Gavin Colquhoun's retirement from Deutsche Bank aged 52 follows some very vintage years
No sooner did we say that experienced credit traders are slipping into the sunset, than one of the most experienced credit traders at Deutsche Bank has gone the way of the rest. 52-year-old Gavin Colquhoun is leaving Deutsche Bank after 20 years. He was head of the distressed products group, based in London, but was also appointed head of European flow trading in 2016.
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Given that Colquhoun specializes in a particularly illiquid corner of the market, his exit is unlikely to be the result of electronification. Deutsche Bank isn't commenting on the reason for his departure, but we have it on good authority that Colquhoun is retiring.
He can probably afford to.
Colquhoun worked with Chetan Shah, Deutsche Bank's distressed debt trading maestro. Also aged in his 50s but based in Singapore, Shah is one of DB's highest earners.
We didn't speak to Colquhoun for this article, but sources close to him say he earned a lot of money in the past few years while Deutsche had a good run in the distressed debt market. In 2021, Deutsche Bank's distressed team made $1bn after betting $100m on a shipping company, Zim. That bet was placed by Mark Spehn in London, a member of Colquhoun's team. The distressed credit business was a "strong" performer again last year. As we noted before, someone at Deutsche Bank earned €14m ($15m) in 2023. If it wasn't Shah, Colquhoun looks like the obvious alternative.
Insiders say Colquhoun was extremely well-liked at DB and that he will not have been ejected against his will. Instead, his departure appears to have been engineered over time. First Deutsche rehired C.J. Lanktree, its old head of US distressed trading from a hedge fund last August. Then it hired Robbie Harris from HSBC to run its team of distressed analysts. Now it's hired Frank Kotsen from BNP Paribas to replace Colquhoun, starting in November. Kotsen was at BNP for less than two years, and previously spent over 20 years in distressed credit at Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, where he was Colquhoun's counterpart at the US bank.
Headhunters say it makes sense for Kotsen to come to Deutsche now, while Shah is growing the business.
Colquhoun, however, appears to have got out while the going was good: Deutsche Bank said its distressed debt business did less well in the second quarter of 2024.
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