BlueCrest Capital Management, the family office run by billionaire investor Michael Platt, has just made another senior hire in Singapore as it continues to source its top portfolio managers from the banking sector.
Nicolas Fanchon joined BlueCrest earlier this month as a portfolio manager, according to his online profile. He was previously at Nomura for almost 10 years, latterly as an executive director in fixed income proprietary trading. Prior to that, he spent most of his career as an Asian interest rate options trader at BNP Paribas (1998 to 2004) and UBS (2004 to 2008).
Fanchon’s new firm, New York-headquartered BlueCrest, was one of the world’s hottest hedge funds until it became a family office in late 2015. As we reported earlier this year, the firm’s new status has not reduced its ability to recruit. Since January, BlueCrest has added a handful of people in the UK, including Evgenii Stroinov, an equity research analyst from Renaissance Capital, and David Bowen, a former currency portfolio manager at hedge fund Pine River.
As in the UK, BlueCrest has been selectively hiring in Singapore, but has been prone to taking senior people – often department heads – directly from large banks. Singapore’s hedge fund sector is comparatively small, making recruitment from buy-side competitors more difficult than in larger markets like London.
Portfolio managers like Fanchon make up a large proportion of these sell-side-to-buy-side moves. Last September, for example, Laurent Piedois, ANZ’s head of FX options for Europe and America came on board as a PM.
Piedois’ move came a few months after those of two ex-Barclays employees, who are now working as BlueCrest PMs in Singapore: Varun Kodthivada, the UK bank’s former head of Southeast Asia rates trading, and veteran trader Ashish Saksena, who spent more than 12 years at Barclays, latterly as a managing director.
In June last year, BlueCrest took on yet another banking boss when Ron Choy, Credit Suisse’s head of APAC rates and head of APAC investor product group, joined as a PM. That same month, Deutsche Bank’s former head of fixed income and currency trading for China, Yun Zou, also became a BlueCrest PM.
BlueCrest’s liking for senior traders from banks is perhaps not surprising – its Singapore CEO, Pierre Mauratille, comes from this background. Before joining Bluecrest in 2012, Mauratille was director, yen interest rates trading, at Barclays in Tokyo.
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