Pay at Brevan Howard vs. pay at Eisler Capital Management

The hedge funds Brevan Howard and Eisler Capital Management have both just published accounts for 2018. As ever with hedge fund accounts, they're slightly obfuscated by a mass of related materials, but they still provide an indication of how much London's two big macro funds pay.

Brevan Howard has in fact filed an entire array of accounts with the UK's Companies House for various operating companies. These include Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP, Brevan Howard Asset Management Services, and Brevan Howard Company Secretarial Services, among others. 

The core parternship, Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP, had a good year in the year ending March 2019. Revenues rose from £66m to £141m and profits available for distribution between members (partners) rose from £17m one year earlier to £64m. Brevan Howard doesn't say how many partners it had last year, but right now it has 18. All things being equal, they got £3.5m each. A separate regulatory filing on Brevan Howard's website says it had 16 code staff during the year ending March 2019 and that they were paid a total of £59m (£3.7m each).

How about the non-partners at Brevan Howard? Brevan Howard Services paid its 51 employees and secondees a total of £7.4m in 2018, or £145k each. No accounts have been filed (sadly) for Brevan Howard's secretaries.

Eisler Capital Management also had a good year in 2018. Accounts filed for Eisler Capital Management Limited show revenues doubling (to £48m) and profits tripling (to £16m). The company employed 48 people last year, up from 26 in 2017, and paid them a total of £25m - so, an average of £511k each. The highest paid director (likely Edward Eisler himself) earned £700k for the year.

The implication is that Brevan Howard's partners are far better remunerated than Eisler Capital's directors, but obviously it's not that straightforward. Brevan Howard's partner pay figures are flattered by the fact that they only pertain to the fund's highest paid people. Eisler's best performing portfolio managers may be paid even more than its directors and the £25m Eisler paid staff will be skewed towards top performers. 

Either way, 2018 seems to have been a good time to work for either Brevan or Eisler - even though macro funds as a whole were down 3.21% last year. 2019 may be better still. After a difficult start to the year, Brevan Howard reportedly had its best first half in a decade.

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