Morning Coffee: JPMorgan's top high yield trader made a huge loss at a hedge fund. Citigroup's other ranking of female graduates
As we noted last week, the signature move for traders in 2024 might not be to leave a bank for a hedge fund, but to go the other way. Ben Hutson did it at Barclays, and now maybe Bhavit Sawjani will be doing something similar at JPMorgan.
Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.
Sawjani, who graduated from the UK's Warwick University in 2003, spent nearly 17 years at JPMorgan before leaving in 2019. During that time, insiders say he was the bank'stop high yield credit trader, and that his departure was therefore a blow.
Sawjani left initially for GoldenTree Asset Management, where he spent two and a half years, but in July 2022 he moved to Dubai with ExodusPoint to become head of the local office. There, things seem to have come undone.
Bloomberg reports that Sawjani and his six person ExodusPoint team lost more than $70m late last year. ExodusPoint's spokesperson declined to comment to Bloomberg, and Sawjani didn't respond to its attempts to get in touch.
Presuming that Sawjani did lose $70m, his next move is unclear. When portfolio managers make large losses at hedge funds, it's not the same as traders making large losses at banks. As former hedge fund PM Brent Donnelly has pointed out, “If you lose $10m in a bank, you go back to zero the next year, and you can get a bonus again,” but “if you lose 1% [at a hedge fund], you need to make more than 1% to get back to flat.”
If Sawjani wants to keep his ExodusPoint position, he therefore has an uphill struggle first to make good the loss and then to make a profit in 2025. Neither may be possible: Bloomberg says his «crew has been disbanded» and that he's been stopped from trading. There's always JPMorgan instead.
Separately, one of the most troubling of all
Read more on efinancialcareers.com
