Jain Global: the hedge fund hiring for July 2024
As the layoffs at Schonfeld highlighted last week, it's not necessarily easy being a multistrategy hedge fund. Even if you grow assets under management, poor returns and high people and technology costs can be your undoing. Hedge fund talent has never been more expensive, and yet one fund is out there building its team from scratch.
Jain Global is due to launch in July 2024. When it does, it's expected to have anything from $8bn to $10bn in assets under management. A New York office is already open; others are planned for London, Singapore and Hong Kong. Staff are, slowly, coming through the door.
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Jain Global currently has 12 key people on its team, some of whom have been reported previously and some of whom haven't. Robert Zellner has just joined in New York from Corbin Capital Partners as senior investment officer. In London, as we reported last week, James O'Callaghan, a 15-year veteran of UBS, has appeared as head of trading. Anton Merlushkin, the former head of quantitative analysis and technology at Credit Suisse has been added in London this month as head of quant modelling and analytics.
Zellner, O'Callaghan and Merlushkin join Jain's other nine global hires. Sam Kellie-Smith, the ex-global head of fixed income trading at Morgan Stanley is the fund's head of Asia. Paul Enright, a former Viking Global portfolio manager, is chairman of fundamental equities. Townie Wells, a former Citadel portfolio manager is chief investment officer and head of fundamental equities. Peter Bolland, the head of quantitative strategies, was last managing money for Schonfeld at Quantbot. Jaime Hobbeheydar joined as head of marketing and investor relations from Elliott. There's chief administrative officer, Thomas Levy. There's chief technology officer, Matt Croy. And there's chief strategy officer Daniel Bergelson, who was previously an AVP at Barclays.
Jain Global declined to comment for this article, but sources in the market say the fund is busy interviewing portfolio managers. The terms of Bobby Jain's Millennium contract states that he can't start managing money until July '24, so there's no immediate rush. For the moment, it's about getting the cornerstone hires in place and then adding headcount around those.
Jain also needs to build its trading infrastructure under Matt Croy, who previously spent nearly 14 years as chief information officer at Hudson Bay Capital Management in New York. There, Croy created the firmwide infrastructure. At Jain, he will need a team of technologists; Hudson Bay looks like a possible hunting ground.
Jain Capital's portfolio managers are unlikely to come cheap. Millennium in particular has a reputation for throwing huge sums at people it wants to recruit. As an unproven entity with untested technology, industry insiders say Jain will need to pay handsomely to get top people on board.
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