Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs traders keep on leaving for hedge funds. Don’t quit, go part time
Traders don’t want to work for Goldman Sachs any more. This isn’t a statement of fact, but it’s a fair supposition based upon the facts: Goldman traders keep leaving for hedge funds.
The latest exit is 35 year-old Mitesh Parikh, the London-based former head of European spot FX trading, whom The Wall Street Journal reports is quitting for an (unnamed) hedge fund. Parikh had been at Goldman for 12 years and his departure at this juncture reportedly has nothing to do with ongoing investigations into FX fixing. In fact, it looks like the continuation of a trend – as we reported last week, hedge fund Tudor Investment Corporation just hired Robert Gold, an ex-Goldman MD who left the bank in April 2013. Earlier this year, Nick Bhuta, then-head of euro governments bond trading at Goldman also quit for Tudor. Add in ex-Goldman executive directors like Nabil Kobeissi who are quitting to (optimistically) set up their own funds, and it looks like hedge funds continue to exert a pull for banks’ traders, even if there are doubts about their business model.
Separately, some people who quit finance have a fine time. Take this ex-Morgan Stanley derivative saleswoman who went to work for Playboy as an executive chef and is now “following her passion” by opening a restaurant in London. Or take Kevin Rogers, ex-head of FX trading at Deutsche Bank, who quit after 15 years in June and is now happily pursuing a career singing in operettas. Mohamed El-Erian doesn’t seem to fall into that category. Having escaped Pimco in June because he decided it was more important to ‘be a good dad than to be a good investor’, El-Erian seems to have reached the conclusion that the two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive and that he could maybe have simply gone part time. “Was there a way of not going 100 miles an hour and maybe going 50 miles an hour? To be perfectly honest, I didn’t explore that option. I never explored it,” he reflects during an interview with Reuters.
