UBS has just made a big algo trading hire from Goldman Sachs

Investment banks’ electronic trading businesses have turned into a recruitment merry-go-round in the past few weeks, and UBS is the latest bank to capture a major new hire.

Peter Sheridan, the former head of U.S. algorithmic trading, sales and coverage, has just been brought in by UBS to head up its electronic trading distribution team in the Americas.

Sheridan worked at Goldman Sachs for over 12 and a half years, having joined from Morgan Stanley where he was an executive director in 2005. He was promoted to managing director in 2011. We had tipped him as one of nine people to get bumped up to partner during Goldman’s bi-annual promotion cycle. Having missed out, he has now switched across to UBS in August, according to his Finra profile.

Sheridan's departure is the latest high profile move in electronic and algorithmic trading over the past few weeks. Bill Hillegrass, a managing director at Barclays in New York has just joined Bank of America as head of electronic client solutions (ECS) trading for the Americas.

Meanwhile, Asita Anche, another Goldman Sachs managing director within its quantitative and algorithmic trading team, moved across to Barclays as its new head of systematic market making, risk centralisation and data science. And Credit Suisse’s head of global electronic products, Nas Al-Khudairi left last week after more than two decades at the bank.

Despite Sheridan’s departure, Goldman Sachs has been building its electronic trading division over the past few months. It’s brought on both Timo Tatzel, a program trader from the British bank and Davinder Bedi, a special situations trader, also from Barclays.

Goldman has trebled the number of corporate bonds on its algorithmic trading platform over the past year under Konstantin Shakhnovich, its head of fixed income systematic trading. In a presentation by Goldman co-chief operating officer, Harvey Schwartz, last week it said that it expected a $500m uptick in equities revenues by improving its algorithms and also unveiled Securities Systematic Solutions – a new electronic trading platform for both equities and fixed income.

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