Goldman Sachs managing director departs for trading role at Wells Fargo

A senior fixed income trader at Goldman Sachs in New York has left the bank and has re-emerged at Wells Fargo.

Ying Xu, a managing director at Goldman Sachs who has worked at the bank since 1998, is the latest senior trader to leave the banks’ markets division.

He signed up to Wells Fargo in August, where he is a managing director working within its markets business.

Wells Fargo, of course, is a big name in the U.S. but has traditionally made less money from investment banking activities than its rivals like Goldman, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, so Xu’s appointment is something of a coup for the bank.

Xu, who was promoted to managing director at Goldman Sachs in 2010, has worked across both fixed income currencies and commodities at the bank and specialises in interest rate derivatives and equity derivatives.

This year, Goldman Sachs has rolled out more redundancies than usual and this has often affected the senior ranks of its sales and trading teams. In May, it said that 10% of its fixed income staff would go, and has been unveiling lay offs in its New York throughout 2016.

Only two weeks ago, it said that another 15 job cuts would be rolled out before the end of the year, bringing the total number of lay offs in New York to 408.

Xu has a B.S in Physics from Peking University, and started a PhD in the subject at New York University in 1992. After initially switching to a PhD in Computer Science in 1996, he instead left the qualification for a job at Goldman Sachs in 1998. The Wells Fargo move, therefore, represents only his second job since graduation.