Morning Coffee: Credit Suisse’s star 29-year-old trader discovers a new dimension. Morgan Stanley CEO says the deals recovery will be someone else’s problem.
It’s good to know that somewhere out there, there’s a guy in a t-shirt looking to reinvent the banking system. No, not Sam Bankman-Fried – former Credit Suisse trader Hamza Lemssouguer, whose fund Arini Capital is now proposing to make short term loans to companies with liquidity needs.
This used to be called “overdrafts” or “corporate banking”, and was something done by middle aged middle managers in a branch office in Lille – today it’s a “credit opportunities strategy” for a private credit fund and it’s the hottest new dimension in hedge funds. Hamza Lemssouguer explained the details in an interview, apparently while wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt saying “It’s all going to be okay”.
Lemssouguer has been spotting opportunities like this for a while now. He was the wunderkind of Credit Suisse, back when that was a big deal – in 2020, he generated $120m of profits on their junk bond desk single-handedly at the age of 29. He was going to launch a fund under the umbrella of Credit Suisse Asset Management in 2021, but that wasn’t a great year for the brand, and so Arini (named after a kind of parrot, apparently) was one of the biggest launches last year. So far, his t-shirt slogan seems to have been an understatement.
How do you get a job at Arini? Definitely, make sure you can speak French. Hamza Lemssoguer is an Ecole Polytechnique graduate, and seems to have surrounded himself with other high-flying French traders. He's not forming a clique of Polytechnique alumni in the way that “les X” are often accused of doing – Ardacan Celebi went to the Ponts et Chaussees, while Jeysson Abergel graduated from the relatively “petit ecole” ISC Paris. But if you look at the employees on thecompany LinkedIn page, you see a
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