BlackRock’s hottest young trader has just joined Point72

How do you get noticed by Steve Cohen, the billionaire at the helm of expansionary ‘family office’ Point72 Asset Management who’s searching for scarce hedge fund talent? Being under 30 and tipped as the next hot young thing in finance certainly helps.

Jonathan Bensoussan is the latest recruit at Point72 in London, which has been expanding since relaunching its UK office early last year and poaching the best and brightest from hedge funds, investment banks and now long-only asset managers.

Bensoussan worked for BlackRock since 2014 as an investor on its credit enhanced strategies team in Europe. Last year, he was also featured as one of the 30 under 30 in Forbes’ annual finance list. He’s now working on Point72’s equity long/short fund in London.

Like a lot of recent junior recruits at Point72 in London, Bensoussan suggests that it helps to have a diverse skill-set to get picked up by Steve Cohen’s hedge fund. He started out in M&A at Goldman Sachs in 2011, before moving across to BlackRock’s credit strategy in August 2014. Now he’s working in equities at Point72.

Point72 has made a habit of hiring juniors who have a background in investment banking. Kim Chatall also joined Point72’s long/short equities team in London after more than three years working in IBD at Morgan Stanley. Before this, he’d also spent time as a quant at Handelsbanken Capital Markets in Sweden. Point72 also hired Alexander Kostyra, who was an associate in Citigroup’s M&A healthcare team, and Lexie Brackenridge, who joined Goldman Sachs' investment banking graduate programme in July last year.

Bensoussan started out in finance six years ago, and is still 29, so is a good example of how juniors are rising up the ranks quickly on the trading floors of both investment banks and hedge funds.

He’s also among good company on the 30 under 30 list, which included the likes of Darren Dixon, the 30-year-old MD in structured credit trading at Goldman Sachs, and Jonathan Birnbaum, the former chief operating officer of Morgan Stanley’s U.S credit trading group who left to start his own fintech firm earlier this year.

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com