Hedge Funds Pick-up Sell-side Talent

As witnessed by Jeff Feig’s movement to Fortress Investments, there is a notable trend of sell side professionals finding new roles and new opportunities on the buy side. According to industry reports, hedge fund and fund-of-funds AUM grew from $2.6 trillion in 2013 to approximately $3 trillion in 2014. This type of growth creates demand for those talented traders and strategists who can add alpha. In this hemisphere, there were a few notable moves in 2014 worth highlighting. Rich Tang, formerly head of North America Sales at RBS and a 20 year veteran of the firm, joined Element Capital; Peter Antico, formerly head of rates trading at Credit Suisse with a long sell side career, joined Convexity Capital Management and Mitesh Parikh, formerly Goldman London’s European head of FX Spot Trading, joined Balyasny in New York. Research & Economics folks were also pulled to the buyside with moves such as Julia Coronado, former Chief US Economist at BNP NY, to Graham Capital; Dean Maki, former Chief US Economist at Barclays Capital, to Point 72; Pablo Goldberg , former head of Global EM Research at HSBC, to BlackRock; Jose Ursua, former International Economist at Goldman, to Dodge and Cox and Igor Arsenin, formerly Head of Barclays EM Asia Rates Strategy to Balyasny. We expect to see the flow of both talent and investment dollars towards the alternative investment arena to continue into 2015.