(Bloomberg) — Hedge fund Walleye Capital has cut about a dozen jobs, including the role of head of equity capital markets, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
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The majority of the affected employees are members of the firm’s investment team and include senior portfolio manager Michael Martin, who oversees ECM, and portfolio managers Lawrence Hurvich and Jerry Siliverdes, who focused on special purpose acquisition companies, said the person, who asked not to identified discussing confidential information.
The total includes two people impacted by the closing of Walleye’s Houston office.
The departing employees represent less than 3% of Walleye’s risk exposure, and the strategies being removed are deemed largely nonessential — though the firm plans to add a new ECM head in coming months, the person said.
A spokesperson for Walleye declined to comment.
The multistrategy Walleye Opportunities Fund, with about $4.6 billion of assets, projects a net gain of 7.3% to 7.7% through the first seven months of the year, according to the person and preliminary returns seen by Bloomberg. Walleye said in a separate letter to clients that it has paused accepting new commitments for that fund until at least the end of this year.
The firm had $6.7 billion of assets under management at the end of July.
“Given the turnover which Walleye has proactively and positively undertaken over the past 12 months, we are clearly very focused on selection,” Chief Executive Officer Will England said in the letter. “We are unapologetically pursuing the best individuals we can find to fill the seats in our boat, keeping in mind that the number of seats is fixed.”
England, who’s also chief investment officer, said the firm doesn’t expect to have as much turnover in the firm’s senior ranks going forward as it has in the past year.
The firm hired Balyasny Asset Management veteran Anil Gondi as head of its equity long-short business, Bloomberg reported last month. About a third of the firm’s 340 employees are based in New York.
Walleye has hired Bryan Wren and Brian Czenszak as portfolio managers focused on industrials and consumer companies, respectively. Wren starts this week while Czenszak starts in October, and both were most recently at Point72 Asset Management, the person said. A Point72 representative declined to comment.
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