0ne of the biggest hedge funds in the world is planning to go public, apparently undeterred by the cool reception the stock market is now giving publicly traded hedge funds and private equity.

The hedge fund company, Och-Ziff Capital Management Group has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $2 billion in its own I.P.O.

Och-Ziff says it has $26.8 billion of assets under management for more than 700 fund investors.  Earlier this year, the trade publication Absolute Return ranked Och-Ziff No.7 among the top hedge funds in the United States, but that was based on assets under management of $21 billion. Based in New York, the company has 300 employees and offices in London and in Asia. In 2002, it had $5.8 billion under management.

Goldman and Lehman Brothers will act as co-lead managers for the offering.

Och-Ziff joins a slowly building parade of once very-private investment partnerships, hedge funds and private equity firms, that are tapping the public markets. Blackstone Group, the private equity giant, went public on June 22. Fortress Investment Group, which manages both private equity and hedge funds, made its debut in February. And GLG, a big London hedge fund, plans to gain a public listing on the  New York Stock Exchange through a reverse merger with Freedom Acquisition Holdings.

Like Blackstone and Fortress, Och-Ziff plans to issue shares that keep control of the company with the managers. Och-Ziff plans to offer Class A shares representing limited liability company interests on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol OZM.

The number of shares and the price for the offering were not disclosed in the filing.  Nor does it provide the compensation of Och and other executives.

But the filing does offer some details on how profitable the company is. Och-Ziff had net income of $588 million last year, up 80 percent from 2005. That gain was made with compensation and benefits expenses of $447 million.

The company also intends to take out a $750 loan before an offering to  make a payout to existing owners

The filing comes as Congress takes steps on legislation that would significantly increase taxes for publicly traded investment management firms. Both Fortress and Blackstone would be grandfathered for a time, under the bill that was introduced in the Senate; that would not be the case for Och-Ziff.

It is not only the potential tax burden that has made investors wary of such public listings. The recent jitters in the credit markets indicate that both deal makers and traders face more challenging times.

 The shares of Blackstone continue to trade below their I.P.O. price. Fortress shares, while still above the I.P.O. price, have slumped recently.  Freedom Acquisition shares, after a brief runup on the GLG deal, have also since declined.