Balyasny hired the former head of Citadel's data strategies group
As we've previously noted, data specialists are in high demand among hedge funds and trading firms. Balyasny is no exception; it just hired a quant who previously led one of Citadel's data analysis teams.
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Halla Yang joined the hedge fund this month as a senior quant researcher based in Chicago. He was at Citadel for eight years, spending five of them as co-head (then sole head) of its data strategies group. Citadel's website says this team "focus[es] exclusively on alternative data rather than traditional market data;" it uses AI to analyze messy data like satellite imagery, providing analysis to the fund's investment teams. Yang left Citadel in April 2025 and appears to have been sitting out a non-compete prior to joining Balyasny.
Before Citadel, Yang worked across a variety of companies. He was a data scientist at McKinsey, a quant researcher at Jump Trading and a VP at Goldman Sachs. Yang is also a competitions grandmaster on competitive data analysis platform Kaggle; there are just 407 of these in the world.
Obtaining insights from unusual data sources can be trickier than it sounds. Earlier this year, a member of Jane Street's alternative data team said that satellite imagery of Walmart parking lots, the most famous alt data example, is "really indirect," showing you only how many people showed up rather than how much they're spending.
In London, Balyasny added to its tech team by hiring Chris Norman to work on systematic infrastructure. He spent the last eight years in crypto; he was head engineering at crypto trading firm GSR and a tech lead at crypto exchange Blockchain.com. Before that, Norman was a team lead at Sun Trading, the electronic market maker acquired by Hudson River Trading in 2018.
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