This Goldman MD has just quit to join a star fund manager who works from a tropical island

Will Morgan, a managing director in equity research at Goldman Sachs, has just left the U.S. investment bank to join a small investment manager run by star fund manager Terry Smith.

In another sign that senior analysts are ditching big banks for the buy-side as MiFID II regulation prepares to shake-up the way that investment banks price research, Morgan joined Fundsmith, a £11.4bn investment manager with just 16 employees in London, earlier this month.

Morgan joined Goldman Sachs' asset management graduate programme after graduating with a first class degree in economics and politics from the University of Bristol in 2000. He switched across to marketing, then sales before finally settling on equity research in its investment bank. Over the past 17 years, he's held various senior roles including co-head of insurance research and head of European construction & building materials. For the past two years, he has been deputy-head of Goldman's industrials business unit and focused on autos, aerospace and defence, capital goods, and construction and building materials.

Fundsmith is the investment manager set up by big name fund manager Terry Smith in 2010. Smith sits alongside the likes of Neil Woodford in the 'star' fund manager category that's all important for attracting assets under management when quitting big name firms to go it alone. Fundsmith's London office is in Cavendish Square in Marylebone, London and it employs around 16 people, according to the Financial Conduct Authority register. However, Smith himself is not there - he quit the City earlier this year to run his flagship Fundsmith Equity fund from the island of Maritius in order to escape the 'noise' of London.

Morgan's departure for the buy-side looks symptomatic of the MiFiD II regulations, which require investment banks to separate research costs from other trading charges and have prompted most banks to scale down their teams of analysts and focus on a few big names supported by a team of juniors. However, Goldman Sachs has been hiring in research - earlier this year it brought in Johnny Vo, a former financial institutions group investment banker at RBC Capital Markets, as a managing director in its insurance research team.

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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