Questions over Balyasny's star Singapore hire as she rebuilds the equities business

Hedge fund Balynasy Asset Management (BAM) has been making changes to its equities business. Since parting company with global head of equities, Jeff Runnfeldt, in October 2023 following a period of underperformance, the equities team has reportedly been run by a group of men comprised of Dmitry Balyasny himself, Stephen Schurr, Bill Wappler and Thomas Stephens. Now it seems that Archana Parekh, one of Asia's top female portfolio managers, and Balyasny's head of Asia ex-Japan, might also have a seat somewhere adjacent to the top table,

Business Insider reported last week that Parekh, whom Balyasny hired from Millennium in November 2022, was initially running $1bn in gross market exposure at Balyasny, but curiously had her book trimmed in order that she can "help retool" the equities unit. It said that Schurr, a senior managing director who's worked for Balyasny since 2018, is also helping with the retooling.

BAM declined to comment for this article. It's unclear how big Parekh's book is after the changes, but some former colleagues expressed surprise that she's taking less risk. Parekh is an "excellent" portfolio manager, said one, claiming that BAM was delighted to hire her and spent years trying to persuade her to move from Millennium. She was allegedly hired to run a portfolio of financials and tech stocks.

It's not clear what prompted the unexpected change, but it seems that Parekh is taking more of a leadership role and building the business as well as managing money. Business Insider says Parekh's new job will include hiring new talent, a role usually reserved for business development specialists who don't manage money and are focused on recruitment.

Balyasny's equities business has made various senior hires this year. They include Peter Goodwin, who joined from Point72 to help run the business in March, as well as Andrew O'Connor from Weiss, Marco Minoli from Citadel, Vaibhav Bajpai from LMR, David Lohman from Schonfeld and - more recently - Allen Zhang - from Cinctive Capital. Francine Fang is joining from Cubist to lead the quant business in 2025. 

However, there have been exits too. Tiberio Guidolin left in London in June. More significantly, Arbab Nandi, who was part of Parekh's team, is understood to have resigned recently in Asia. Thomas Yang, the former head of the central liquidity book in New York just became head of execution at North Rock Capital Management. Runnfeldt himself has a new job as CIO of Fortress Investment Group, but is currently on gardening leave. 

Balyasny's Founder, Dmitry Balyasny spoke at length to Bloomberg this week. As well as revealing the unlikely coincidences that enabled his career (he doesn't have a degree from a top university and got his first job by answering a newspaper ad for a job at a trading firm which subsequently became his investor), Dmitry said it's become hard to compete with the big pod shops now, partly because of the enormous cost of technology.

BAM insiders said building a technology infrastructure to compete with the big funds is a big drag on the firm. They also said that Dmitry is an unusually nice hedge fund founder, something which his Bloomberg interviewer David Rubenstein appeared to fully agree with.

Balyasny Asset Management returned 5.5% in the first half of 2024, putting it well behind Citadel's best performing strategy (13.7%). Critics of BAM point to past strategy changes, including the move away from fundamental equities and last year's credit losses that were rightly or wrongly associated with George Klavdianos, the former London-based head of event driven credit.

Alongside the changes in equities, BAM is currently building out a commodities business. It recently hired Joe Costantinou from Bank of America for power trading, but Kobi Platt, an oil trader hired in 2021 also recently disappeared to Brevan Howard.

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