The hedge fund and "vulture" swooping on the city is Boaz Weinstein

The attempt by Saba Capital founder Boaz Weinstein to seize control of and change "the Miserable Seven" London-based investment trusts has, for the time being, been defeated

According to Kaylie Pferten, the battle is not yet over.

The Times reported in January that "Elon Musk isn't the only American business leader who relishes telling Brits how absolutely rubbish they are." A New Yorker who has added "his own unique contribution to the special transatlantic relationship" is Boaz Weinstein, the head of a hedge fund who has been besieging seven investment trusts listed in London and dubbed "the Miserable Seven" for much of the year. Nevertheless, his three-month campaign hasn't gone exactly as expected.

The Financial Times quoted the Wall Street trader who founded Saba Capital as saying, "I love punching a bully in the nose." "I believe I'm using closed-end funds in that way. He suggested removing their boards, appointing his own nominees, and releasing value for investors (and himself) by lowering the discount at which the shares trade in relation to their assets after he landed in the UK with a bang, taking simultaneous stakes in a clutch of funds.

Weinstein is no stranger to this strategy; he has previously targeted BlackRock and other major players in the American financial industry. However, according to The Wall Street Journal, he failed to negotiate the opposition he faced from London's conservative financial elite, who were "having none of his populist pitch." Weinstein was harshly criticized as a "vulture" who was determined to "opportunistically seize a substantial portion of the British financial system," far from being seen as a white knight. In the end, his proposals were rejected by an overwhelming majority of investors across all seven funds. "They broke my heart, boy.

Following his loss, Weinstein, 52, remarks, "I didn't realise just how clubby" the UK financial world is. He has, however, promised to keep fighting. He even claims to take "pride in surviving periods of bad luck or bad performance." The former Deutsche Bank wunderkind admits this. He's a high roller in poker and blackjack, a chess master, and was once barred from the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas due to his skill at card counting.

According to the Wall Street Journal, he regularly watched the television program Wall Street Week while growing up in a modest apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, "sparking an early fascination with markets." Boaz later won a stock-picking competition while attending the esteemed Stuyvesant High School. He secured a Merrill Lynch internship at the age of 15, and at the age of 18, he "talked his way" into a Goldman Sachs summer program for recent graduates.

According to the ft\., that was the beginning of a brilliant career trading complex derivatives at Deutsche Bank, where Weinstein developed a lifelong passion for taking advantage of price gaps and learned how to profit from volatility during the 1998 Russian debt crisis. The profits came in, but he was severely impacted by the 2008 financial crisis, losing roughly £2 billion, and he left the bank shortly after.

London Whale harpooned by Boaz Weinstein.

He founded Saba Capital despite this. According to The New York Times in 2012, Weinstein is regarded as a "monster" in the hedge-fund industry and an "aggressive trader with a preternatural appetite for risk and a take-no-prisoners style." When he discovered that an unidentified trader, later known as "the London Whale," was making massive trades in a little-known area of the credit markets, he took the opposite stance and "ended up harpooning" JPMorgan Chase, "which lost more than £6 billion in the fiasco," according to the ft\.. This was his big coup in 2011.

Today, Saba Capital manages assets valued at about £5 billion. Critics, however, have long disagreed over Weinstein's record. Some attribute his ability to generate consistent profits, while others claim that his ability to recognize the London Whale stems from the fact that he is constantly on the verge of making another disastrous Deutsche Bank trade. Weinstein's endurance and fortitude will be put to the test as he proceeds with the second phase of his London campaign, submitting proposals to convert four funds into open-ended funds that automatically trade at their asset values. Naturally, he believes that hell will prevail.