Morning Coffee: JPMorgan trader who bought cows & donkey wants new $1․4m job. Morgan Stanley cedes to Citadel Securities

Daken Engmann's Instagram doesn't have much on it, but it doesn't look like a bad life. After leaving JPMorgan, where he was an executive director and power trader in London and Singapore, Engmann became a farmer in Ireland's Wicklow Mountains. He had 53 acres, cows, sheep and a dog. When Bloomberg last spoke to him in 2014, Engmann - then 40 - also had two donkeys. 

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Engmann spent 15 years in power trading. When he left the industry for the dog and donkeys in 2011, it was because power prices were at nine year lows. Engmann was part of a generation of traders who decided to get out. Angel Sanz, the former head of EMEA energy sales for Barclays was on the same journey. After leaving banking, Sanz was selling holiday homes with his wife in 2014. "I choose my hours and have more of a work-life balance," he duly declared. 

Times have changed. Power traders are in short supply. Sanz is back to selling energy at a company in Madrid. Hedge funds are hiring, with a focus on people who can build algorithms to trade quantitatively on the intraday market. Jonathan Funnell, a recruiter in the area, tells Bloomberg, they'll pay €200k ($230k) salaries, plus bonuses of €1m+ (depending upon profits). 

Engmann wants some of this cash. Aged 49, he went back to university in 2023 and studied a Masters in economics and data analytics at University College Dublin. Aged 51, he says he's out there interviewing for trading jobs again. 

Ironically, it was renewable energy that drove Engmann and others out of power trading jobs in 2014. And it's renewable energy that's bringing them back again. 12 years ago, Europe's five-fold surge in renewable power generation was depressing prices. Now, renewables are creating intense price volatility as wind and solar output varies by the day. Trading battery storage is the next frontier and this is what Engmann has written his thesis on. It's not clear what this means for the cows. 

Separately, Morgan Stanley has gone the way of Citi in 2020. 

When Citi pulled out of options market making for retail traders five years ago, the Financial Times said it was because the bank was unable to compete with electronic trading firms like Citadel Securities, Susquehanna and Simplex Trading in the "technology arms race." (It probably didn't help that Citi had sold its automated market making operation for equities to Citadel in 2016.)

Once Citi dropped out, the FT noted that Morgan Stanley was left as the last remaining Wall Street bank making markets in retail options. Not any more. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Morgan Stanley is closing its electronic market making unit for US options and trying to find other jobs internally for the people who work in it. 

It's the end of an era. Members of Morgan Stanley's automated market making team could always retrain in the power market. Or get themselves some cows.

Meanwhile....

State owned Chinese companies are listing frenziedly in Hong Kong. This includes the $5.2bn listing of Contemporary Amperex Technology in May. (Bloomberg) 

Citadel Securities, IMC Trading, Millennium, IMC Trading and Optiver are all hiring in India. Optiver has 70 people there and wants 100. IMC wants to go from 100 to 150. (Reuters)  

SocGen wants people back in the office four days a week. It sent a memo saying, "“I would like to inform you of the executive committee’s decision to harmonize rapidly our working from home policy within the group, on the basis of a maximum of one day per week.” (Bloomberg) 

Redinel Korfuzi and his sister were both convicted of insider dealing and money laundering. Kofurzi was accused of passing on trade information while he worked from home for Janus Henderson. (Financial Times)  

Ex-Goldman Sachs partner Stefan Bollinger is on a personal mission to meet 1,000 clients in is first year at Julius Baer. So far, he's met 500 of them. “He dramatically grew the business at Goldman [Sachs] and was generally well-liked. He is not afraid to get his hands dirty and get out of his office.” (Financial Times) 

JPMorgan is expanding its Spanish private banking team, and has hired Miriam Ordinas from Deutsche Bank. (Bloomberg) 

ABN AMRO has been hit with a $17m fine for paying bonuses to seven second tier managers between 2016 and 2024. It was prohibited from paying bonuses to the executive board after the financial crisis. (Bloomberg) 

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