An ex-Goldman Sachs trader who joined Balyasny quit for Point72

Remember Balyasny? - The $12bn Chicago-based hedge fund that kept hiring juniors from investment banks throughout last year? One of the traders it recruited from Goldman Sachs is leaving for Point72 as Steve Cohen's fund continues to build its London office.

Peter Williams spent nearly seven years as an FX trader at Goldman Sachs in London after joining from the London School of Economics in 2008. He went to Balyasny in April 2015 and left again on March 2nd 2018 according to the FCA Register. Insiders say Williams is off to Point72, which is building out its London office and recently hired Aardash Malde from Tudor Capital.

Williams isn't Balyasny's only recent exit. The fund, which hired ex-Citadel executive and former Lehman head of prop trading Tim Wilkinson in February, also parted company with three other traders in June according to the FCA Register. The fund didn't respond to a request to confirm their exits.

Balyasny paid its average London employee £624k for 2016 (the last year for which pay figures are available). In a letter to investors in February 2018, founder Dmitry Balyasny said the fund lost money during last month's period of intense volatility. Balyasny previously declared his intention of making the fund into the "Amazon of hedge funds", by building a "scalable platform that can extend opportunistically into new business lines”.

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