Bluecrest Capital Management is still hiring from struggling banks

Bluecrest Capital Management's expansion in London is back on, and it's targeting investment banks' trading divisions again.

The latest recruit at Bluecrest is Emmanuel Kreutzberger, who was previously head of European index and equity products at Commerzbank. Kreutzberger joined the German bank in July 2011, having previously worked as a proprietary trader on BNP Paribas' merger and special situations desk. He joined Bluecrest earlier this month as a portfolio manager. 

Kreutzberger is not the only Commerzbank employee to join Bluecrest this month. Philippe Mereb, a vice president in securities finance and corporate equity, who also spent some time working at BNP Paribas, signed up to the hedge fund earlier this month. 

November is, of course, a strange time of the year to move as a trader because it means that any bonus accrual is lost. However, Commerzbank is rapidly scaling back its investment bank as it continues to lay off employees across all its divisions. In late September, it said that a further 9,600 staff were set to go across the bank and that it would shrink its investment bank further.

This is part of a broader retrenchment from London by Commerzbank, which relocated around 400 jobs to Germany at the beginning of 2015, when Brexit was only a distant possibility.

For Bluecrest, this is another indication that it's back to aggressive recruitment after a period laying fallow in 2016. Bluecrest's expansion stalled in 2015 - headcount went from 451 people to 426, according to its latest accounts for the year published on Companies House last month.

However, in September it made a flurry of new hires, and has been bringing in traders and portfolio managers since then. Michalis Kapsos, a former quantitative researcher also from Commerzbank joined then, as did Asgar Rahemtulla, a senior credit trader at Goldman Sachs.

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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