Why 20% of Hedge Funds Fail After One Year - Claudia Quintela on Why Managers Need Business Sense

Disclaimer: This is not a financial promotion and must not be seen as advice, but only as an educational piece

Cláudia Quintela has spent 25 years connecting early-stage hedge fund managers with institutional capital. She's worked across FX, macro, and systematic strategies at State Street, UBS, Morgan Stanley, and Blenheim Capital, one of the world's largest commodity managers at its peak.

In 2017, she founded Vibe Advisors, an independent advisory boutique focused exclusively on helping emerging managers—particularly systematic, CTA, and macro funds—navigate the hardest part of launch: raising that first $50 to $200 million when you have limited track record, tight capacity constraints, and institutional investors demanding day-one infrastructure.

She specialises in the messy reality of early-stage fundraising: fee pressure, seed negotiations, managed account structures, positioning for allocators who need to sell your strategy internally, and translating complex quant models into language that gets you through the door. Her client base skews heavily toward liquid macro and model-driven managers.

Today, Cláudia runs a portfolio career: advising fund managers and investors, writing weekly about entrepreneurship and capital raising, hosting webinars on AI tools for investor relations and marketing automation, and speaking on panels about women in finance. She's an advocate for the sisterhood and believes the next generation of emerging managers will look different from the last.

Based in London and originally from Porto, she holds an MSc in Finance from LSE and is a CFA charterholder. She's here to talk about what actually works when you're trying to raise institutional capital at the hardest stage—and how emerging managers can build smarter, leaner operations using the tools that didn't exist when she started.