Brevan Howard hired a quantum entanglement specialist and lost a senior FX trader to Lloyds

If you aspire to get a job at one of the world's biggest and highest paying hedge funds, Brevan Howard should probably be on your list. The London-based fund ranks third globally in terms of size, with $40bn in assets under management according to Institutional Investor. Founder Alan Howard is the richest hedge fund manager in the UK, with net worth of £1.6bn according to the Sunday Times.  

Unfortunately, Brevan Howard isn't a big hirer of financial services talent. Having moved many of its traders to Switzerland in 2013, it only has 76 registered employees in London now - and as we've noted before, when it does venture to hire, the fund tends to go for highly elite, highly quantitative students from top universities in the U.K.

So far this year, Brevan Howard has added just one new member of registered staff in London according to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Stuart Broadfoot, a former Oxford PhD with a Masters in maths from Cambridge, fits the caricature of Brevan's quantitative hires exactly. Broadfoot, who joined in February, is a self-proclaimed expert in 'quantum entanglement over large distances.' Prior to arriving at Brevan Howard, Broadfoot said his expertise was perfect for use in, 'distributed quantum computing.'

As well as hiring super-elite quantitative types, Brevan Howard has a reputation for parting company with people who don't perform. Since January, four registered staff have left the firm according to the FCA. It's not clear whether they left voluntarily, and Brevan Howard declined to comment on the departures.

One of Brevan Howard's exes, James Binny, left in January 2014 and started at Lloyds in March 2014. At Brevan, Binny was a senior FX execution trader. At Lloyds, he's head of FX quantitative solutions. This looks like a promotion - except Lloyds is a nationalized bank which has been hiring but isn't usually at the top of ex-hedge funders' employment wish lists.

Other recent Brevan exits include Christopher Bickell, who went to Prologue Capital, Bernard O'Reilly, who went to BlueCrest and Christopher Rokos - one of Brevan's founders who supposedly left in 2012, but has only just officially checked out, seemingly to help launch boutique brokerage firm Prism Financial Products. As we noted last week, Prism has been hiring. If you're not a super-quantitative PhD but want to work with one of Brevan's former top traders, Prism could be a good career bet.

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