JPMorgan’s head of Asia equities trading, Cyril Levy-Marchal, has joined Capula Investment Management’s expanding Hong Kong office.
Levy-Marchal joined Capula at the end of April as a portfolio manager, having previously spent 10 years at JPMorgan in both London and Hong Kong. Until September 2010, he was global head of equity flow derivatives trading before he moved to Asia to become head of derivatives trading, replacing William Lee. He has been a managing director since 2005 and left JPMorgan in May last year, remaining on gardening leave until last month.
Before joining JPMorgan, Levy-Marchal was head of the equity derivatives prop trading desk at Credit Suisse. Like a lot of equity derivatives specialists, he attended an elite French university and holds an MSc in Finance from the HEC School of Management.
Fixed income-focused hedge fund Capula, which had $9.6bn in assets under management as at 30 June 2013, launched its Hong Kong office in 2012, headed by Antony Hung, a former Bank of America Merrill Lynch veteran. A number of hedge funds expanded into Asia at the time in order to capitalise on China beginning to open its capital markets to international investors.
Capula is making a habit of hiring senior ranking derivatives specialists from investment banks. As well as Levy-Marchal, it also hired Mathias Berenger, managing director and head of European vanilla options at Credit Suisse, in April.
At the same time, however, some senior staff have departed. Amol Devani, who was managing director and head of the foreign exchange options desk at Goldman Sachs before leaving for Capula in August 2012, has now left the firm, according to the Financial Conduct Authority register.
Capula was set up by former JPMorgan prop trader Yan Huo in 2005 and had $13bn in AUM at the beginning of 2013. It has a reputation for paying well – its London partners earned an average of £2.2m in 2013, down from £4.1m the previous year. Huo himself took home £56.6m in 2012, and £12.5m last year.
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