This $10bn hedge fund's chief investment officer has just quit for a small tech firm
Capula Investment Management, the $10bn fixed income focused hedge fund set up by former J.P. Morgan managing director Yan Huo, has just lost its co-chief investment officer, who has joined a small analytics software firm.
David Gu, co-CIO and partner at Capula, has just left the hedge fund to join Adarga Limited, a tech firm that uses machine learning and cognitive computing to help clients delve into reams of data. His employment finished on 24 May, according to new filings on Companies House.
Gu is chairman at the Adarga. In some ways the switch into a tech firm is going (a long way) back to his roots - Gu graduated with a BSc Computer Science from Columbia University back in 1985.
Capula has made a habit of hiring senior fixed income traders from large investment banks, and Gu is no exception. He joined Capula in October 2011, from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he was latterly global head of rates and currencies in London and co-head of the bank's EMEA markets business, which had more than 1,000 employees at the time.
As most hedge funds have struggled, Capula has continued to offer generous compensation and sway investment banks' traders across. Switching to the buy-side has an obvious appeal for banks' fixed income traders, which until the first quarter of this year have been subject to ongoing cuts. Capula employs a relative value strategy and its main fund – the Capula Global Relative Value Master Fund – seeks to exploit anomalies in pricing across macro products.
Its latest accounts, for the 12 months to 31 March 2016 (released in January this year) show that the highest paid partner at Capula received £34m. The remaining 26 partners got paid an average of £3.9m. The 90 rank and file employees received an average of £317k.
Over the past few months, there have been some significant exits and hires at Capula. In November, it brought in Manu Tripathi, the head of emerging markets FX options at Unicredit, as a portfolio manager, Peter Warren, a portfolio manager and head of distribution at CQS joined as co-head of global investor relations in May and Puzhong Yao, a former Goldman Sachs rates trader was hired in late August
However, Mathias Berenger, who was previously head of European vanilla options trading at Credit Suisse, left Capula in September. Vassilis Angelopoulos, a former interest rates options trader at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Dipak Shah, an FX options trader at Goldman Sachs who joined Capula as a portfolio manager in 2012, also departed.
Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com
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