Seeing this man walk down your street, you would not be able to guess that he had set up one of the biggest hedge funds in the country, peaking at over one billion USD. While in a Florida office, wearing naught but shorts and a t-shirt, Ron Pollack discussed his success as a hedge fund seller and manager, the members of his family, the charities he's worked with and why he is returning to managing funds after six years. He said that short selling was what he needed to do.

Ron Pollack is an alumni of Yale (Magna Cum Laude) and earned a M.B.A and J.D. from Harvard. After grad school, Pollack turned to stocks where he joined the ranks of many of his classmates in investment banking and fine tuning his skill as a hedge fund manager. Ron first learned short selling from the Feshbach Brothers.

Yale and Harvard are both successful in turning out successful investors. For example, Jim Chanos exposed Enron as a fraud and Ron met him in the 1980s when they both worked for First Executive Live. Zoe Cruz is a commodity trader and was the vice president of Morgan Stanley, and also a colleague of Ron's at HBS. Jamie Dinan was another successful investor. He is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase and used to play pick-up basketball with Ron when they worked together. Strauss Zelnick was the chairman of ZelnickMedia and Take-Two interactive, as well as Ron's roommate while they attended Harvard. Scott Schoen and Scott Sperling were co-presidents of THL and also friends of Ron's from Harvard. Steve Pagliuca and John Bekenstein, who worked for Bain Capital, were Ron's friends from HBS and Yale, respectively. Glenn Hutchins was also a Harvard classmate. Pollack, who is a graduate of both Yale and Harvard, is a usual example. When he left Feshbach in the early 1990's, he built successful hedge funds. The most famous of those funds was his short fund named Dancing Bear. Near the end of 2001, Pollack felt a burning need to spend more time with family and helping charities.

“After the terrorist attack on 9/11, I was moved by what happened and I really wanted to help," said Pollack. For the months following the attack, the financial markets were in turmoil and Ron began to feel the pull of loyalties between his investment business and the needs of his growing family. In November of that year, Ron was at a family vacation with his expectant wife and three children. Sitting with his laptop on a hotel room watching the markets, he told his wife that he had to go back to the office because the markets were just too crazy.

On his way back, he began working on a course of action which would increase his ability to spend time with his family along with helping charity groups. Ron combined his hedge fund company with the Cambridge, MA based Monitor Group in 2002 so that he would be able to spend time on extracurricular activities, especially volunteering and raising his kids. Next he succeeded in establishing fund-raising efforts for ailing firefighters, cops and other New York city workers along with the Vail Valley Foundation, NY Rescue Workers Detoxification Foundation among other charitable groups.

In his fund-raising role, he sometimes found himself visiting fund managers. Whenever this happened, he became somewhat torn because he had quit trading and he missed being involved. In all the time he served as a volunteer, Pollack actually made only a single trade.

For a bit of personal entertainment, Pollack treated himself to a day of 'personal training' and trading with a local stockbroker, which he won at a charity auction in Vail. It was a major surprise for this stockbroker when he discovered who his trainee was going to be and even more of a surprise when he realized quite how much Ron knew about the markets. It took Pollack just 15 minutes to triumph and a successful short sale trade. He then knew that he had not lost his touch.

Pollack was not recognized by the broker when they came across each other for the first time but he was known to many others. Even the CEO of Ramsey Asset Management, Russ Ramsey asked for Pollack's services while setting up his short selling project. Pollack got a chance to study the markets for Ramsey. He believed that by that time other managers would have filled the short selling space and was surprised to find they actually didn't.

“I was amazed. Nothing in short selling had changed in the years of my absence. They were still using the same techniques that we were using back in the 1980s" exclaimed Pollack. “I had already moved on to a newer short-selling model with Dancing Bear back in the mid-1990s I thought for sure others would have followed suit, and that by now short-selling would be over-crowded, just like most other hedge fund categories." Not only was the space not crowded, he found out that only a handful were doing well. Although it was still not the right time to get back into this field, he realized then that this truly was what he wanted to do and would eventually come back to it.

Towards the end of 2007, Pollack knew that he needed to go back to fund management. He saw that charities he was helping still needed help, but that he could actually do more to help them by earning money and donating it. His kids were growing up and even though it was full of stress and turbulence, he wanted to go back to trading as it was his love.

Stated in simplest terms, Pollack says that the time apart was necessary for his family and the charitable work that he loved, however at this time he is ready to return. "I loved the challenge of investing," he states passionately, adding that he particularly enjoyed short selling and missed it.