Former Brevan Howard partner has just joined Izzy Englander's Millennium Management

Millennium Management is a hedge fund that keeps hiring in London. It’s just brought in a former Brevan Howard partner as a senior portfolio manager for its rates business.

James Watson, the former head of swaps trading ex-euro at Morgan Stanley, has just joined Millennium Management as a lead portfolio manager and partner. He joined Brevan Howard in June 2011, initially in its Geneva office, but moved to London two years later and eventually left the hedge fund in May 2016.

In another display of the onerous non-compete clauses hampering the moves of senior hedge fund professionals, it's therefore taken a year for Watson to reappear at Millennium after leaving Brevan Howard.

In hedge fund terms, Millennium is a behemoth. It has $34.9bn in assets under management, as of 1 May, and has 2,150 employees across offices in the U.S., UK and Asia. It’s hired six new FCA registered staff in the past two months in London, but headcount has remained flat in the UK thanks to some key departures alongside the new recruits.

In the past month, Millennium has also hired two analysts. Ashley Thomas, the former head of European utilities research at MF Global in London who has been working at Societe Generale for the past five years, has joined Millennium as has Wayne Drayton, who was latterly a senior European Cash equities trader at Macquarie. He’s now an analyst on Millennium’s consumer fund.

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com