Singapore's most alluring family office is hiring traders
BlueCrest, Mike Platt’s family office that looks suspiciously like a hedge fund wearing a disguise, is picking up traders again. This time, it seems to be expanding its reach in Asia – and Singapore, specifically.
Its latest recruits include Akihiro Konishi, a former macro trader at Garda Capital Partners. Konishi spent five years at Deutsche Bank, trading Japanese Government bonds and the Yen. He moved from Tokyo to Singapore for Garda and is a portfolio manager in the city for BlueCrest, too.
Punit Kaji, meanwhile, joined BlueCrest in Singapore from Dymon Capital Asia, where he spent three years. He was at Standard Chartered for nearly a decade before that and was the bank’s head of foreign exchange cash trading in the city. Curiously, he’s a senior portfolio manger at BlueCrest.
Also joining is Arvind Agarwal. Agarwal spent five years at Nomura as an FX trader before joining BlueCrest, and ten years before that for Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong as a rates and currencies trader for the latter.
Being a portfolio manager at BlueCrest is, by all accounts, a highly lucrative job. Whilst banks pay around 5% of profit generated (known as PnL) to traders as a bonus, and regular hedge funds pay around 15-20%, BlueCrest pays a comparatively astronomical 30%. New PMs are typically set up with around $100m to $1bn in capital allocations.
Not bad work if you can get it.
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