Zero Hedge

After Boaz Weinstein blew the place up, others are refusing to pick up the shrapnel. Bberg reports that DB's entire quant trading group, Equitech, has left to start on its own. The new fund will be called Roc Capital Management, based in NY and will be run by Arvind Raghunathan. Nicola Ralston, an advisor on investing in hedge funds points out the blatantly obvious "In this environment, it’s particularly important for individuals to have reputations in order to get access to seed money."

Some more on Equitech:

Equitech, which was part of Credit Suisse Group AG’s proprietary trading unit until 1999, returned 2.37 percent last month after posting a 1 percent loss last year. Quantitative directional funds lost 2.6 percent in January after posting a 23 percent decline in 2008, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc. in Chicago. Quantitative funds use mathematical models to pick securities to buy and sell.

Roc Capital will be supported by a team of 40 people in India who are trained by Equitech.
Raghunathan, 45, first joined Deutsche Bank in 1995, after working at Credit Suisse First Boston since 1992, according to the documents. He returned to Credit Suisse from 1997 to 1999, running a proprietary trading group, before going back to Deutsche Bank. He graduated from Indian Institute of Technology and got a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.

This is bad news for hedge fund back office ops who are apparently becoming outsourced to Calcutta.

Incidentally, if Roc is unable to raise direct capital, they should just become a managed account of Millennium Partners, which recently seems to have so much money it is seeding new hedge fund managers left and right. Lately it seems their new love is retail and consumer. Some of the never-a-down-month (we jest, the occassional one does slip here and there) fund's recent forays into Fund Of Funding include:

Robert Kim, who got $100 million from Millennium to start RDK Capital, an equity fund focused on consumer and diversified stocks. Kim previously was a consumer prop trader for RBC. Btw, Kim is looking to hire an analyst and a trader, so any unemployed lovers of Saks, Macy's and Zale's should promptly submit their resumes.
Julie Macklowe, who is launching a consumer and retail stock fund Macklowe Asset Management, and previously was a PM at SAC's Sigma Capital.
Brian Pinsker, who is launching a healthcare fund called 11:11 Capital, and was previously a prop trader at J.P . Morgan.
Jon Cheng, who is launching a retail-stock fund Overland Park, and was formerly at Perry Capital.

Our advice to these new budding hedge fund overlords: avoid the down months... Izzy is allegedly not a big fan of those. Sphere: Related Content

Bookmark this post with: