Morning Coffee: The eccentric guy running Jane Street. Citi's banker comings and Citi's banker goings
It was already well known that Rob Granieri, the 53-year-old billionaire running Jane Street, is not like Jamie Dimon, the 70-year-old billionaire running JPMorgan or David Solomon, the 64-year-old multimillionaire running Goldman Sachs. Granieri is younger; he has hair down to his waist; he likes Metallica and attends Burning Man. Dimon and Solomon are uptight in his shade. Granieri is probably not a fan of euphoric house music.
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As Jane Street succumbs to scrutiny in the wake of its $15bn loss in July, Granieri is in the limelight. This time he is not dancing in a shiny jacket and fedora.
Described last year by Bloomberg as a shy introvert and the sort of person you might encounter on a park bench reading Shakespeare, Granieri is the centre of Jane Street's universe, says the Financial Times. âAs much as they like to pretend heâs not the guy, heâs the guy,â one person familiar with Jane Street told the FT. There's no CEO at Jane Street, but Granieri is the last of the four founders still at the firm. Persons told the FT he is Jane Street personified.
Despite this, Granieri doesn't seem to be standing up in front of his people and giving motivational townhall speeches. People at the firm apparently don't all know who he is. Sometimes they speak to him without comprehending his centrality. When Jane Street lost the $15bn someone called Turner Batty messaged the Jane Street staff to point out that it had been a "bad month."
Granieri is not, however, without some flexes. When it's a company dinner, the FT says he might order steak for dessert. Or he might order the whole meal again. He likes fine dining. He likes to eat at Le Bernardin in New York. His parents ran a banquet hall called Chateau Granieri in Norristown Pennsylvania.
Bloomberg reported previously that Granieri was careful with his early career. He was offered a job cold-calling and pitching stocks but he turned that down. He got a job at Susquehanna International Group after printing out resumes and dropping them off at tall buildings in Pennsylvania. He was making $700k at SIG aged 27, but he didn't like a middle manager there and so he left and founded Jane Street instead with two colleagues and one other.
Those colleagues were Mike Jenkins and Tim Reynolds. Reynolds was nearly paralyzed in a crash after a Jane Street party and left Jane Street in 2012. Reynolds now runs private resorts. Jenkins left and walks a pot-bellied pig in a Manhattan park.
Only Granieri is still around. Bloomberg said he avoids long vacations and stays online until odd hours. Sometimes he buys a smart outfit for a client meeting. The FT says he is an oddball with a formidable intellect. He likes casinos and Jane Street's trading floor has been gamified with animal noises and more. Other people seem to like this too. âItâs just recruiting,â one former Jane Street employee told the FT. âThey hire the best people in the world for what they do and they donât fuck that up.â
Sounds great. Granieri isn't immune to mistakes though. He was once conned by a former nun with lavish spending habits. He was once duped into funding an alleged coup in South Sudan. He is partial to 24-year-old hedge fund wunderkind Leopold Aschenbrenner and attended Aschenbrenner's big wedding earlier this month. Jane Street also invested $2.5bn in Aschenbrenner's fund. The $2.5bn became $10bn and then shrunk to $3bn in July. Granieri is still up. It may be too early to have a steak dessert to celebrate.
Separately, Citi needs more bankers because Citi says it has 100 fewer managing directors than rival banks at the 75th centile of its "core peer group".
Citi has been hiring some new MDs, but it's also been losing them. Financial News says Citi hired Bhavin Dixit, a technology media and telecoms (TMT) banker at HSBC in London who weirdly survived last year's HSBC cull. This follows the hiring of five other TMT bankers in the US and various hires from Deutsche Bank and elsewhere.
However, Citi is leaking bankers too. In the US, Dan McDow has gone to JPMorgan to run East Coast M&A. In London, TMT banker Robert Farrington left in May. Also in London, head of asset management M&A Hamish Summerfield is off to Perella Weinberg.
Revenues in Citi's M&A business were up only 7.4% in the first half of this year. That compared to over 60% at Bank of America, Barclays and Morgan Stanley. The implication is that Citi is losing market share. It may need to hire some more bankers yet.
Meanwhile...
Citadel Securities tripled its trading revenues to $7.3bn and made $2.2bn of income. (Bloomberg)
Dorothee Blessing, the co-head of investment banking at JPMorgan, says she's hiring bankers too, particularly for technology, healthcare and financial sponsors teams. (Financial News)
Millennium wanted to hire Tang Lin, a portfolio manager from Dymon Asia. She accepted a job offer. Then she changed her mind. Now Millennium wants $2.5m to cover its costs of preparing to hire her. (Bloomberg)
Simon Costello was a senior FX options trader at Goldman Sachs. He left for hedge fund Balyasny and worked there for nine months before returning to Goldman. (IFR)
The coroner found that the UK Treasury âmaterially contributedâ to the death of a 26-year-old personal assistant who took her own life after facing disciplinary proceedings. She attended an informal meeting and then had her job responsibilities temporarily changed and her access to the diary of her manager removed. She was convinced she was going too lose her job, even though this wasn't the case. (BBC)
Consultants want everyone back in the office because they say AI made interpersonal skills more valuable. (FT)
Jes Staley is surprised about Jeffrey Epstein. âYou know, you can go to jail forâ.â.â.âa year and youâve been convicted of abusing minors, itâs just incredible to me that he would continue to do it after he got out of jail.â (FT)
Stephen Miran declares the US treasury market is fine. "The recent increase in bond yields is therefore almost entirely due to higher expected overnight rates over the long term. In other words, investors are marking up their expectations for long-run economic growth, not becoming concerned over central bank or fiscal credibility. The market could be recognising that AI, deregulation and better tax policy are turbocharging the American economy." (FT)
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