Want to work for the hottest new hedge fund in Paris?
Remember Maxime Kahn? He's the star ex-SocGen trader who unwound Jerome Kerviel's €70bn of trades in 2008. He's also the ex-head of equity flow trading for Europe. And he's the man who left SocGen last November with the promise of setting up a new hedge fund. That hedge fund has just surfaced. It's called One Eleven Capital and is based in Paris's 2nd arrondissement.
Kahn's delay can be attributed to SocGen's punitive notice periods, which mandate that anyone leaving has to spend five months out of the market. The French bank can be flexible on this, but in Kahn's case it seems to have enforced the full term. One Eleven's only other current employee - chief technical officer Bruno Belmondo, also from SocGen, seems to have been subject to the same conditions after leaving the bank (where he was technical leader of the equity finance trading system) in December.
One Eleven describes itself as a, "a quantitative hedge fund start-up," launched, "by very experienced people gathering their skills to deliver strong performance with low volatility. " It says it will invest in equities and listed derivatives, and promises, "pure alpha creation with no market exposure."
There's no sign of additional hiring at One Eleven, but it's almost certainly happening. Last November Kahn told Bloomberg that he intended to launch the fund in the third quarter of this year with 10 staff and €400m of assets under management He added that he will combine quant strategies with fundamental analysis and that his recruits will come from, "a lot of different horizons."
SocGen seems Kahn's most obvious hunting ground. He spent twenty years at the bank, trading equities and derivatives, and knows the equities business inside out. There's a strong chance that any senior equities people who've quit SocGen in the past six months will turn up in the 2nd arrondissement soon. Equities traders and researchers from elsewhere might want to preemptively get in touch.
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com
Photo credit: Paris, Quartier Latin by Luc Mercelis is licensed under CC BY 2.0.