As we have noted here in the past, Sam Wisnia, the deputy CIO at hedge fund Eisler Capital Management, is not always easy to work with.
Wisnia, who was a partner at Goldman Sachs and a managing director at Deutsche Bank before joining Eisler in 2018 has been described as “brilliant,” “extremely fair,” “intolerant of politics,” and “extremely inquisitive and bright,” by colleagues who are his super fans. He has also, however, been described as “brilliant but eccentric” by his mere fans, and irascible and difficult to deal with by those who’ve found themselves on the wrong side of him.
Writing today, Bloomberg suggested another crop of portfolio managers at Eisler have found themselves in the latter situation.
Bloomberg reported that Ying Zhang, Devvrat Tripathi and Johan Kurtz have left and that Sirushe Hewazy, one of the most senior emerging-markets traders, is still at the fund but isn’t trading. Some are said to have disagreed with Wisnia.
They will not be the first. All multistrategy hedge funds churn through staff, but Eisler has had various staff who have come and gone within relatively short time periods and complaints about Wisnia are not unusual. In Wisnia’s defence, though, insiders say he is simply doing what any hedge fund CIO does when people make losses and that portfolio managers don’t like this.
Eisler didn’t respond to a request to comment for this article.
Bloomberg reports that Wisnia is in favour of quantitative trading strategies, but Eisler insiders claim that following the departure of various quant portfolio managers last year, Eisler’s main quant focus is simply ex-Millennium portfolio manager Alexander Alekseev and his pod focused on systematic equities.
Wisnia’s biggest fans at Eisler tend to be the strats he works closely with, many of whom followed him from Goldman to Deutsche Bank to the hedge fund. “There is a focus on meritocracy and the intellectual honesty necessary to take what can be difficult decisions,” Eisler COO Chris Milner said last year.
While at Deutsche Bank, Wisnia famously chartered a private jet for his strats team while the then-CEO John Cryan flew commercial.
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