Hedge fund Brevan Howard's equities business is thriving despite something unusual
Hedge fund Brevan Howard has said goodbye to one of its recently recruited macro portfolio managers after a year, but maybe that's ok, because its equities business is compensating.
Bloomberg reported yesterday that John Curtice, a macro trader known for high conviction leveraged bets, who joined Brevan in Geneva in February 2025, has left again. It's not clear what Curtice's intentions are or why he's gone.
The departure of another major macro trader may not matter, though. Bloomberg also reported this month that profits linked to equities trading have helped offset losses in Brevan Howard's rates and currencies business. As a result, Bloomberg said Brevan Howard's Master Fund was up 3.7% through to May 15th, while its BH Alpha Strategies Fund was up 4.2% over the same period.
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Brevan Howard has been trading equities for 20 years, but the fund has expanded in the area recently. It operates an unusual equities set up. Unlike rival funds, Brevan Howard doesn't have a head of equities. Instead, its recent equities success appears attributable to star portfolio manager, Fash Golchin. This is even though Golchin has historically specialised in multi-asset macro trades.
Brevan does, however, have a significant equities specialist in its arsenal. Abhijit Chakrabortti, joined in January 2023 and is based in the Abu Dhabi office. Chakrabortti was formerly a researcher and managing director at Duquesne, the family office of Stan Druckenmiller. Before that, he was a global equities strategist at JPMorgan and at Morgan Stanley.
Brevan Howard declined to comment for this article. Over the past year and a half, Bloomberg said Chakrabortti has built a team of 'equity sector specialists' that filter trade ideas to Brevan's portfolio managers. It's not clear whether he was behind this month's arrival of Christoph Brinkmann, an emerging markets equities portfolio manager, who just joined from BlackRock in London.
Brevan's equities trading success comes as Business Insider reported yesterday that the future of Jain Global's fundamental equities business is being evaluated. Jain is returning capital to investors and preparing to manage money exclusively for Millennium.
Unlike Brevan, Jain does have a head of equities in the form of Townie Wells, who joined the fund from Citadel's equities business in October 2024. At Jain, Wells is thought to have built out an equities trading business with pods run by portfolio managers for each key sector vertical. Business Insider says four of them (Michael Scheer, Costas Constantinides, Evan Fiedler and Niels Heilmann( have left. Wells appears to be waiting for a decision about his own role. Jain Global declined to comment. Maybe Wells should approach Brevan instead?
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