New York and the firm was founded back in 1998. It was founded by three very successful entrepreneurs and businessmen by the names of Randal Nardone, Robert Kauffman, and Wes Edens. Robert Kauffman has been replaced as one of the principles by Peter Briger because of his retirement back in 2012. Wes Edens and Randal Nardone both reside in New York. Peter Briger the new principal currently resides in San Francisco, California. When the Fortress Investment Group was originally founded the goal was to create a different type of investment firm that offered alternative investment vehicles. The Fortress Investment Group immediately became successful and grew quickly from 400 million dollars to over 3.9 billion dollars in holdings in just five short years. The company just continued to grow and by the year 2007, its assets under management were a total of 32.6 billion dollars. In recent years the total amount of holdings that the firm has managed is 70.2 billion dollars worth. These holdings consist of liquid hedge funds, credit funds, and private equity.
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The Fortress Investment Group has been one of the trend-setting private equity firms since it first opened its doors. The Fortress Group was the first alternative investment firm to launch an IPO. This gave the company a lot of credibility and boosted its profile significantly. Once the Fortress Group paved the way for the alternative asset firm’s other firms followed behind and started to launch their IPOs as well. The firms that followed in the Fortress Group’s footsteps were Blackstone Group, Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, Apollo Global Management and many more.
A case can easily be made that the Fortress Group paved the way for the alternative asset sector and for alternative investment firms as well. If the Fortress Group would not have taken the step to launch its IPO maybe the other alternative asset firms would not have taken it either. Read: https://pitchbook.com/blog/investor-of-the-week-fortress-investment-group