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According to headhunters, Deutsche has lost its head of European flow rates sales along with four other rates salespeople to UBS. It’s also said to have lost one other rates salesperson to Morgan Stanley. Kevin Arnold, the head of European flow rates at Deutsche, is said to have left for UBS, along with hedge fund salespeople Osman Ozsan, a VP, and associates Ivan Chalbaud, Rahul Stanchina, and UK real money salesperson... Read more

We’re slightly behind with this, given that it was published in the Wall Street Journal on March 16th, but as part of today’s high frequency trading ‘series,’ we’re leading with it anyway. The WSJ’s article suggests both what it’s like to work for one of the world’s leading quant funds, and the kind of people who work there. It reveals, for example, that Ren Tech employs 90 PhDs and that the... Read more

As of last year, high frequency trading is the new, new thing. The London Stock Exchange, NYSE Euronext and Nasdaq OMX all say they’re receiving increased applications from high frequency trading specialists, and the fact that the average order size on the LSE is down from £20.4k in 2005 to around £7.4k today is being taken as an indication that a higher proportion of orders are being put through in... Read more

Electronic trading systems are hot. Such is their hotness that both Deutsche and JP Morgan have explicitly identified electronic trading as an area of strategic importance in 2010. JP Morgan alone plans to invest $200m in electronic trading over the next two years. And Deutsche is aiming at a top two position in electronic equities cash trading by 2012, as well as planning further investment in rates and FX electronic... Read more

Monday was Clifford Sacks’ first day as Ceo South Africa and head of Pan-African equities for Renaissance Capital, the Russian investment bank that is expanding aggressively in emerging markets. Before joining RenCap, Sacks, who is South African, was co-Ceo for SA and Sub-Saharan Africa at BoA Merrill Lynch, a well-respected investment banker with twenty years’ experience and a deep knowledge of African equities. His task is to open and staff a... Read more

The party may be over for fixed income, currency and commodity (FICC) professionals. At last week’s investor day, JP Morgan said margins in the fixed income business were down 50% and likely to stay that way. US banking analyst Dick Bove says senior traders have told him they’re not making money. And yesterday Bove cut his earnings estimates for Goldman on the grounds that trading activity has been disappointing, ‘across... Read more

As we've alluded to before, many banks have been building their equity derivatives capabilities. However, it seems that those with an understanding of how to either structure or trade Delta One products are finding their services particularly in demand. “I placed a Delta One person in December and he’s already had six headhunter calls,” one equity derivatives focused headhunter told us last month. “HSBC, MacBank, Deutsche and JP Morgan” are... Read more

Hedge fund start-ups are rising again - according to the Wall Street Journal, 173 funds were launched in the third quarter of last year. But not all hedge funds are born equal. In December, Belay Partners, a long/short European equities fund, was born to two members of the European hedge fund aristocracy: Daoud Zekrya and Harry Tyser. Zekrya formerly managed the Core fund at Marshall Wace; Tyser previously ran New Star's... Read more

With more hedge funds entering the high frequency trading fray, demand for the already much sought-after (and highly paid) technical expertise looks set to sky-rocket. But how long can these astronomical pay packets last? One the one hand, firms are looking to take on developers to put together rapid-fire trading programs to take advantage of tiny buy and sell imbalances. Such low latency systems are likely to receive significant investment,... Read more

Adair Turner isn’t going to let the ‘socially useful’ mantra die. In the closing days of Davos he turned his social filter on FX trading (and the carry trade in particular), claiming that a big part of FX trading in London is “economically valueless” and serves, “no social purpose.” Turner supports punitive capital requirements which will render carry trades unprofitable. He’s also fully approving of Brazil’s tax on capital inflows,... Read more

As Felix Salmon notes, the potential demise of banks' pure prop trading activities does away with one of the big incentives for joining an investment bank as a trader in the first place: moving into prop. As Salmon notes, if the Volcker rule passes, traders at investment banks will no longer be able to aspire to a career path where they first become prop traders and then eventually leave to start... Read more

Morgan Stanley has been hiring. After declaring its intention of recruiting 400 sales and trading professionals in August, it said it had hired 200 of them by October. Yesterday, it revealed there are now only 50 more of those vacancies to be filled. The emphasis so far seems to have been on rates and FX. In a slightly garbled exposition of the strategic motivation for hiring during yesterday’s conference call,... Read more

In the responses to my last article, a lot of people focussed on the difference between working in advisory and a trading floor role (i.e. in sales or trading). As someone who has seen both sides of an investment bank (I interned on the trading floor and then did my analyst programme in M&A for three years) these are my thoughts... Trading is chaotic, M&A is cerebral A trading floor... Read more

Goldman Sachs’ recent entrance into the exchange-traded funds market in the US (along with other asset management heavyweights) illustrates the increasing competitiveness of the sector. New players are also setting up shop in Europe, and more established firms are having to pay over the odds to keep hold of their existing talent. “New ETF players in Europe have been targeting the established firms’ key talent,” says one City asset management... Read more

This may all be a mere coincidence, but it may equally be a coincidence worth noticing. When those rumours erupted last week about Goldman threatening to move teams overseas in response to the bonus tax, FX teams (along with prop trading and operations) were among those said to be in line for migration. When Standard Chartered established a trading floor in Dubai in 2007, London-based FX staff were among the 50-100 people... Read more

We’re a little late with this, but BusinessWeek published an interesting article earlier this week on Michael Platt, co-founder of BlueCrest Capital Management, London’s third largest hedge fund. For those who aspire to follow in Platt’s footsteps, or to get a job at BlueCrest by astonishing Platt with their interest in his path to hedge moguldom, the article contains some helpful pointers, as follows. Start young Platt was introduced to trading... Read more

This may be spurious, but as it’s still early in the year and we’re working our way back to optimum productivity, we thought we’d give it an airing and offer you the opportunity to agree, or not. In the dying days of 2009, a reader left a comment on an article suggesting a simple way for evaluating success in a sales or trading role. According to the anonymous reader, the rule of... Read more