Millennium won’t stop poaching sell-side quants

Millennium Management has hired another veteran quant, continuing the recent trend of hedge funds picking off senior sell-side trading talent before the end of the year. Grigor Peradze joined Millennium in New York this month as the head of equity derivatives research.

The hire is the latest example of hedge funds poaching from investment banks in just the last few weeks. At least two managing directors and one executive director at Goldman Sachs departed for roles at hedge funds in September. This includes Dan Cleland-James, the former head of synthetics and quant sales, who also left for Millennium. Lifelong sell-side quant trader Derrick Li joined Millennium in August.

And earlier this month, Laurent Henrio, the former global head of credit trading at SocGen, left the French bank for Axiom Alternative Investments. Corrado Giovanelli, a former managing director at Credit Suisse, recently quit the Swiss bank to join hedge fund Incus Capital.

The hiring of Peradze, Cleland-James and Li come at an interesting time for Millennium as the hedge fund recently partnered with Neil Chriss, founder of now-defunct hedge fund Hutchin Hill Capital. Chriss officially joined Millennium this month to build up a new quant trading business. While it’s unclear if the three new hires are reporting directly to Chriss, Millennium is certainly stocking up on veteran quants.

Peradze himself is a life-long sell-side quant, cutting his teeth at Lehman Brothers before stints at Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and UBS, according to LinkedIn. He spent the last nine months as a director at Wells Fargo before joining Millennium. Peradze has his PhD in physics from Yale University and had his dissertation on string theory published in 2003.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: btuttle@efinancialcareers.com

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by actual human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t).