Peter Kraus Serves As New CEO Of AllianceBernstein

According to

, AllianceBernstein's

new CEO Peter Kraus is a stark contrast to the company's previous CEO, Lew Sanders. Michael Shari for Barron's writes "Sanders is a renowned value investor who pioneered the fusion of quantitative with fundamental investment techniques and consistently beat the Standard & Poor's 500 from 1971 till 2007. He also had the last word on virtually every investment decision the firm made. Starting as a research assistant in 1968, he spent 40 years there before a quick departure at the end of 2008 after he badly misjudged the depth of the stock market's woes. As the firm's chief investment officer for equity, Sharon Fay, describes him, Sanders was "an introvert who went home on Friday night to work on an investment model." Kraus is considerably more colorful. A former Goldman Sachs investment banker who later co-headed the firm's asset-management group, Kraus who tends to roam the halls, picking investment officers' brains about ideas but leaving portfolio decisions to them, is contending with more problems than middling performance, including thorny cultural issues." "I'm direct, open, and willing to entertain different ideas. I don't have a 'not-invented-here' mentality. I like people to challenge the status quo," explains the bearded 58-year old Kraus. Says a former colleague of Kraus' at Goldman's asset management group: "At Goldman, if you see something working, you copy it and just do it better than other people. That will be a wake-up call to the Bernstein culture." Turning the firm around is akin to "turning a battleship around in the Hudson River," says Roger Smith, an asset management analyst at Macquarie Securities. Today AllianceBernstein manages $467 billion in assets, with $217 billion invested in equities, $205 billion in bonds and $45 billion in asset allocation and other strategies. It runs about $52 billion in its U.S. mutual-fund business.