Mike Platt spied hiring traders from NatWest and Nomura
Hedge fund ultra-shark Mike Platt has been adding to his family office, BlueCrest Capital Management, and there are signs of further recruits to come.
Tuo Wang, a former Nomura (and Citi) rates trader, joined BlueCrest in January as a portfolio manager after four years for the Japanese bank in Shanghai. Kunal Mistry also joined the fund in January, after 12 years in a macro trading role at NatWest.
In an apparent indication of hiring intent, BlueCrest has also hired Lewis Wrall from Meta as a global talent partner.
In an article today, Bloomberg says that Platt himself takes a keen interest in the portfolio managers he hires. Anyone wanting to work for him might want to refer to the 2012 book “Hedge Fund Market Wizards,” in which the Financial Times says Platt declared that he looked for traders who get up at “seven o’clock on Sunday morning when his kids are still in bed, and logs on to a poker site so that he can pick off the US drunks coming home on Saturday night.”
Traders in banks have good reason to work for Mike: he notoriously pays them 30% of pnl. Bloomberg reports that new portfolio managers at BlueCrest “typically start with a capital allocation between $100 million and $1 billion.”
The firm had 110 teams last year – and 17 of those teams made more than $100m in profits. But the risks are high. “If their losses reach 5%, BlueCrest typically reins in their capital,” says Bloomberg. “Such declines can lead to dismissal.”
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