Point72 has been ramping up junior recruitment in London

Steve Cohen might be prepping a massive new $20bn hedge fund, but the build out of his ‘family office’ Point72 Asset Management in London continues and is focusing on junior recruits.

After an initial bout of hiring portfolio managers, Point72’s London recruitment drive has more recently centred on analysts, and the bar has been unusually high. The latest junior recruits to stroll into Point72’s St James’s Square office are Ryan Fox, a former equity analyst at the UK operation of Tudor Investment Corporation, and Daniel Sepe, an analyst on the firm’s equity long short fund who joined from BNP Paribas’ equity broker Exane earlier this month.

Like most recent Point72 junior recruits in London, both Fox and Sepe have an investment banking background. Fox started out as a telecoms research analyst at Morgan Stanley, while Sepe was an associate in Macquarie’s investment banking group for three years before joining Exane.

Point72 rose from the ashes of SAC Capital Advisors following a major insider trading scandal in 2014. It has over 1,000 people globally managing $11bn of Steve Cohen’s money and relaunched its London operation last year after SAC pulled out of the UK in 2013. Initially, its recruitment drive primarily attracted former senior SAC employees who had moved on to other hedge fund roles after the office closure, but this year hiring has focused on analysts.

In April, it hired Jonathan Bensoussan, a credit trader at BlackRock who was named in Forbes’ annual 30 under 30 finance list in 2016. He also previously worked in M&A at Goldman Sachs, but is now working as an analyst on Point72’s equity long-short fund.

Meanwhile, Kim Chatall, who spent three years working in IBD at Morgan Stanley as well as spending time as a quant at Handelsbanken Capital Markets in Sweden, also joined Point72 as an analyst in February.

Steve Cohen has bemoaned the lack of talent available to hedge funds on a couple of occasions now, so has focused on hiring in juniors and training them up. Around 80% of Point72’s money managers started out as trainees. As well as the analyst recruitment, it’s also rolled out its ‘academy’ to London and received 1,500 applications last year for three-five available roles.

The best route in is internships, and Point72’s London interns have just started their summer at the firm. Fin Brown, a statistics, economics and finance student at University College London (UCL) – and who previously interned at quant fund Cantab Capital Partners – has just started at Point72, as has Farah Hamzaoui, who is also studying at UCL.

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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