Eisler Capital hiring Deutsche Bank strats as it expands in NYC
Eisler Capital has struck again at Deutsche Bank. Around four years after Sam Wisnia left for Eisler and then poached around eight other top Deutsche Bank strats, including Angelo Haritsis, the ex-Goldman Sachs MD was in charge of Deutsche's fixed income strats function, Eisler Capital has been back for another two people.
Sources say the hedge fund has hired Dave Ford and Bruce Langham in New York City. Both men were managing directors. Langham was Deutsche Bank's global head of debt strats. Ford was head of U.S. core strats. They'd each been at DB for around six years.
Neither Deutsche Bank, Ford or Langham responded to a request to comment on the moves. Eisler Capital declined to comment.
The exits follow suggestions of disquiet in the Deutsche Bank strats team after an allegedly unedifying bonus round, which itself followed a change in reporting lines. - Strats at Deutsche Bank now report into the chief risk officer and are said (by insiders) to be considered part of the middle office instead of the front office and paid accordingly. Nonetheless, Deutsche had only lost 2% of its strats globally in April and successful hired Gurjot Singh for its London office, where sources claim staff shortages were becoming acute.
The exits of Ford and Langham in New York could signal the start of a whole new headache for Deutsche. Sam Wisnia, the ex-Goldman Sachs partner who joined Deutsche Bank in 2014, built the bank's 'Kannon' pricing, risk and P&L platform with the assistance of Haritsis, with whom he worked at Goldman Sachs. While Wisnia and Haritsis left in 2018 and took a whole load of Deutsche's U.K.-based Kannon team with them, the team in the U.S. was untouched. Until now.
Ford and Langham's departures seem to have been triggered by the fact that Eisler has only just set up a strats team in the Americas. In February, the fund poached Wen Cheng, a quantitative finance analyst from Bank of America, who says he was the fund's first quant hire in NYC. Until now, most of Eisler's NY staff have been actual portfolio managers, including its most recent PM hire Allan Levin, Deutsche's onetime head of inflation trading, who joined this month from Wellington Management, where he'd been hanging out for the past seven years.
The arrival of Ford and Langham in Eisler's New York office suggests a whole new spate of hiring may be on the cards. If so, Deutsche may come to regret the allegedly scrimpy bonuses it paid some strats for 2021.
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