Singapore hedge fund Dymon Asia hired 19 PMs, ~100 staff in bumper year ahead of Dubai expansion
Singapore hedge fund Dymon Asia Capital has had an exemplary year. Business Insider reports that, for the year to November, it posted 16% returns, more than other high performing funds like ExodusPoint and Balyasny. The success has been facilitated by expansion on multiple fronts, including the hiring of 19 portfolio managers (PM), and the buildout of multiple new offices.
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Most notably, Dymon is almost quadrupling its Dubai office space just 14 months after it first entered the market. It's moving from a 12 seat office, which currently houses ~8 PMs, to an office in Index Tower with ~40 seats. The Dubai office is one of the three key growth areas for Dymon alongside Hong Kong and Singapore, but newly hired PMs have also been spread out across its Mumbai office and its new Tokyo office.
Who were some of these new hires? In Dubai, it hired Ayoub Spitalier in January; he spent the last two years as a Millennium PM in London, and has a background as an electronic market maker at both JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. In June, it hired John Koetzle, an ex-Citadel trader and Brevan Howard PM, who was most recently based in New York.
Between Hong Kong and Singapore, Dymon's hiring appears to be focused on the latter city. In January, it hired Anass Hammedi in Singapore who, like Spitalier, spend the last two years at Millennium. In April, it also hired KJ Choi as a PM; he spent the last 18 years at Deutsche Bank, where he was most recently an MD and head of portfolio risk management for its Asia emerging markets team. In Hong Kong, meanwhile, it hired Steven Chan, an ex-Merrill Lynch investment banker who spent the last six years as a portfolio manager at Hong Kong hedge fund Infini Capital.
It's not just trading staff that Dymon is hiring. It has ~350 total employees, up from 250 just eight months ago, and has been significantly growing its technology team.
Dymon primarily runs macro, relative value and equity long/short strategies. Its macro strategy is thought to have performed particularly well in the first half of the year, while the long/short strategy did well in the second, giving it smooth returns across the year.
Dymon is thought to give its traders more autonomy than most other hedge funds, but there's a lot of pressure to perform well. Earlier this year, Dymon said it hadn't lost a profitable portfolio manager for two years, but it has reportedly cut a few underperformers. In April, it closed a merger arbitrage pod led by ex-Millennium trader Hans Tang after it reached its loss limit.
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