As hedge fund Eisler Capital's people resurface, questions over its strats team
As we reported last month, people at shuttering hedge fund Eisler Capital are being hotly pursued by headhunters. Some are already arriving in new seats.
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Several are resurfacing at Balyasny Asset Management (BAM), where Alexander Alekseev is building a team. A senior systematic equities portfolio manager who left Eisler in May, Alekseev has taken five people from Eisler to BAM, including Harry Armitage, an Eisler quant and portfolio manager.
Eisler Capital was particularly well known for its large team of quantitative strategists ("strats") led by the sometimes Marmite figure of Sam Wisnia, its deputy CIO. Like Wisnia himself, many of Eisler's strats once worked for Goldman Sachs and, or, for Deutsche Bank. They include: Angelo Haritsis, a former Goldman managing director (MD) who ran technology at Eisler; Dan Tapson, another ex-Goldman MD Eisler's head of quantitative research; David Ford, a former Deutsche Bank MD; and Pavel Gonzalez.
Eisler's most senior strats have worked together for decades and are very loyal to Wisnia - who's rumoured to be part of an attempt to sell the fund's risk pricing system - but their numbers have swollen dramatically with new arrivals in recent years. In 2023, Eisler COO Chris Milner told us the fund had increased its strats headcount by 60% to 70 people in the previous year. Between 2023 and 2024, non-investment headcount at Eisler Capital Management Ltd went from 89 to 238 people according to recently filed accounts. Many of those new hires are likely to have been strats. Investment headcount at the fund coincidentally plummeted from 176 to 86 people over the same period. The strats seem to have been inordinately well paid: average compensation per head at Eisler was $1.1m in 2024.
Following the departure of many of Eisler's top portfolio managers, some recruiters say the strats are Eisler's most desirable employees. Others aren't so sure. Wisnia himself didn't respond to a request to comment for these articles, but speaking off the record one senior portfolio manager from a rival fund says Eisler Capital's problem was that it didn't have a proper trading culture. "Those strats are a bunch of structurers who wanted to show the traders and portfolio managers that they were better and smarter than them," he tells us. If so, that didn't seem to work so well.
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