This hot new $750m macro hedge fund has just poached from Brevan Howard

One of the hottest macro hedge fund launches of 2017 has continued its recent hiring spree by poaching a portfolio manager from Brevan Howard in London.

Amia Capital, which launched with $750m in assets under management this summer, has just hired Karsten Filt, a portfolio manager at Brevan Howard who only signed up to Alan Howard’s firm in September last year.

Filt, who left Brevan in June, joined Amia as a portfolio manager in late September. Amia is the macro hedge fund set up by Antoine Estier, the former chief investment officer at BTG Pactual’s macro fund and three other founding partners: chief executive Igor Hordiyeyych, and portfolio Alex Garrad and Marat Djafarov. It spun out of BTG, and has largely been hiring from the Brazilian financial services firm, with 12 of its expected 20 staff coming from Estier’s former employer.

Filt also has a BTG Pactual connection. He joined the firm from Credit Suisse in October 2015, but spent just four months there before departing in February 2016 for Brevan Howard. BTG made some big headcount cuts last year – with headcount shrinking from 66 to 32 in the space of a month in March last year.

Estier’s firm has been hiring from other hedge funds too. Most recently, it brought in Pierre-Antoine Cousin, a former portfolio manager at BlueCrest Capital Management, who joined as a PM focused on equity derivatives in July. This follows the appointment of Ronan Cantwell, who joined from BlueCrest as chief risk officer in February.

Amia leased an office on King Street, London in the heart of the traditional hedge fund land of St James’s Square, Mayfair at a time when a number of other buy-side firms are moving to cheaper parts of the capital to cut costs.

Contact for news, tips and comments: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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