(Bloomberg) -- Hedge fund Eisler Capital has seen a fresh round of departures as its transformation into a multistrategy hedge fund faces a period of poor returns and an intense war for talent with peers.
About 10 money managers have left the $4 billion hedge fund firm in recent days, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The exits include people leaving voluntarily as well as those the firm has dismissed, the people said, asking not to be identified because the details are private.
New York-based senior money manager Mark Mallon, one of Eisler’s first employees, has left the company along with his team. Leo Niemelainen, who joined in February, has departed along with Matt Haigh, Will Bartlett, Hardeep Jhutti and Bernd Kuhlenschmidt.
A representative for the London-based investment firm declined to comment. The money managers named in the story either didn’t respond or declined to comment.
Eisler Capital employs around 300 people globally and its hedge fund gained 0.06% through August this year, Bloomberg News has reported previously. By comparison, the PivotalPath Multi-Strategy Index, which tracks 70 hedge funds managing a combined $342 billion, has climbed 6.5%, with established peers such as Marshall Wace, Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, Walleye Capital, Point72 Asset Management, Citadel and Millennium Management outperforming many peers.
The churn at Eisler is on top of several traders who left the firm earlier this year after it largely pulled back from money-losing bets on emerging-markets interest rates and some of those departees disagreed over investment strategy with Sam Wisnia, a top deputy to founder Edward Eisler.
Among those who left in the earlier round were portfolio managers including Ying Zhang, Devvrat Tripathi and Johan Kurtz, Bloomberg News reported in May.
Founded in 2015 by Eisler, a former co-head of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s global securities unit, Eisler Capital has been transforming itself into a multistrategy hedge fund from its roots in macro trading. It shuttered its first money pool in 2022 and ditched plans to start another so it could focus on deploying teams across strategies.
Prior to the latest round of departures, Eisler had more than 60 investment teams that worked across fixed income, equity, macro and commodities strategies.
Multistrategy hedge funds are constantly engaged in an intense war for talent and frequent hiring and departures of traders are common. Yet the churn at Eisler has drawn industry attention, with some money managers stopped from trading well before reaching some loss thresholds set by the firm.
--With assistance from William Shaw.
(Updates with previous exits in eighth paragraph.)
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