We’re three weeks into 2015, investment banks have been doing more firing than hiring to make the bonus pot go further and few institutions have suggested that this year will be particularly expansionary. Investment banks’ traders escaped to hedge funds throughout 2014, and this trend appears to be continuing this year.
Already this year, prominent UK hedge funds have continued where they left off in 2014 – poaching from investment banks and other areas of the financial sector.
Bluecrest Capital Management:
Bluecrest hired a lot of traders from investment banks last year, but staff churn meant that it ended the year with only seven more people than it started with. However, it’s continued its tendency to hire long-term employees of investment banks’ prop trading desks. The latest recruit is Pierre-Antoine Cousin, a senior proprietary trader in equity derivatives at BNP Paribas, joined as a portfolio manager earlier this month. Still, after some bad losses on the Swiss franc moves, Bluecrest has also let go of some senior employees this month.
Capula Investment Management:
Capula had a good year in 2014: revenues increased by £35m, it increased front office headcount and founder Yan Huo may have walked away with £17.6m. Now, it’s poaching from other areas of the financial sector – Vassilis Angelopoulos, an interest rates options trader at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Carl Andreas Isaksson, a vice president at BlackRock who previously spent 10 years at J.P. Morgan, have just joined the fixed income focused hedge fund.
Millennium Capital Management:
Millennium has been hiring scores of investment banks’ traders as they pull back from prop trading activities. As we pointed to previously, some of these tenures can be short-lived. However, this hasn’t stopped it attracting new senior employees. Antonio Fortes, who managed the systematic macro portfolio at BTG Pactual, signed up as a senior portfolio manager focusing on FX at Millennium, while Bruno Durin, a statistical arbitrage portfolio manager at Capital Fund Management, also joined in January.
Tudor Investment Corporation:
Tudor has been expanding its UK operation over the past 12 months, hiring senior hedge fund portfolio managers and investment bankers like Robert Gold, who was formerly a managing director at Goldman Sachs. Now, it’s just hired Dev Sahai, a former trader at Brevan Howard and Citigroup director who was latterly at Salix Capital.
Winton Capital Management:
Winton has been on a hiring spree, both for its traditional quant-driven business and for less obvious areas as it starts a quest to become a mainstream fund management company. It targeted 100 hires in 2014, and has continued to bring in new talent this year. So far, Dan Melley, who was head of UK fiduciary management at Mercer, has just joined as global head of consultant relations.