Fortress Investment Group

Fortress Investment Company is an Investment management company that has its headquarters in New York City, New York. It was started as a private equity company by Randal Nardone, Rob Kauffman and Wesley R. Edens in 1998. When Fortress gave its initial public offering and was first launched in the New York stock exchange in February 2007, Fortress was the first big company to be traded publicly in the United States. The company had managed over $70.2 billion alternative assets as of June 30, 2016. The alternative assets were in the form of credit funds, liquid hedge funds, and private equity. Fortress Investment Group would quickly expand into debt securities, investments related to real estate and hedge funds.All these investments were run by Peter Briger and Michael Novogratz who were both former employees of Goldman Sachs. Between the years 1999 and 2006, the value of investments by Fortress Investment Group grew at an exponential pace with a 39.7% in private equity funds. In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the Forbes magazine included three Fortress principals including Wesley Edens and Peter Briger as the most prominent losers of the economic recession.

Fortress Investment Group was in 2014 named the Hedge fund manager of the year courtesy of the Institutional Investor. HFMWeek also named the company the management firm of the Year. In 2012, the Investment group was also recognized as the Discretionary Macro-Focused Hedge-Fund of the Year. In 2010 and 2011, Fortress was named the Credit Fund of the Year. In the autumn of 2014, Fortress Investment group hired Jeff Feig who was supposed to join Novogratz as the company’s Macro Fund co-CIO. The company announced that the Macro-Fund, which was valued at $2.3 billion was going to be closed down and re-distributed to the initial investors. The sale of the Macro Fund came after Feig stepped down as the co-CIO in the July of 2015. Novogratz continued to serve as the remaining CIO until his retirement in December 2015. Fortress Investment Group had four primary businesses by June 30, 2016. The four core business had total assets under management value of over $70 billion. The cost also included the traditional asset management, liquid markets, and private equity credit.

Softbank agreed that it would acquire Fortress Investment group in the future on February 14, 2017. The acquisition deal was negotiated for over six weeks and was agreed at $3.3 billion. The Acquisition deal was completed and signed in December 2017 and was worth $3.3 billion. Fortress Investment group has more than 1,600 institutional investors in Hong Kong, Singapore, Italy, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York City.The company, in 2010, acquired CWCapital in a bid to get deeper into the commercial real estate market. Fortress Investment group’s holdings today include the Inverness Corners retail center in Alabama which was acquired in 2014. Alabama Inverness Corners has been critical in assisting finance condos and other commercial buildings around the city of New York. On January 2014, Fortress Group was the winning bidder for the Montreal Maine assets and Atlantic Railway.