Bluecrest Capital Management has made a flurry of new hires in September

Since Bluecrest Capital Management took the decision to return money to clients and instead focus entirely upon managing the wealth of founder Michael Platt and its employees in December last year, key employees have departed. Now, though, Bluecrest appears to be back in expansion mode.

The hedge fund with a reputation for poaching from the trading desks of large investment banks has been hiring again – both from the sell-side and from other hedge funds. Filings with the UK's  Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) register suggest four senior traders joined in the past month.

They are: Daniel Strauss Vasques, a partner at hedge fund Spinnaker Capital Group who was also head of macro trading for EMEA and Asia; Nick Chetwynd-Talbot, a former portfolio manager at Visium Asset Management in London,  Asgar Rahemtulla, a senior credit trader at Goldman Sachs; and Michalis Kapsos, a former quantitative researcher at Commerzbank.

At the junior end, Bluecrest hired Christos Charalambous as an equity trading analyst on its graduate programme. Charalambous graduated from UCL with a first class degree in economics and achieved a distinction in the Masters programme at the London School of Economics.

After the flurry of hires in September, Bluecrest now has 133 FCA approved people working in London. This is still one fewer than December 2015.