Ex-JP Morgan CIO credit chief appears to be running his hedge fund from a Kensington apartment

Starting a hedge fund these days is tough. The days of two guys and a Bloomberg terminal have been replaced by times when even the smallest funds are being weighed down by compliance burdens and costly tech investments.

Tolga Uzuner, the former international head of equity and corporate credit at J.P. Morgan’s chief investment office – the division at the heart of the “London whale” scandal last year – would appear to be taking an old school approach, however.

Uzuner is planning the launch of Brocade Capital Management – a non-US corporate credit hedge fund – within the next year, and is likely to have ten people on the team at launch.

He had initially based the firm on Grosvenor Crescent, within the plush managed offices associated with London’s hedge fund elite. Now, however, he’s shifted the operation to a flat in Kensington.

According to a filing on Companies House, Flat 4, 5 Kensington Park Gardens – a residential property – is the new registered office for Brocade Capital Management. We were unable to contact Uzuner for further details.

This is no pokey bedsit, however, and Uzuner is not the current owner. Benedict Thomas, who was last registered with the FSA during his role as manager of the T. Rowe Price Latin America Fund, bought the property for £1.3m in 2004. It’s now worth a cool £2.3m.

Uzuner was a managing director in J.P. Morgan’s chief investment office until April, but was not implicated in the $6.2bn losses that the bank incurred in the division last year. At Brocade he will be chief investment officer, with Stuart Firth, a former managing director and head of European distressed trading at Credit Suisse, taking the role of CEO, according to Financial News.