Amol Devani, the former head of Goldman Sachs’ FX option desk who has been leading the FX team at hedge fund Capula Investment Management since 2012, is currently taking time out of the financial sector to head up a London-based nursery.
Devani is far from alone in leaving the financial sector to embark on a start-up venture, but he has been managing director at Bright Little Stars nursery in Mill Hill, North London since March 2012, shortly before he took the job leading Capula’s FX macro directional and volatility trading desk in July of that year.
He left his role at Capula, the $9.6bn fixed income focused hedge fund founded by former JPMorgan prop trader Yan Huo in 2005, in January, according to the Financial Conduct Authority register, and has yet to resurface in another financial sector role.
Devani didn’t respond to requests for comment on this article, but his LinkedIn profile says that his ten years of “top level banking, managerial and project management expertise as well as natural interest in education and childcare” led him to launch Bright Little Stars.
He spent four years at Goldman Sachs, leading a team of 50 technologists and quants as head of the G10 FX derivatives group in London. Before this, he was European head of the G10 foreign exchange derivatives desk at UBS, which he joined as a graduate.
Capula has a reputation for paying its employees well, even by hedge fund standards. Last year, its partners earned an average of £2.2m after a difficult year in which profits slipped from £137.9m to £57.9m.
In April, it hired Mathias Berenger, a managing director and head of vanilla options trading at Credit Suisse, the latest in a string of new hires. Cyril Levy-Marchal, the former head of Asia equities trading at JPMorgan also joined Capula’s Asian office in May. Its headcount increased from 66 in 2012 to 95 last year, according to the latest available accounts for the firm.
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