Alger's Chung Rebuilt a Firm That Lost 35 of Its Own

Dan Chung, CEO and chief investment officer of Fred Alger Management, survived the 9/11 attack by chance and was tasked with rebuilding the growth-investing firm after 35 of its staffers were killed, and he continues to run its stock selection today.

Few jobs in American finance have ever begun the way Dan Chung's did. The chief executive and chief investment officer of Fred Alger Management survived the September 11 attack by chance, then found himself responsible for putting back together an investment firm that had lost 35 of its staff in a single morning.

That is the story CNBC revisited this week, on the anniversary of the attack. It is also, in its way, a story about the mechanics of the asset management business: what a fund company actually consists of, how much of it walks out of the building every evening, and what happens when it does not walk back in.

A firm's assets are the people who pick the stocks

An investment manager has very little in the way of physical plant. What it has is a research process, a set of client relationships, a track record and the specific group of analysts and portfolio managers who produced that track record. Strip out the people and what remains is a name, a list of holdings and a set of legal obligations to shareholders who can redeem at the close of any business day.

That is the position Chung inherited. Rebuilding meant hiring analysts, restoring coverage of the companies in the portfolios, keeping mandates from walking out the door, and doing all of it while the people who remained were grieving colleagues. There is no playbook for it in any CFA curriculum. The fact that the firm continued to operate at all, with Chung still in both the chief executive and chief investment officer seats a quarter of a lifetime later, is the plainest measure of how that went.

The dual title matters. In most large houses those two roles are split, deliberately, because running a business and running money pull in different directions. One demands distribution, fee negotiations and headcount decisions; the other demands sitting with a company's numbers long enough to form an independent view. Holding both puts the investment process and the commercial process in the same head.

Growth investing, then and since

Alger has long been identified with growth investing — buying companies whose revenue and earnings are expanding quickly, and accepting higher valuations and sharper drawdowns in exchange for that expansion. The approach lives or dies on identifying change early: a product that is taking share, a market that is forming, a business model that is inflecting.

The two decades and more since 2001 have been, on balance, kind to that discipline, though not evenly. The period contained a financial crisis, a long stretch of near-zero interest rates that flattered long-duration growth stories, a pandemic, and then a rate shock that punished exactly the kind of high-multiple names growth managers tend to own. A manager who came through all of that and is still selecting stocks has been tested across more than one regime, which is more than can be said for a lot of track records now being marketed.

What the Alger case does not offer is a shortcut. Growth investing is not a formula; it is a series of judgments about which companies are genuinely compounding and which merely look like it for a few quarters. The firms that survive in the category tend to be the ones with enough analytical bench strength to tell the difference — which brings the story back to people, and to why losing 35 of them was existential rather than merely tragic.

The session Chung's anniversary fell in

The market backdrop on the day was firm. As of the last trade at 18:44 GMT on Friday, 11 September 2026, the S&P 500 tracker SPY stood at $765.19, up 0.97% from the previous close of $757.83, inside a day range of $763.60 to $766.38. The Nasdaq 100 proxy QQQ was at $716.20, up 1.06% from $708.69, with a range of $713.63 to $717.63. The Dow 30 vehicle DIA traded at $526.01, up 1.01% from $520.75 and ranging between $524.29 and $527.36.

The ordering is telling for a growth house: the technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 proxy led, with the broad market and the industrial-weighted Dow proxy close behind. A session in which all three benchmarks advance by roughly the same amount, with the growth-tilted index a fraction ahead, is the market's least dramatic version of a risk-on day — breadth doing the work rather than a handful of megacaps.

What the industry took from it

Business continuity planning in financial services changed permanently after 2001. Firms moved trading floors to redundant sites, split research teams across boroughs and states, and started treating off-site backup not as an IT line item but as a board-level obligation. Much of the regulatory architecture around disaster recovery for broker-dealers and investment advisers traces to what happened to firms like Alger.

But continuity plans deal with systems. They do not deal with succession in a business where judgment is the product. The unresolved question for every boutique asset manager — and for the clients who allocate to them — is what the process is worth without the people who built it. Alger answered that question under the worst conditions imaginable, by rebuilding the bench rather than trading on the name.

What to watch

• Key-person risk disclosure. Fund documents name the managers responsible for a strategy. Investors should know who those people are and what happens to the mandate if they leave.
• Analyst bench depth. In growth investing the research staff is the asset. A house running concentrated portfolios on a thin bench is a fragile house.
• Regime tolerance. Growth strategies behave very differently when rates rise than when they fall. A track record that spans only one of those environments is not a track record of the discipline.
• Leadership concentration. Combining the chief executive and chief investment officer roles works while it works. The transition, whenever it comes, is the moment that tests the institution rather than the individual.

Chung's biography will always be read through a single morning. The more durable point is commercial: a firm that lost a large part of its investment staff is still competing for growth mandates, which suggests the process was rebuilt rather than merely resumed.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Dan Chung?

Dan Chung is the chief executive officer and chief investment officer of Fred Alger Management, an investment firm known for growth-style stock selection. He survived the September 11 attack by chance and was subsequently tasked with rebuilding the firm after 35 of its staff members were killed. He still runs the firm's investment process today.

How many Alger employees died on 9/11?

Thirty-five staffers at Fred Alger Management were killed in the September 11 attack. For a firm whose entire product is the judgment of its research and portfolio management staff, a loss on that scale was existential rather than only tragic, and rebuilding the investment bench became the central task of the years that followed.

What is growth investing?

Growth investing means buying shares in companies whose revenue and earnings are expanding quickly, accepting higher valuation multiples and sharper price swings in exchange for that expansion. It depends on identifying change early — a product taking market share, a new market forming — and on distinguishing genuine compounding from a few flattering quarters.

Why is key-person risk important in asset management?

An investment firm has little physical plant. Its value sits in its research process, client relationships, track record and the specific people who produced that record. If those people leave, the strategy can change even though the fund name does not. Fund documents name responsible managers, and investors should check who they are.

How were the major US indices trading that day?

As of the last trade at 18:44 GMT on September 11, 2026, the S&P 500 tracker SPY was at $765.19, up 0.97%; the Nasdaq 100 proxy QQQ was at $716.20, up 1.06%; and the Dow 30 vehicle DIA was at $526.01, up 1.01%. All three advanced by broadly similar amounts.

What did the financial industry change after 2001?

Firms rebuilt business continuity planning: redundant trading sites, research teams split across locations, and off-site backup treated as a board-level obligation rather than an IT expense. Much of the disaster-recovery framework applied to broker-dealers and investment advisers dates from that period. Continuity plans cover systems, however, not succession of investment judgment.

Sources

• Dan Chung rebuilt a decimated Alger Management after 9/11. He's still finding the market's winners — CNBC Investing

Photo: Max Vakhtbovych · Pexels Licence — source