19 hot hedge fund jobs are coming soon...to Paris

It is Bastille Day today in France. The French are celebrating the decapitation of Bernard-René de Launay

with a kitchen knife, and all that came after it. We are therefore unable to engage anyone in Paris to talk about what's going on in their hedge fund industry.

This is a shame, because big things are afoot there.

It emerges today, after months of fevered speculation, that Guillaume Rambourg, the former star trader at Gartmore, is opening his new hedge fund in Paris.

Even more excitingly, Financial News reports that Guillaume has hired 1 person so far (Karim Moussalem, a managing director and head of cash trading at Goldman Sachs) and that he wants to hire approximately another 19 (including operations people).

Guillaume's fund will apparently start operating in 2012 and will follow a long/short equities strategy.

The Parisian hedge fund scene has been heating up recently. Alain Demarolle has been hiring for his new fund, Alura Capital Partners. John Locke Investments and Bernheim Dreyfus & Co have opened new UCITS fund. Parisian investors are said to be particularly prepared to put up seed money for new hedge funds.

However, before anyone gets too excited, London is still the place to be.

Phil Irvine at PirHo Investment Consulting says that out of 1,600 funds in Europe, only 103 are in Paris. Worse, he says that most funds in Paris have very short redemption times - of a day or a week (compared to a month or a quarter in Mayfair). This limits Parisian funds to the pursuit of liquid strategies. You will not find many distressed debt funds in La Defense.

John Godden, from hedge fund consultancy IGS Group, says Guillaume's a bit of a one-off and there aren't any hedge funds trying to move to Paris right now. "The problem with Paris is that the employment laws are so restrictive," he says. "Once you've hired someone there you can't get rid of them."