Top portfolio manager wisely disappeared from London hedge fund in February
As markets buck wildly, one veteran London hedge fund trader is not straddling them. Neil Smith quietly left ExodusPoint's London office in February.
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Smith has been around. He joined RBS in 2002 after graduating from Edinburgh University and worked for the ill-fated Scottish bank on its once enormous Stamford trading floor during the financial crisis. He then joined Millennium's London office and became a senior partner for six years.
Smith was said to have been one of Millennium's top London portfolio managers, but he quit to join ExodusPoint in 2018. Now he's gone again.
Smith is a relative value trader, meaning that he arbitrages price discrepancies between historically correlated securities. There have been plenty of these discrepancies this week, meaning that Smith could have made - or lost - a lot of money were he still in his seat.
It's not clear what Smith - who is thought to be aged in his mid-40s - is doing next. ExodusPoint declined to comment. He may find himself in demand: after this week's ructions, it's thought that large hedge funds will need to clear out everyone with significant drawdowns and find some new staff.
Smith was a partner at ExodusPoint. In 2023, nine partners at the fund shared £79m ($103m) in profit.
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