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tenacious individual who is highly principled. He is articulate and to the point. He is organized in thinking and speaking as well as hard-working.

As we sit in his conference room overlooking Central Park in New York City, Singer, 56, discusses his diversified, opportunistic approach. "The world has a rapidly shifting set of opportunities. You have to be there and you can't stay in too long. It's like the Welcome Wagon in front of your house for 10 minutes. You don't want to be too late and miss the cookies." He also emphasizes that being eclectic is different from being whimsical and a dilettante.

His objective is to achieve a rate of return as high as is consistent with his goal of capital preservation. Distressed securities and arbitrage are two big parts of his business. At the moment, due to where the opportunities are, arbitrage strategies like investment trust arbitrage and related securities arbitrage represent the largest deployment of capital. Long-term equity-linked positions, largely derived from his distressed and convertible investing, represent another significant area of capital deployment. Distressed investing, which had been the largest area in the past, is now shrinking.

Early on, a good percentage of his business was in convertible arbitrage. But after the crash of 1987, Singer found the paper was too cross-correlated, too correlated to the stock market, and too difficult to hedge. "It is an overstatement—but not too much of an overstatement—to call them bull market instruments." For example, convertibles have not had an easy time in test periods such as the 1973–1974 market weakness, 1987, 1994, 1998, and April/May 2000. He feels that in a sustained bear market, convertibles may not trade well. Interest rate hikes and bear markets are just a few factors that make convertibles vulnerable. Since then, convertibles have diminished to a smaller percentage of what he trades. Convertible hedging in Japan, which was active from 1988 to 1993, has also since diminished. Today, he approaches convertibles on an opportunistic basis.

There are typically about 200 positions in the portfolio. Regarding portfolio optimization, Singer says that he uses both quantitative and qualitative measures but does not provide further details. This situation is reassessed continuously. Liquidity of markets traded ranges from low to high.