Morning Coffee: JPMorgan's complicated choice for its new head of M&A. Hedge funds are harsh
JPMorgan has got a new co-head of M&A in Europe. Irish-educated Dwayne Lysaght has been doing the job for years out of London, but Lysaght now has his third new co-head in two years with the appointment of Netherlands-based Cassander Verwey JPMorgan's M&A co-head in Continental Europe.
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The job now occupied by Verwey at JPMorgan became available when the previous incumbent left after just six months. Carsten Woehrn spent 24 years at JPMorgan and was finally promoted to be co-head of EMEA M&A in his 23rd year at the bank last October. In April 2024, though, Goldman Sachs invited Woehrn to become a partner, and he skipped off to work there instead.
Before Woehrn, JPMorgan's co-head of European M&A was Guillermo Baygual, a Spaniard who's still there, but who's now heading real estate, infrastructure and consumer banking instead. Baygual presumably didn't want his old job back.
That it took all summer for JPMorgan to find its internal person to replace Woehrn is an indication that the choice wasn't easy. The other likely candidate for co-head looked like Maja Torun, the head of JPMorgan in France, who joined from Citi in 2020. The head of the German business, Alexander Mayer, only arrived from Goldman Sachs in May, so was presumably too new to ascend.
Instead, of choosing Torun, JPMorgan seems to have decided to go for a longer serving incumbent based in a smaller market. Verwey, who looks like a guitarist and lives in a minimalist 16th century weavers' house next to a canal in Amsterdam, has spent the past two decades with the bank and will continue living in Amsterdam while travelling about Europe and managing the bank's M&A teams. Hopefully he won't immediately leave for Goldman Sachs like his predecessor. Hopefully Torun and Mayer won't feel too slighted.
Separately, as has been variously noted in the past year, multistrategy hedge funds are not kind and nurturing employers. If you don't perform, you will be out, which is why so many people move from one fund to another.
Bloomberg reports that August's losses and volatility led to a rush of exits from multistrategy pods with losses. They included: Chiga Murayama, a Japanese government bond trader at BlueCrest; Ryan Fitzgibbon and his team at Millennium in Houston; and Mark Cox at Balyasny.
Being a portfolio manager in a hedge fund is not an easy job. One Swiss fund manager said August's volatility was a reminder that the industry can be afflicted by cascading stop losses, which only serve to reduce liquidity and make the markets more stressed than ever.
Meanwhile...
The arguments between David Siegel and John Overdeck at Two Sigma started when Overdeck was described as the Master Chef by Forbes and the proceeded to wear a chef's outfit to a meeting. (Bloomberg)
Hedge funds will pay you 50% more if you have a PhD. (Financial News)
It's a fine time to work in European leveraged finance. The total volume of leveraged finance deals in the region hit €204 billion ($226 billion) between January and August, more than twice the amount in the same period last year. (Bloomberg)
Banks want to hire people who are not too posh but very neutral and extremely middle class. (Financial News)
It's not easy to escape taxes. “[People I know] who moved to the Bahamas were bored to death. Sun, sea and sand. OK, it’s great for a couple of weeks to recharge the batteries, but after a while you think, ‘I’d quite like to go and watch an opera.’ Well, you can forget that, there’s no theatre in the Bahamas.” (Financial Times)
If a wealth tax is going to be raised on non-tradable assets, what does this mean for unvested stock? What about restricted stock or stock grants that vest over time? Are you only paying taxes on the unrestricted/vested part, or the whole thing? (Marginal Revolution)
Where to go for your cheap starter suit: Dutch brand Suitsupply, or Canadian brand Spier & McKay. (WSJ)
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