Goldman Sachs' ex-head of front office strats joined Balyasny
Gabriele Sarais is not a person who likes to hang around in a job. He is, however, a person who likes to have a succession of jobs at top employers. In the past few years, Sarais has had four of them.
His latest is at Balyasny Asset Management, the multistrategy hedge fund that's performing worse than some rivals (Citadel) but hiring heavily nonetheless.
Sarais has joined Balyasny in London as co-head of macro risk and risk advisory. He comes from hedge fund LMR, where he worked for just under three years. Before that, he was at Citadel for a similar amount of time and before that he spent just over a year at Goldman in London as head of front office strats.
As we noted last month, Balyasny has been adding portfolio managers despite its comparatively diminutive returns. Edouard Baldini, a long/short equity PM joined from Point72 in July. Ankur Dhingra joined from JPMorgan in August, as did David Hill, an energy PM from Hartree Partners.
Most of all, though, Balyasny's London office has been hiring technologists and data specialists to work on its systems under Mike Grimaldi, the CTO whom it hired from JPMorgan in 2021 and who's based in London. Grimaldi's recent hires include Shripad Nayak, a software engineer from Nomura, Vinod Kumar, a senior develop from Insight Development, Stefan Petrov, a data engineer from Meta, Anish Kumar, a cloud engineer from AWS, Christian Glenn, a data engineer from Shell and and Brendan Jackson, a macro data engineer from Schroders. All have joined in the past few months alone.
Macro strategies are underperforming this year, and there are signs that banks are upgrading their PMs. Schonfeld recently hired a New York-based macro portfolio manager from Eisler, for example.
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