Brevan Howard’s bubble of invincibility has been pierced – after building up the ranks of traders and portfolio managers throughout 2015, the hedge fund has decided to swing the axe and remove around 10% of its staff.
However, this move is unlikely to affect front office staff: the 70 people set to leave Brevan Howard will predominantly be in support functions.
Except, the picture at Brevan Howard is not as straightforward as it seems. If the hedge fund is focused on retaining its front office staff, they appear to be leaving anyway.
John Capaldi, a marketing specialist focused on the Middle East and Asia who has been at Brevan Howard for five years, is set to depart in April 2016, according to sources close to the situation. Richard Adcock, the former head of fixed income technical strategy at UBS who only joined Brevan Howard in June, has also departed.
So have traders Morgan French, Owen Job, Amu Latif and Leo Evans. Latif was an analyst on the macro execution team. Leo Evans has been a macro execution trader at the hedge fund for the past five years.
However, Brevan Howard has also been hiring. In the past few weeks, it’s brought in Viktor Hjort, the former head of Asia fixed income research at Morgan Stanley, as a strategist in Hong Kong. It’s also hired Jezri Mohideen, the former head of rates trading at RBS, as well as Credit Suisse trader Daniel Hill and Louis Basger from Morgan Stanley.
Brevan is expanding in the U.S. Michael Lyublinsky, the former head of trading for the Americas at RBS, is running Brevan’s fixed income trading business in the U.S. and Pravin Mouli, the former head of Latin America rates trading at Barclays, ajoined in September.
Away from the big ticket hires, Brevan has also brought in Andy Constan, the former chief investment officer at Centerlight Capital Management and ex-head of global equity derivatives sales trading and structured products at Salomon Brothers, as an economist, Richard Yuanchi Xue as a quantitative analyst and Joshua Messina as a compliance analyst in recent months for its U.S. operation.
Brevan Howard did not respond to a request to comment for this article.
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