Goldman Sachs, BAML, Unicredit are hiring e-trading expertise

While cash equities traders and traditional salespeople continue to languish, electronic trading (e-trading) skills remain in demand. Both Goldman Sachs and UniCredit have both made recent electronic trading hires in London.

Goldman just hired Chris Bell from Morgan Stanley. Bell was working on Morgan Stanley's listed derivatives eTrading coverage sales desk. It's thought he'll be doing a similar coverage role at GS.

UniCredit just hired Tibor Gergely from Bank of America Merrill Lynch as a director in FXecommerce. At BAML, Gergely enhanced and developed trading algorithms while performing transaction cost analysis on their execution. He was previously a quant trader in BAML's FX market making unit, and prior to that was a quant analyst at BNP Paribas in New York City.

And Bank of America Merrill Lynch has recently hired JanMartin Jahn as an equities quant trader from Citi.

All the men are based in London.

As a salesman of electronic systems, rather than a designer of actual algorithms or quant trader, Bell is inevitably less quantitative than Gergely. He started out in client billing and trade support at J.P. Morgan and worked his way into a front office position on J.P. Morgan's trading desk before moving to Citi and Morgan Stanley, and now Goldman Sachs. In this sense, he's something of an inspiration.

Jobs in electronic trading are split between coverage (sales traders who sell system to clients), execution traders (who make sure trades are executed in the most efficient way possible) and quant traders, who devise trading strategies based upon patterns in historic trading data.

In the past, electronic trading simply meant matching up buyers and sellers electronically, but banks are increasingly using algorithms to devise trading strategies and execute orders. Chris Robbins, chief executive at search firm Tradestone, says demand for electronic trading staff is buoyant across the board, but particularly in areas like rates trading where the market is less mature.

Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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