Hedge fund titan Ken Griffin hired two veteran portfolio managers from Louis Bacon's hedge fund.
Marco Birch and Eric Dannheim will join Mr. Griffin's $30 billion Citadel later this year as senior portfolio managers, spokeswoman Julia Kosygina confirmed. They will be part of Citadel's macro strategies business, which was started in early 2018, and report to group head Colin Lancaster.
Citadel, which trades across multiple markets, has been expanding into macro — betting on broad economic trends by trading everything from currencies to commodities. Last year, it hired Mr. Lancaster from Balyasny Asset Management to build a new macro trading unit in London, and former Bank of England policymaker Kristin Forbes as a consultant. The oldest of macro funds have suffered from years of underperformance, shrinking assets and headcount.
Messrs. Birch and Dannheim are Citadel's macro group's first hires in New York. They left Mr. Bacon's $10.2 billion Moore Capital Management, which has lost about $3 billion in assets since July 2017 as clients fled amid mediocre performance.
Mr. Birch was at Moore for 21 years after working at Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley. Mr. Dannheim spent almost a decade at Moore, where he was once chief operating officer of its European business and a deputy to former trader Greg Coffey, who left in 2012. Mr. Dannheim had previously worked at GLG Partners.
As well as trading money in macro unit, Messrs. Birch and Dannheim will also help build a research and trade execution team for the group in New York, Ms. Kosygina said. The business has also hired Jerome Lebuchoux as head of quantitative research from Goldman Sachs, who will start later this year, she said.
