Citadel poaches from Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan once again

Citadel has returned to form and started hiring from Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan as it continues to build its London operation.

Volkan Dikman, an executive director focused on emerging markets fixed income trading at Goldman Sachs, has just joined Citadel as a portfolio manager in London. Meanwhile, Ben Scarlett, who was a VP within J.P. Morgan’s European chemicals equity research division, has been hired into Citadel’s global equities team.

Citadel has been adding employees sporadically throughout 2016 for its London office. As we pointed to previously, around 20% of its UK-based employees hail from Goldman Sachs, and it’s also been tapping large banks like J.P. Morgan or big buy-side players such as Brevan Howard.

Dikman certainly fits the mould of the usual Citadel recruit. He has a Masters in Accounting and Finance from the London School of Economics and spent six years working at Goldman Sachs before moving across in July. Previously, he was a director in the emerging markets group at Credit Suisse and also worked as a fixed income trader at HSBC.

Scarlett has a more unconventional background. He started out as a fluid dynamics engineer at automotive firm Delphi before moving across to Grant Thorton, where he spent two years. He graduated from Loughborough University in 2009.

His only investment banking job is at J.P. Morgan, where he spent nearly four years before joining Citadel in July.

Citadel has made other recent hires in London including Christian Hess, a machine learning specialist who joined from Deutsche Bank in June and Raghav Subbarrao, who joined from Millennium Capital Partners, but was also previously chief of FX options strategy at Barclays.