WisdomTree burst onto the scene in 2004 when a group led by hedge fund legend Michael Steinhardt (and including such luminary finance names as Stocks in the Long Run author Jeremy Siegel) executed a reverse merger with a shell company to form the publicly traded Index Development Partners (ticker: WSDT.pk). The stock shot up 20-fold as the group announced plans to create and launch a number of ETFs, which they said would beat the market by a few percent a year.
They just wouldn't say how. Their PR team - at the direction of the company - granted just one interview with a reporter, and even that barely touched on the eventual strategy.
In the vacuum, expectations began to build. Over the course of a year, the firm brought in a series of A-list executives: Frank Salerno, former COO of Merrill Lynch, Ray DeAngelo, head of sales and marketing for iShares, Richard Morris, chief legal counsel for Barclays. Surely, people thought, these people wouldn't be signing on unless WisdomTree had found something unique … something incredible … some new insight into how to trounce the major global markets. The firm kept silent even as their stock rose from $0.04/share to $3.70/share.