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Michael Lewitt is the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of Third Friday Management, LLC a hedge fund, private equity and merchant banking firm located in South Florida. He is also the Chief Investment Officer of the Platinum Group USA Ltd., a merchant banking firm focused on investments in the Middle East and Asia.
Lewitt has over 30 years of investment experience and successfully managed large credit portfolios through the 2001-2002 and 2008 credit crises. In 2016, his firm Third Friday Management, LLC was named Hedge Fund Manager of the Year by Wealth & Finance magazine in the UK and The Third Friday Total Return Fund, L.P. was named “Best US Options Hedge Fund Strategy (Since Inception)” by BarclaysHedge.
Mr. Lewitt is widely recognized as one of the few investors and strategists to forecast the credit crisis of 2001-2002 as well as the global financial crisis of 2008. Mr. Lewitt co-founded Harch Capital Management in 1991, where he produced strong risk-adjusted returns managing non-investment grade credit portfolios for clients including Omega Advisers, Inc., Texas Teachers Retirement Plan, Los Angeles County Employee Retirement Associations, Investec Bank (UK) and Goldman Sachs.
Prior thereto, Mr. Lewitt was a member of the Corporate Finance Department at Drexel Burnham Lambert in Beverly Hills, CA. Mr. Lewitt began his career as an associate in the tax department at the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York City. Mr. Lewitt is the editor and publisher of The Credit Strategist, a monthly newsletter covering economics, politics and markets read around the world. He is also the author of two highly regarded books, The Death of Capital: How Creative Policy Can Restore Stability (John Wiley & Sons, 2010) and The Committee to Destroy the World: Inside the Plot to Unleash a Super Crash on the Global Economy (John Wiley & Sons, 2016). His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic and many other publications.
Michael graduated Magna Cum Laude from Brown University with honors in Comparative Literature and History. He also received his JD and LLM in Taxation degrees and from New York University School of Law and was a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University. Mr. Lewitt is a member in good standing of the New York State Bar.