Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management is bulking up its macro trading teams as his stocks-focused multimanager investment firm diversifies its $31 billion hedge fund business.
Led by Mo Grimeh, the unit will soon have 51 macro trading teams with two new hires joining next year, a spokesperson said. That’s five times the size three years ago when Grimeh, former deputy global head of fixed income at Izzy Englander’s Millennium Management, joined the Stamford, Connecticut-based firm.
Charles Thorburn is joining from Caxton Associates in January to trade rates, while Ketan Gada is coming on board from Banque Pictet & Cie SA in April and will focus on emerging markets, the spokesperson said. Both will be based in London.
Macro trading is increasingly playing a bigger role at multistrategy hedge funds as economies across the world reset to higher interest rates after years of quantitative easing. That’s sparking volatility and creating a fertile ground for money managers, with billionaire investor Alan Howard predicting a great time for the strategy over the next five to 10 years during a rare public appearance in Abu Dhabi last month.
Although Point72 macro trading business was started in 2003 when the firm operated as SAC Capital Advisors, it has grown rapidly under Grimeh after he joined the firm in 2020. He has expanded the teams and upped risk-taking at Point72, making directional and relative value bets across foreign exchange, interest rates, government and corporate bonds, futures, indexes and select commodity futures markets.
The firm added eight money managers this year, taking the total number of macro teams to 49. More recently, Louis Wang joined last month in New York from Third Point to trade credit. London-based Julien Ercole, a former Barclays PLC trader, also started in November to focus on rates trading, while Julien Cheron joined this month from Carmignac Gestion. The latter is focused on foreign exchange and rates and is based in Paris.
Point72 is tapping into a hot market for traders where multistrategy hedge fund peers are ramping up recruitment amid increased demand from investors for steady returns. Those firms are vying to hire and retain senior staff, paying huge sums of money in a war for talent.
Grimeh was the COO of Silver Spike Acquisition Corp just before joining Point72. Before that, he was at Millennium Management. He previously spent about a decade as global head of emerging markets fixed income and equities at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
More than 185 teams of money managers trade for Point72. Its hedge fund returned 9.8% through November this year, said a person with knowledge of the matter.
Cohen has a net worth of about $14 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.