This hot new UK hedge fund paid its employees a mere £97k last year

Joining a start-up hedge fund is risky. Many fail, others take years to turn a profit, while some star fund managers – Chris Rokos, Edward Eisler or Edouard de Lanlade – have been hitting it out of the park in the first couple of years of operation.

Another hotly anticipated hedge fund launch in 2015 was Greenvale Capital, the $150m fund set up by Bruce Emery, a former Citadel portfolio manager who also ran his own hedge fund Naya Fund for two years.

Things don’t seem to be going so well. In recently published accounts for 2016, Greenvale revealed that it had made £52.8k profits on the back of nearly £1.4m in revenues. This is up from £17.1k in 2015. Separate figures for its LLP, which covers revenues for its senior partners, suggest a £404k loss in 2016, which is up from £778.1k in the red for the prior year. This was shared among six members

Greenvale also said that it had six employees, which it paid £586.4k – or £97.7k on average.

The hedge fund has kept headcount relatively flat since its launch and remains a small operation. Nonetheless, it’s managed to attract some names from bigger institutions.

Patrick Marx, an analyst and partner, joined from Millennium Management, and Christopher Dennis, another partner in business development, came from Deutsche Bank’s prime brokerage division.

Further down the tree, its employees include Olly Cobb, an analyst who has previously worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Kynikos Associates, research analyst Fia di Liscia, who came from AlphaSights, and Hannes Noeckler, who came from Oaktree Capital Management.

Hedge funds remain attractive to investment banks' traders, who continue to gravitate to the buy-side even if it's for a small start-up. However, 2016 was a rough year - more than 1,000 funds shuttered, according to figures from Hedge Fund Research, which is the highest number since the 2008 financial crisis. In the first half of 2017, 481 funds shut down, while 369 have been launched.

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