Goldman Sachs has just made a senior electronic trading hire

Goldman Sachs is getting serious about building out its electronic trading business and has just poached a new managing director in New York.

John Cosenza, who was previously head of electronic trading at Cowen Group, the alternative asset manager and investment bank, has just signed up to Goldman Sachs as a managing director in its electronic trading division.

Cosenza is an e-trading veteran who’s been at Cowen Group for the past four years. Before this, he worked at Algorithmic Trading Management, a firm which developed custom algorithms and was acquired by Cowen Group in 2012.

Cosenza shows you don’t necessarily have to be working for a ‘big’ name in order to make into a senior role at Goldman Sachs. He has, however, previously worked in trading at both UBS and Deutsche Bank.

Goldman Sachs has been making a big push into electronic trading over the past couple of years. It hired Raj Mahajan as to lead its electronic equities business in March last year and has been hiring in senior technologists and e-trading professionals in order to play catch up with arch-rival Morgan Stanley.

More recently, it’s made another foray into attempting to electronify the corporate bond market – having shelved its previous attempt, GSessions, in 2014. The Goldman Sachs Algorithm has been active for about a year, but was rolled out on Bloomberg in July.