Bank of America poached one of Barclays' top equity algo traders

Robert DeWitt, a senior equities algo trader at Barclays in London has turned up at Bank of America.

DeWitt joined BofA this month according to his LinkedIn profile. He'll be heading BofA's quantitative strategies group for EMEA. 

Barclays didn't immediately respond to a request to comment on DeWitt's exit, which happened back in June. He spent the rest of the summer sitting out of the market on gardening leave.

DeWitt joined Barclays in Asia as head of algorithmic product development in 2010, before moving to London in 2016.

His exit from Barclays comes after the bank announced the extension of its long-established Barx trading platform to the equities business in May 2019 and said its equity quant team had doubled in size in the past 18 months. Insiders say Barclays also runs a machine learning team under Asita Anche, who joined from Goldman in 2017.

Like most banks, Barclays is cutting costs. Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Barclays has imposed a hiring freeze, however the bank denied this.

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