Morning Coffee: Chirayu Rana wants to go the whole way with JPMorgan. When Citadel and Millennium think you are hot

When we said, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, that Chirayu Rana - the former JPMorgan senior vice president (SVP) accusing a colleague of making him her sex slave - wanted $12m from JPMorgan, it turns out that we were wrong. We can now say, courtesy of the WSJ, that what Rana really wants may be more like $22m. 

This has not been confirmed by Rana's attorney, who didn't respond to multiple requests to comment on this article. But the WSJ cites 'people familiar with the matter' as stating that Rana's representative requested a $22m settlement from JPMorgan one year ago in May 2025. This was after he first filed his complaint at JPMorgan citing sexual assault and race based harassment involving Laura Hadjdini, a female executive director (ED) at the bank.

Hadjini has strongly denied Rana's claims which her lawyer says are "entirely fabricated." JPMorgan has denied them too. The bank says it investigated thoroughly and found no evidence of their validity. Despite this, JPMorgan offered Rana $1m to settle in March 2026, ostensibly to protect Hajdini from his lurid accusations becoming public. Rana countered asking for $12m. JPMorgan didn't pay. Now Rana is going the whole way. To court. 

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The WSJ says both sides are gearing up to go to trial. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for May 2026.

Rana's attorney, Daniel Kaiser has represented multiple women with legal cases against Jeffrey Epstein. Kaiser is not thought to work for contingency fees (Kaiser didn't respond to a request to comment on his fee structure). The costs for Rana, who was reportedly earning less than $500k at JPMorgan, could be high. 

As the case continues, Kaiser has suggested that evidence favourable to Rana will emerge. Kaiser told the New York Post last week that the publication will be "embarrassed" by its reporting in favour of Hadjdini once the full evidence comes to light. “We look forward to the truth and facts coming to light through court proceedings,” Kaiser told the WSJ in an article published at the weekend. 

In the interim, the WSJ has done some digging of its own. After speaking to Rana's former colleagues, the WSJ claims that Rana was driven, ambitious, good at bringing in new business and not afraid to disagree with team members. He could allegedly be socially gauche. Kaiser said: “we categorically reject these claims as false and another attempt to smear my client in the press.” By comparison, the WSJ says Hadjdini was a model employee at JPMorgan and that she played an active role in encouraging more women to work in finance.

People at JPMorgan are said to be shocked by the claims against Hajdini. The WSJ has seen screenshots and says that Rana and Hadjdini exchanged friendly text messages. It has not seen messages stating things like: "Never forget, I own you," which Rana alleges he was sent and which Hajdini strenuously denies sending him. 

One of Rana's friends told the WSJ that Chirayu Rana is actually an outgoing person with a "quick, dry sense of humour." Whether he elicits a large sum from JPMorgan or not, he will need to tolerate a lifetime of salacious comments about the case he's currently bringing to court. 

Separately, Rana may know what it's like to be the subject of thousands of AI videos and internet memes, but he will never know what it's like to be wanted by both Citadel and Millennium simultaneously. 

New York-based Pablo Duran Steinman knows what this is like. Having left multistrategy hedge fund ExodusPoint and spent the past year on a non-compete coincident with fatherhood, with the intention of joining multistrategy hedge fund Millennium, Duran Steinman has reportedly decided to join Citadel instead.

Neither Millennium nor Citadel nor Pablo are commenting, but Bloomberg says Millennium was gazumped by Citadel, implying that Citadel proffered a larger package. Either way, he also got to spend up to a year with his child.

Meanwhile...

Hedge fund manager David Einhorn is having a party. He wants the women in "sexy party clothes". The men are not governed by similar criteria. (FT Alphaville) 

A recently divorced billionaire hedge fund co-founder met a Chinese entrepreneur on LinkedIn. She invited him back to her place. Then she allegedly tried to extort $1bn from him by threatening to publish videos of their exploits. (WSJ) 

Goldman Sachs insiders say its management committee has become "incredibly bloated" now that it has 47 people. It had 24 at the start of 2025. One in every 10 partners is on it. JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have 13 members on their operating committees. (FT) 

Commerzbank wants to cut 3,000 jobs and to double profits by 2020. Unicredit this it needs to make 5,000 cuts or maybe 7,000 if it merges with Commerz. (Bloomberg) 

Arun Dhar, former Head of Eisler Capital USA is a truly rare and brilliant person, says this interviewer who seems very partial to him. "With his unique multidisciplinary background, Arun has developed an investment strategy that is structurally uncorrelated to pod-like idiosyncratic alpha and has low correlation to short-term momentum."  (PhoenixLearning) 

A former UBS equities director with a Substack says the new frontier for AI skills will be understanding how to solve problems with the appropriate number of tokens. "A routine check on a mature, low volatility company which is currently a small weighting in a portfolio might be monitored cheaply and continuously by a lighter model. But a highly complex, anomalous datapoint in a high conviction position deserves escalation into a much more intensive, expensive, and multi layered reasoning process." (TheAgenticAnalyst) 

Beware working in options trading for a firm that knows nothing about options. It will end badly. "Stop-losses do not make sense in options. You want to constrain your risk a priori so that it’s survivable (however defined) not have a risk rule that has memory since the best opportunities in vol (a domain that has mean reversion) are seeded by pain." (Bloomberg) 

The New York Stock Exchange is opening a private members club on Wall Street. It had a luncheon club but that was closed in 2006. “It was high society and a big deal to get invited, I wore a three-piece suit and shined my shoes,” recalled the lunchers. (FT) 

It's a bad time to be a recruiter in the UK but it's all cool if you're in America. (Bloomberg) 

Lamenting the death of software programming. "It’s hard to describe that state, in which the inner voices are completely silent, you are oblivious to the passage of time and so focused on the intricacies of your construction that even after stopping you can’t immediately respond to your surroundings. Writing software is a craft, like carpentry." (LRB) 

If you want to be like Citi, you can play Easy McCoy's song "Beat the Best and use words like "relentless" and "win" to show intention. (Business Insider) 

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